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Northern Passage: American Vietnam War Resisters in Canada
More than 50,000 draft-age American men and women migrated to Canada during the Vietnam War, the largest political exodus from the United States since the American Revolution. How are we to understand this migration three decades later? Was their action simply a marginal, highly individualized spin-off of the American antiwar movement, or did it have its own lasting collective meaning?
John Hagan, himself a member of the exodus, searched declassified government files, consulted previously unopened resistance organization archives and contemporary oral histories, and interviewed American war resisters settled in Toronto to learn how they made the momentous decision. Canadian immigration officials at first blocked the entry of some resisters; then, under pressure from Canadian church and civil liberties groups, they fully opened the border, providing these Americans with the legal opportunity to oppose the Vietnam draft and military mobilization while beginning new lives in Canada. It was a turning point for Canada as well, an assertion of sovereignty in its post-World War II relationship with the United States. Hagan describes the resisters' absorption through Toronto's emerging American ghetto in the late 1960s. For these Americans, the move was an intense and transformative experience. While some struggled for a comprehensive amnesty in the United States, others dedicated their lives to engagement with social and political issues in Canada. More than half of the draft and military resisters who fled to Canada thirty years ago remain there today. Most lead successful lives, have lost their sense of Americanness, and overwhelmingly identify themselves as Canadians.
John Hagan, himself a member of the exodus, searched declassified government files, consulted previously unopened resistance organization archives and contemporary oral histories, and interviewed American war resisters settled in Toronto to learn how they made the momentous decision. Canadian immigration officials at first blocked the entry of some resisters; then, under pressure from Canadian church and civil liberties groups, they fully opened the border, providing these Americans with the legal opportunity to oppose the Vietnam draft and military mobilization while beginning new lives in Canada. It was a turning point for Canada as well, an assertion of sovereignty in its post-World War II relationship with the United States. Hagan describes the resisters' absorption through Toronto's emerging American ghetto in the late 1960s. For these Americans, the move was an intense and transformative experience. While some struggled for a comprehensive amnesty in the United States, others dedicated their lives to engagement with social and political issues in Canada. More than half of the draft and military resisters who fled to Canada thirty years ago remain there today. Most lead successful lives, have lost their sense of Americanness, and overwhelmingly identify themselves as Canadians.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published May 31, 2001
17 people want to read
About the author
John Hagan
37 books7 followersJohn L. Hagan (born 1946) is an American sociologist focusing on criminology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_L....
Also publishes as John L. Hagan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_L....
Also publishes as John L. Hagan
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February 7, 2022
Northern Passage: American Vietnam War Resisters in Canada
by John Hagan
Reviewed by Dee Knight
As former co-editor of AMEX-Canada, the war resister-exile publication, I can say with confidence that John Hagan's book is the most thorough and authoritative history of U.S. Vietnam-era war resisters in Canada. While it has the scholarly style of a university professor, the story is alive and well in Hagan's hands. He took me back to the heydays of our first years as exiles, then expatriates, then new Canadians. The story weaves these sometimes disparate strands faithfully together, so it's possible for each person or group that makes a strand to find themselves clearly and accurately.
By focusing on a set of key questions from the outset, and then faithfully addressing them, Hagan provides reliable answers: how did we decide to come to Canada? How did the settlement process unfold? Did the legal and political events that brought us to Canada continue to be important for us? How socially and politically active were we when we re-located, and how did that change over time? And how were our lives changed by all this? Writing from the vantage point of the early 2000s, Hagan answers these questions based on interviews of several dozen people -- many of whom I knew years ago.
These questions have living, breathing answers in "Northern Passage." While reading the book I encountered old friends often -- people who helped me and many others, friends I socialized with, argued with, and celebrated with. Some stand out as heroes: Naomi Wall, Bill Spira, Richard Brown, Katie McGovern, Dick Burroughs and Dan Zimmerman kept the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme (TADP) open to help literally tens of thousands of newly arrived resisters for a decade. Mark Satin, whom I never met, applied his considerable skills to crafting the TADP Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada, which had numerous pressruns totaling more than 50,000 copies. I was glad to get to know Mark in "Northern Passage."
The stories of how TADP helped resisters are all impressive, and some were hair-raising. Like providing a "stash" of money for penniless resisters to show when they went to the border to apply for immigrant status. (It was a "rotating" stash that nearly always came back safely.) Then there was the time in 1969 when TADP counselors collaborated with antiwar Canadian students to send "decoys" to several border points, masquerading as military deserters. They proposed to apply for immigrant status, then exposed the automatic denials they received, as a violation of Canadian government policy. The ensuing scandal served to "open" the border for American military resisters. In 1971 the border "closed" again, as the Canadian government changed its immigration policy, but provided an "amnesty" for thousands of people (American resisters and others) living "underground" without legal status. Hagan tells the impressive story of how TADP counselor Richard Brown wrote letters and met with Canadian government officials to convince them to provide an “immigration amnesty” to regularize the status of about 10,000 such people. The story details the help received from churches and church organizations on both sides of the border.
My close friend and housemate John Liss worked with TADP briefly before becoming a lawyer and helping the legal defense of Karl Armstrong -- a thankless but critically important task which he related to Hagan. Stan Pietlock brought his professional journalism skills to found AMEX-Canada, then later to hand it over to Jack Colhoun and myself when it became a voice and organizing medium for the movement for universal unconditional amnesty.
Hagan describes in significant detail the campaign for amnesty, which was in full swing when he moved to Toronto from Edmonton and began teaching at University of Toronto in 1974. I missed meeting him personally, as I departed for New York to become the "exile representative" to the National Council for Universal Unconditional Amnesty (NCUUA). But he conducted extensive interviews with Jack Colhoun, Steve Grossman and other members of the AMEX collective. (Later, in the 1990s, he also managed to reach and interview me through phone calls and letters.) So his book provides good details of the war resister boycott of the punitive "clemency" program offered by Gerald Ford after he became U.S. president following Nixon's forced resignation in August 1974. And he tells the story of the two-year amnesty campaign sprint that culminated in the 1976 Democratic National Convention, where AMEX and NCUUA teamed up to get a draft resister "nominated" for vice president, seconded by Gold Star Mother Louise Ransom and disabled Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, in a dramatic moment that moved Jimmy Carter to grant something close to what we were demanding.
All these stories are told with remarkable clarity and accuracy, due to Hagan's careful methodology. (He supplemented first-person interviews of dozens of people with careful studies of a range of public records and archives, to which he applied the professional tools of sociology.)
Hagan documents the little-known but important fact that there were more women of draft age who went from the USA to Canada during the Vietnam war years. While many traveled with their mates or companions who were facing draft or military trouble, quite a number switched countries on their own, as part of a political and cultural exodus that was a mark of the time. Some became part of the “American ghetto” Hagan tells of, which surrounded Baldwin Street just west of downtown Toronto, where hippy businesses sprang up, with names like The Yellow Ford Truck, Ragnarokr, The Cosmic Egg, Whole Earth Natural Foods, Snowflake and the Baldwin Street Gallery. Then there was Rochdale College, a high rise experimental educational community that became a landing place and scandal center for a desperate and disparate fraction of our resister community.
The book finishes with stories-by-interview and analysis of the large fraction of our resister community who stayed and sank roots in Canada. Hagan quotes Andy Barrie, a resister who became a famous radio personality, about how many once-upon-a-time U.S. resisters acknowledge their country of origin to Canadians: “When someone says, ‘I’m originally American’ it means ‘No, we didn’t go to high school together and maybe I didn’t play hockey as much as you did as a kid… but I don’t still think of myself as an American.” He also tells the story of Steven Burdick, originally from Florida, who became a union leader and well-known socialist in Toronto.
Both Andy Barrie and Steven Burdick were representative of tens of thousands of other former U.S. war resisters who made their home, and a difference, after coming to Canada. Thanks to John Hagan for telling this valuable story. In a way it’s a supplement to part of the story I have tried to tell in my own memoir, My Whirlwind Lives: Navigating Decades of Storms. I’m very glad to share that story with John Hagan, who is now a Professor of Sociology and Law at Northwestern University and Senior Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago.
by John Hagan
Reviewed by Dee Knight
As former co-editor of AMEX-Canada, the war resister-exile publication, I can say with confidence that John Hagan's book is the most thorough and authoritative history of U.S. Vietnam-era war resisters in Canada. While it has the scholarly style of a university professor, the story is alive and well in Hagan's hands. He took me back to the heydays of our first years as exiles, then expatriates, then new Canadians. The story weaves these sometimes disparate strands faithfully together, so it's possible for each person or group that makes a strand to find themselves clearly and accurately.
By focusing on a set of key questions from the outset, and then faithfully addressing them, Hagan provides reliable answers: how did we decide to come to Canada? How did the settlement process unfold? Did the legal and political events that brought us to Canada continue to be important for us? How socially and politically active were we when we re-located, and how did that change over time? And how were our lives changed by all this? Writing from the vantage point of the early 2000s, Hagan answers these questions based on interviews of several dozen people -- many of whom I knew years ago.
These questions have living, breathing answers in "Northern Passage." While reading the book I encountered old friends often -- people who helped me and many others, friends I socialized with, argued with, and celebrated with. Some stand out as heroes: Naomi Wall, Bill Spira, Richard Brown, Katie McGovern, Dick Burroughs and Dan Zimmerman kept the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme (TADP) open to help literally tens of thousands of newly arrived resisters for a decade. Mark Satin, whom I never met, applied his considerable skills to crafting the TADP Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada, which had numerous pressruns totaling more than 50,000 copies. I was glad to get to know Mark in "Northern Passage."
The stories of how TADP helped resisters are all impressive, and some were hair-raising. Like providing a "stash" of money for penniless resisters to show when they went to the border to apply for immigrant status. (It was a "rotating" stash that nearly always came back safely.) Then there was the time in 1969 when TADP counselors collaborated with antiwar Canadian students to send "decoys" to several border points, masquerading as military deserters. They proposed to apply for immigrant status, then exposed the automatic denials they received, as a violation of Canadian government policy. The ensuing scandal served to "open" the border for American military resisters. In 1971 the border "closed" again, as the Canadian government changed its immigration policy, but provided an "amnesty" for thousands of people (American resisters and others) living "underground" without legal status. Hagan tells the impressive story of how TADP counselor Richard Brown wrote letters and met with Canadian government officials to convince them to provide an “immigration amnesty” to regularize the status of about 10,000 such people. The story details the help received from churches and church organizations on both sides of the border.
My close friend and housemate John Liss worked with TADP briefly before becoming a lawyer and helping the legal defense of Karl Armstrong -- a thankless but critically important task which he related to Hagan. Stan Pietlock brought his professional journalism skills to found AMEX-Canada, then later to hand it over to Jack Colhoun and myself when it became a voice and organizing medium for the movement for universal unconditional amnesty.
Hagan describes in significant detail the campaign for amnesty, which was in full swing when he moved to Toronto from Edmonton and began teaching at University of Toronto in 1974. I missed meeting him personally, as I departed for New York to become the "exile representative" to the National Council for Universal Unconditional Amnesty (NCUUA). But he conducted extensive interviews with Jack Colhoun, Steve Grossman and other members of the AMEX collective. (Later, in the 1990s, he also managed to reach and interview me through phone calls and letters.) So his book provides good details of the war resister boycott of the punitive "clemency" program offered by Gerald Ford after he became U.S. president following Nixon's forced resignation in August 1974. And he tells the story of the two-year amnesty campaign sprint that culminated in the 1976 Democratic National Convention, where AMEX and NCUUA teamed up to get a draft resister "nominated" for vice president, seconded by Gold Star Mother Louise Ransom and disabled Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, in a dramatic moment that moved Jimmy Carter to grant something close to what we were demanding.
All these stories are told with remarkable clarity and accuracy, due to Hagan's careful methodology. (He supplemented first-person interviews of dozens of people with careful studies of a range of public records and archives, to which he applied the professional tools of sociology.)
Hagan documents the little-known but important fact that there were more women of draft age who went from the USA to Canada during the Vietnam war years. While many traveled with their mates or companions who were facing draft or military trouble, quite a number switched countries on their own, as part of a political and cultural exodus that was a mark of the time. Some became part of the “American ghetto” Hagan tells of, which surrounded Baldwin Street just west of downtown Toronto, where hippy businesses sprang up, with names like The Yellow Ford Truck, Ragnarokr, The Cosmic Egg, Whole Earth Natural Foods, Snowflake and the Baldwin Street Gallery. Then there was Rochdale College, a high rise experimental educational community that became a landing place and scandal center for a desperate and disparate fraction of our resister community.
The book finishes with stories-by-interview and analysis of the large fraction of our resister community who stayed and sank roots in Canada. Hagan quotes Andy Barrie, a resister who became a famous radio personality, about how many once-upon-a-time U.S. resisters acknowledge their country of origin to Canadians: “When someone says, ‘I’m originally American’ it means ‘No, we didn’t go to high school together and maybe I didn’t play hockey as much as you did as a kid… but I don’t still think of myself as an American.” He also tells the story of Steven Burdick, originally from Florida, who became a union leader and well-known socialist in Toronto.
Both Andy Barrie and Steven Burdick were representative of tens of thousands of other former U.S. war resisters who made their home, and a difference, after coming to Canada. Thanks to John Hagan for telling this valuable story. In a way it’s a supplement to part of the story I have tried to tell in my own memoir, My Whirlwind Lives: Navigating Decades of Storms. I’m very glad to share that story with John Hagan, who is now a Professor of Sociology and Law at Northwestern University and Senior Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago.
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