My father Julius Eichel was born in 1896 in the small town of Sokolow, in Austro-Hungary, in a one-room log cabin with a dirt floor. My grandparents, Isaac and Kate (Mann) Eichel were desperately poor and almost illiterate. In the fall of 1895, my grandfather set sail for the United States. My father never saw his father until he was three years old, when the rest of the family joined him in the US. My grandfather was a ladies' tailor and my grandmother scrubbed floors.
My father's brother David was about eighteen months older than my father, and they resembled each other physically. Though my father was bored by school and often played hookey, he loved books, and introduced his brother David to books and the local public library. By the time they were in their teens, they were enthusiastic Socialists, and their Socialist beliefs formed the basis for their opposition to war.
Having refused his physical examination, my father was treated as a military prisoner, court-martialed and sentenced to twenty years in prison. Some of his fellow objectors were sentenced to be shot. Eventually, all sentences were reviewed and shortened. My father served twenty-six months in various military prisons, including Leavensworth (KS). For refusing to work, he was chained by his wrists to metal bars for eight hours a day in such a way that his feet barely touched the ground. His brother David was once on the receiving end of a high pressure water hose. Life was not easy for noncooperative CO's. President Wilson had described the draft as "conscription of the willing," but clearly not all men were willing.
After prison was over, my father, who had learned to like school, was yanked out of high school by my grandfather, who told him that his salary was needed to help support the family. My father married my mother, Esther Halperin, in 1928 and I was born in 1930. My father was in business from 1929 through 1969. Had he chosen a cash business, we would have become wealthy; as it was, the business was sold to a competitor for very little money.
In 1939, my father, who had had only an elementary school education, decided to go to high school, In those days, there was no such thing as an equivalency diploma. He entered the evening session of a private preparatory school where he did very well, graduating in three-and-a-half years. He then enrolled as a chemistry major in the evening session at New York University. Despite doing hard physical labor during the day, he applied himself to his studies and did brilliantly; however, when Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, he dropped his studies and never obtained a degree.
When Roosevelt announced the first peacetime draft in 1940, my father wrote to as many World War 1 CO's as he could get in touch with, inviting them to a reunion at our modest four-room apartment in Brooklyn. Men came, some of the married ones with their wives, from all corners of the country. All declared their opposition to conscription and the involvement of the United States in World War Two. A number of CO's who had been Socialists had become Communists in the 1920's, after the split. When my father called for another reunion in the summer of 1941 (before Pearl Harbor), the Communist CO's not only declined the invitation but one told my father that he should be shot for his opposition to war!
A local draft board had moved into a vacant doctor's office in the apartment house in which we lived. Some mothers had accompanied their young sons to the draft board for registration, and my father learned that some neighbors were upset to hear the weeping of a number of these mothers . In November 1941, just before the Pearl Harbor incident, my father circulated a petition , addressed to the landlord, protesting the renting of the doctor's office to the draft board. He sent a copy of the petition to Lewis Hershey, head of the Selective Service System. When the United States went to war the next month, the FBI visited every tenant who had signed the petition against the draft board. In a panic, some tenants told the FBI men that my father had coerced them into signing the petition!
When Congress enacted a new draft law requiring the registration of all men between the ages of twenty-one to sixty, my father openly refused, going so far as to notify the draft board housed in our apartment building. At the close of the deadline for registration, on April 27, 1942, two FBI men appeared at our apartment asking for my father, who at that moment was meeting with Norman Thomas [six-time Socialist Party candidate for president], his brother Evan and Howard Moore, (the latter two World War I CO's). They were mapping out strategy in the event of arrests. Expecting trouble, my father telephoned home, and my mother told him that the FBI had come to arrest him. My father headed for home at once. I was not quite twelve at the time, and I found the whole episode frightening. My father asked to use the bathroom before he left, and the two men insisted on following him inside. As they marched my handcuffed father out of our apartment, my mother, who was in tears, asked them where they were taking him, but they refused to tell her.
The next day we learned that my father had been taken to the old West Street House of Detention, in lower Manhattan The next day he was arraigned in Eastern District Court, and appeared before Judge Matthew T. Abruzzo, who set bail at the then unheard of sum of $50,000 Bail was later reduced to $25,000, and Norman and Violet Thomas furnished the bail money. After a number of re-arrests and court appearances, the case was "nol prossed" (the government declined to prosecute).
My father began publishing "The Absolutist" [Absolutist, non-cooperator, and non-registrant were all terms for those who would not register for the draft] in 1942. My mother typed the mimeograph stencils and copies were run off on a second-hand hand-powered mimeograph machine. Issues appeared every other week, I believe, and copies were sent to the President, members of Congress, the head of the FBI, the attorney-general, the head of Selective Service, and the head of the Federal prison system.. The main purpose of the paper was to expose instances of the mistreatment of imprisoned CO's. Many of those who did not cooperate were subjected to really brutal treatment of the kind meted out to Russian political prisoners in the heyday of the USSR.
In the meantime, my parents formed a group called Families and Friends of Imprisoned CO's, of which my mother was the heart and soul. She never recreived enough credit for her work, but many individuals who were initially ashamed of those friends or relatives who took the CO stand, thanks to my mother's work began to understand the CO position and to support the imprisoned men. "The Absolutist" ceased publication after the war when the last CO's were released from prison.
The CCCO came into being to offer support to those taking the nonregistrant position [also to support non-peace church and non-religious CO's -ed.] The Metropolitan Board for Conscientious Objectors discouraged nonregistration for the draft, to the consternation of the more radical CO's. My father was among the first to see the need for an organization that would support nonregistrants.
Julius Eichel was a member of the original board of CCCO when it formed in 1948. Bent Andresen, Katherine Arnett, Jim Bristol, Rev. Donald Cloward, Julian Cornell, Dave and Betty Dellinger, Ralph DiGia, Catherine Juram, Leonard Lazarus, Roy Kepler, Albon Man, John Mott, A.J.Muste, Ray Newton, Allen Olmsted, Jr. , Grace and Elizabeth Rhoads, Wilbur Rippy, Igal Roodenko, Albert Simon, Ruth McAdam Smith, Robert White and DeWitt Wycoff were the other Board members.