A searching (if at times somewhat turgid) and ultimately quite
moving account of the draft exiles of the Vietnam War..It was the
largest mass migration of Americans since the loyalists fled during
the revolution: tens of thousands (perhaps more than 100,000) US
citizens crossed the border to Canada in the late 1960s and early
1970s to avoid military service in Vietnam. What sparked these
actors to make so momentous a decision, and what (if anything) did
it mean? Hagan himself went north, but he remained on the periphery
of things in Alberta. Here, he concentrates on the Toronto
community around Baldwin Street and the Amex war resisters'
organization, interviewing activists to get a sense of their
specific motivations (which ranged from a desire to flee a country
that appeared to be unraveling as it ate its young to pointed acts
of protest against the militarization of American life to a simple
desire to live rather than die in a rice paddy). The author insists
that this was not a ragtag army of losers and cowards, as many
still perceive them, but a rational and responsible group of men
who became "the basis of a sustained antiwar movement and
continuing social activism" in a land that (luckily for them) was
in the mood to assert its autonomy and sovereignty. Much of the
story revolves around the amnesty issue, which most Americans
erroneously think was settled by Jimmy Carter. Stylistically,
Hagan's prose is a mixed bag, at times comfortable as an old
jacket, then suffocating in the lint-choked language of social
theory..Hagan shines some welcome light on a long-forgotten issue,
which he is able to address as both participant and observer..
(Kirkus Reviews)
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.
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