Out of Irons, Into the Dock

Defendant was convicted of two violations of the Universal Military Training and Service Act by willful failure to report for and submit to Armed Forces physical examination and by willful failure to report for or submit to induction into the Armed Forces....The Court of Appeals, Mathes, Senior District Judge, held that evidence sustained the convictions.

Judgment affirmed.

Peter H. Irons, a first-year law student, leans back in his chair, fingers smoothing a neatly-trimmed moustache that is slightly tinged with gray. Irons looks at home in the Pound Hall class on criminal law--he seems relaxed, content to follow the discussion without participating in the argument, which is about negligent homicide.

Irons's interest in the law is more than philosophical or abstract. Convicted in 1965 on two counts of violating the Selective Service Act, Irons spent 26 months--from late 1966 to early 1969--in Federal prisons, paying for his refusal to carry a draft card.

His refusal had nothing to do with the war in Southeast Asia. Irons first sent in his draft card in 1961, long before Tonkin bay, even before Diem's murder. The House Un-American Activities Committee, although not as powerful as it had been in the mid-fifties, was still an active force. The civil rights movement was only just beginning to gain momentum. Most students were still more interested in panty raids than in politics.

A letter accompanied the card that Irons, then a sophomore at Antioch College, returned to his draft board in Wyoming, Ohio. "I have been imprisoned for a time because I presumed to sit at a lunch counter with my friends in the South--Negro friends. This sort of injustice is but a reflection of the malaise rooted deeply into our social system; a system that also says 'you must place your body at our disposal.' The authority of the government, insofar as I see it to be warranted, I will cheerfully obey. But I cannot obey a law see as wrong.... Therefore I say to you with all respect that I am returning the symbol of your agency and dissociating myself from your jurisdiction."

Irons was brought up as a Unitarian, but in the letter he declared himself an agnostic. This was before the Supreme Court ruled that men could be conscientious objectors without belief in a supreme being, and while that decision came down between Irons's conviction and appeal, the appeals court ruled not to grant him a chance to reapply for C.O. status.

Now 35, Irons stands out less in a crowd than he did in 1963, when an FBI file he has since obtained described him as having "a beatnik appearance." Of medium height, with brown hair cut above his ears, he looks much like any graduate student--a little older, perhaps, but no more revolutionary.

"It's easy to get lost in the Law School," he says. "You can go between classes and the libraries without ever talking to anyone."

Despite his desire to remain inconspicuous, however, Irons stands out in his classes. He isn't particularly interested in the law as a profession--he isn't even sure he will want to pass the bar when he graduates. A friend relates an incident that took place in the first week of classes this year, when the professor asked the class why the decisions of the seventh federal court district are not widely-respected among lawyers. The class offered a number of theoretical reasons--a tradition of lightweight judges, the number of cases the court sees--but the professor wasn't satisfied. Finally, says the friend, Irons answered it correctly. The seventh circuit--that's Chicago, and Daley controls all the decisions."

Irons doesn't remember the incident, but it expresses fairly adequately his attitude toward the law. "Lawyers control the law," he says. "I'm not a total anarchist--I do believe in some kind of legal system. I think the basic cause of crime is the political social system, which has inequality built into it. But that doesn't answer the problem of what you do till the revolution comes."

The oldest son of a nuclear engineer, Irons lived all over the eastern United States during his childhood--"everywhere they were making the bomb," he says quietly. He doesn't articulate a link between his father's profession and his own social consciousness--Irons doesn't often speak of his personal life. His father died during Peter's first year at Antioch, and Irons ended up the only one of the seven children to get a college degree. His four brothers are house carpenters, one sister is married to a house carpenter, and the last sister teaches in a Montessori school in Cambridge.

Now, six years out from behind bars, Irons is less bitter about his time in jail than he when he was first released. "Jail isn't as bad as everyone thinks," he says.

The worst thing about it, he says, was the boredom. He spent 18 of his 26 months in the medium security federal prison in Danbury, Conn. "It's supposed to be the country club of prisons," he says, "but it's an undeserved reputation. There wren't too many petty rules, but it's incredibly boring--no library, all you can do is watch television, see a movie once a month, or if you're a member of the Mafia you can play bocci."

He draws a map of the prison courtyard on a paper napkin, dividing it into the areas controlled by the various social groups. The blacks played basketball in one corner, homosexuals lifted weights in another, the hippies who were in on drug charges hung out in an area the inmates called "needle park," the Italians played bocci in the center. And the section of the courtyard that had benches was reserved for the "senior citizens" of the prison community.

"I've always been interested in socialization processes," Irons says, looking around a rapidly emptying Law School classroom. "One of these days I'll analyze the socialization that goes on here."

Irons finished working for his undergraduate degree in sociology during the year between his conviction and the rejection of his appeal--he had taken three years off to work for the United Auto Workers union in Washington. At Danbury, he says, he became more and more interested in going on to graduate school, and wrote to Howard Zinn, a professor of political science at Boston University, to ask for an application form. He wanted to go to school in Boston--anywhere except Harvard, he adds--and Zinn was the only name he was familiar with at B.U.

Zinn wrote back saying he was admitted, with a full scholarship waiting for him when he was released; Irons still had more than a year to serve on his sentence. A few months later Zinn sent Irons a copy of his book Disobedience and Democracy. Characteristically, he didn't notice the dedication until he lent the book to a friend, who pointed out the Zinn had dedicated it to Irons.

"I had been in correspondance with Peter," Zinn says, "and knew he was one of the early resisters of the draft, and that he was one of the first to go to prison for resisting. It seemed fitting to dedicate the book to him."

Irons spent three years with Zinn when he got out of jail, working toward his doctorate in political science, writing a thesis on the domestic roots of the cold war. Zinn calls him "one of the very best graduate students I ever had," and adds that Irons is "the most assiduous researcher I've ever seen."

Bruce Howard, another first year law student, describes Irons's research methods by recalling the only time he has seen Irons hissed in class. A professor asked if anyone knew where a case had taken place--the casebook, which only gave the appeal, didn't mention it. But Irons had been the only student to go back to the original, just because the case interested him. He knew the answer.

But Irons only looks up those cases that interest him. One of Irons's main research projects right now is an investigation of the Alger Hiss case. Irons's interest grew out of his doctoral research, when he found some files in a library in the midwest that mentioned Hiss. Irons followed the discovery up with interviews, and research into the Hiss case is now a major part of his life. He says he is "almost--not quite" positive that Hiss was innocent of the charges of espionage and perjury for which he was convicted, and the law student filed a suit last year to obtain FBI files related to the case.

Hiss, like Irons, is still waiting for his own suit to be heard in court. "Peter came up last summer with two major pieces of evidence in the case," Hiss says. "He's not the kind of researcher who writes letters to institutions, he actually goes there and gets the stuff himself. I'm very fortunate he's one of the researchers working on my case."

Irons is involved in other activities outside the Law School besides the Hiss case. He is director of a university without walls program in Boston, part of UMass-Amherst. He teaches a course on the American socialist movement there, but plans to resign in January to become more of a full-time law student. He is also the chairman of the New England branch of the Committee to Repeal Repressive Legislation.

"No one should go to prison," Irons says. "Only 10 per cent of the people now in prison should be there--the psychopaths who are really dangerous." Of the other 90 per cent, he says, "There are millions of ex-convicts running around--we're under no more danger from the people now in jail than we are from them."

Iron's outside interests keep him somewhat separate from the rest of his class. He has calculated that he attends just over 70 per cent of his classes--average attendance at the Law School is closer to 95 per cent. "Grades? I don't want to get on the Law Review," he says. But he adds, wryly, "Of course, I may be frantic in January."

Classmate Bruce Howard attributes some of the difference between Irons and the other first year law students to his age and some to his outside interests. "Peter's older, and because of that he keeps things in better perspective than the average law student. The average student feels grades come first," Howard says. "Peter's friendly, but he doesn't hang around the Law School. They like him personally and respect him, but he doesn't really socialize there--he doesn't eat there often, or sit around and discuss cases."

Irons admits he feels set apart from the others in his class. Part of it is because he lives in Somerville, in a one-room apartment covered with papers. His bed is often left unmade as a "political statement," he says--a reaction to Danbury, where he was called in sporadically because he didn't make his bed with regulation hospital corners.

But Irons's detachment may go deeper than his geographic distance from the Law School campus. In a moment of unguarded emotion--rare for Irons, who is generally self-contained--he says softly, "Here are 150 people who will be part of the American political-legalelite, and what do they know about the real world? About prisons? About racism?" He looks down at the table, a little sadly. "Obviously you can't ask everyone who goes to law school to stay in prison, but sometimes you can't help wondering."

Irons says he isn't certain what he will do with his degree when he gets it. He's interested in legal history, and in teaching people in the community how the law affects their lives, but he doesn't really know what he'll do for sure. Sometimes he says he'll probably end up back in the academic world somewhere, but he doesn't really know what area. If he is ever really hard up for money, he says, he could always forge checks--he learned more ingenious ways to do it in prison than he ever knew existed.

While he sometimes refers to himself as a "political chameleon," Irons basically considers himself "a cross between an anarchist and a socialist," with what he calls some Ghandian pacifism thrown in for good measure. He doesn't really offer a model for the society he'd like to live in; he concentrates instead on the society at hand.

Irons laughs, a little embarrassed about the number of organizations in which he seems to have been an active force--the Student Peace Union (a draft resistance group he helped found in the early 60s), the Socialist Party, the Southern Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). His FBI files, tucked into his Law School course catalogue, are an accurate record of the meetings he attended, the times he was arrested, the dates on which he spoke at hearings. True to FBI form, all names except the subject's own are deleted--including J. Edgar Hoover's, which is faintly visible through the ink. Another mass of files will never be released to Irons--the FBI protects its informants, and the other files would reveal their names.

He doesn't feel he's sold out the revolution by going to Law School. It's interesting, he says, he's enjoying the intellectual stimulation, and perhaps that's enough.

"I used to worry about being too intellectual," he says. "People used to talk about being self-indulgent and elitist. But now it seems important to enjoy what you're doing." He describes a summer he spent in New Hampshire working as a silversmith, supporting himself by selling jewelry on the Boston Common. But the silverworking equipment is all in a closet now, a closet Irons doesn't dare open for fear it will all spill out onto the floor of his already-crowded apartment.

Irons doesn't feel the Law School will have much effect on him. People who come just out of college are likely to get molded by the Law School. In a way, I suppose that's why they're there." But he says that won't happen to him, that he'll leave without having turned into a real lawyer--a species for which he does not seem to have a great deal of respect.

Zinn himself an activist, agrees.

When Irons told Zinn he was applying to law school, Zinn says, "I didn't have great feelings of enthusiasm because I don't feel enthusiastic about Harvard Law School--or any law school, for that matter. If it were anybody but Peter I'd have been a little worried that he might be submerged under all the crap you get at Law School. But I think Peter's strong enough, committed enough, to avoid all that."

This week, Irons's lawyer told him he might get his conviction expunged. The FBI's record of his correspondance with his draft board shows that the office declared him delinquent in order to hasten both his induction and, ultimately, his convictions as a draft-evader. Under a recent Supreme Court decision, such convictions can be retroactively overturned.

Even if his appeal is successful, however, the government will not compensate Irons for the time he spent in prison. But compensation doesn't seem to be that important to Irons. He can't retrieve the time he did in prison, he points out, adding, "I guess I'll still be the Law School's only ex-con."