The Milwaukee Fourteen: Napalm on Draft Files

September twenty-fourth, nineteen sixty-eight. Nine draft boards in Milwaukee's Brumder Building, on West Wells Street, held the Selective Service records of thousands of Wisconsin men eligible to be called up for Vietnam. Fourteen people had been planning for months what to do about those records.

The fourteen included five Catholic priests, a Catholic brother, a member of the Church of Scientology, and seven laypeople, four of them from Milwaukee. Their method had been developed in part by observation of the Catonsville Nine, who had burned draft files in Maryland four months earlier. The Milwaukee Fourteen's variation was to use homemade napalm, a mixture of gasoline and soap, which burned faster and was harder to extinguish with water.

On the evening of the twenty-fourth, a graduate student staged a takeover of Milwaukee's Cathedral of Saint John the Evangelist during services, drawing the police department's resources. While the police were occupied, the fourteen entered the Selective Service building on Wells Street and removed approximately ten thousand Selective Service files. They carried them to an open space and set them on fire with the napalm. They then stood at the site, singing hymns and reading aloud from the Gospels of John and Luke, until the fire department and police arrived.

They were arrested, charged with arson, theft, and burglary. The trial that followed was the first Vietnam-era resistance trial in which the defendants chose to represent themselves. After eleven days, twelve of the fourteen were convicted. They each received the same two-year sentence, with the possibility of parole after fourteen months.

The action was part of a wider wave of draft-file burnings that continued into the early nineteen seventies, including the Camden Twenty-Eight in New Jersey in nineteen seventy-one. The files they burned represented conscription into a war that was, at the time of the burning, in its thirteenth year with no end publicly visible.