I Was Sentenced to Be Shot: Autobiography of a Political Objector By MaxSandin. Brooklyn, NY: Max Sandin Radical Pacifist Cell, 2024. Foreword by RandyKehler; edited by RuthBenn and EdHedemann. 260 pages. $15.00 (paperback). <scp>ISBN</scp>: 979–8218

Max Sandin (1889–1971) was a secular and political radical pacifist; a conscientious objector and absolutist in World War I; and a war tax resister. Previously unpublished, Sandin's autobiography is a significant document. The autobiography is divided into five parts and 24 short chapters. PART ONE: Beginnings (1889–1920) offers a portrait of Sandin's life in Czarist Russia, as well as his immigration to the United States in 1910 and his early years in Cleveland. Growing up in Dvinsk, Russia (now Latvia) under Czar Nicholas II, the Sandins, a humble Jewish family of six, shared a single room in a six-room house. Max's father was a house painter, and the Sandins were active in the Jewish Labor Bund (a socialist organization for Jewish workers). To please his parents who wanted him to become a rabbi, Max attended a cheder—a school to study Judaism and Hebrew—for nine years. Once, after Sandin questioned a Torah passage on Jehovah's command to destroy the Amalekites (1 Samuel, chap. 15), the teacher slapped him, knocking out two teeth, an experience that planted in him the “seeds of conscientious objection to war” (21). At age 13, he began teaching the Torah to elderly Jews at the synagogue and reading socialist literature to Bund members. In 1910, to avoid serving in the Russian army and to shield his parents from government penalties, Sandin registered for the army, took a loyalty oath, and then, after his induction, deserted. Making his way to Cleveland via Bremen, Germany, Max became a house painter and paperhanger, a member of the Painters Union (Jewish Local), and a US citizen. He joined the Socialist Party and its Jewish Branch and co-organized the August Bebel Club, which soon affiliated with the Young People's Socialist League. PART TWO: The ‘Great War’ (1916–19), the most important section of this memoir, narrates Sandin's pacifist opposition to World War I and his experiences in army camps and prison. Of the 4,000 US conscientious objectors to the war, ten percent were secular and 504 (including Sandin) were absolutists who refused to cooperate with conscription and the military. Sandin registered for the draft, was inducted, and reported to Camp Gordon in Georgia. There he refused to handle guns, wear an army uniform, obey military orders, and accept noncombatant service. The federal government transferred Sandin, along with other absolutists and court-martialed COs, to Camp Funston, a training camp at Fort Riley, Kansas, and to the US Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth. Sandin provides riveting accounts of CO conscience, resolution, and resistance. With other absolutists, Sandin waged (often successful) work strikes, hunger strikes, and noncooperation actions to protest their conditions. For instance, at Fort Riley, Sandin joined a tent colony of absolutist COs (including Evan Thomas, Howard Moore, Harold Gray, and Erling Lunde, all of whom also wrote about these experiences) who refused to build their own encampment. In September 1918, Sandin and other absolutists were transferred to the Camp Funston guardhouse, where some officers and guards “tortured” objectors, who were beaten, manacled to their cell doors for eight hours a day, prodded with bayonets, and dunked in latrines (54). Sandin's autobiography incorporates several published accounts of CO repression and resistance. These include “Crucifixion in the Twentieth Century, The Case of Jacob Wipf and the three Hofer Brothers…” (1918), and the “Report of Conscientious Objectors at Camp Funston Guard House” (1918), which Sandin co-signed. He also included journalist Winthrop Lane's report on the successful CO-led strike involving 2300 inmates at Fort Leavenworth in January 1919. The editors include the last two reports in full as appendices. Court-martialed in October 1918, Sandin refused to recognize the court, to acknowledge that he was in the army, or to cooperate with the proceedings. After deliberating for 30 minutes, the court sentenced Sandin to be shot (one of 17 COs sentenced to death) and sent to Fort Leavenworth. “Those 30 minutes,” Sandin proclaimed, “were the best in my 28 years of life at that time” (75). Arriving at Fort Leavenworth a month after the mass strike, Sandin told the commandant that he would not work in prison. He was placed in “Wire City,” a cantonment with COs located outside the prison walls to prevent them from influencing other prisoners. Allowed considerable autonomy, the COs there organized English and history classes, played games, argued about the Bolshevik Revolution, and published the “Wire City Weekly.” Sandin's sentence was reduced to 18 months, and he was released in June 1919, even though he refused to sign his discharge papers or to accept $390 in accumulated pay. PART THREE: Interbellum (1919–38) recounts Sandin's involvement in Cleveland's interwar labor politics. Active in the paperhangers and painter's unions, he fought union corruption and supported greater union democracy. During the Depression, he championed unemployment insurance rather than “degrading” (132) relief and charity, and he helped to persuade the AFL to support the proposal. Notwithstanding his disillusionment with communism, he joined the CP-affiliated Unemployed Councils, which took direct action against evictions and demanded more assistance and unemployment insurance. PART FOUR: Another War (1941–44) outlines Sandin's draft and tax resistance during the Second World War. In April 1942, he refused to register for the draft (under the Fourth Registration: “not eligible for military service”), although at age 53, it is unlikely that he would have been drafted. Sandin was briefly imprisoned, one of two men to be jailed in both world wars. (The other was Julius Eichel.) In jail, he refused to work and went on a hunger strike. Two Quakers appeared at his arraignment and offered to post his bail. Sandin thanked them but, as an atheist, declined their offer. The secular War Resisters League then arranged bail; Sandin was released; but no trial was ever scheduled. More consequently, Sandin read Henry David Thoreau's “Essay on Civil Disobedience,” which urged opponents of the Mexican War to “Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence” (158) and to withhold their tax payment. Inspired by Thoreau, in 1943 Sandin refused to pay his income tax and practiced war tax resistance until his death. Across his Internal Revenue Service tax form, he wrote: “As a conscientious objector, I refuse to pay income tax – not to help war directly” (159). PART FIVE: War Bound (1944–61) focuses on Sandin's involvement in the post-1945 war tax resistance movement. He relates his own struggle with the IRS which, to collect unpaid taxes, regularly mailed him statements and summons, placed a lien against his property, and sent agents to his job sites to collect taxes directly from his employers. This led Sandin to arrange to be paid at the start of each day. More broadly, he sketches US war tax resistance since the formation of Peacemakers (1948), a militant radical pacifist group that advocated civil disobedience, particularly draft nonregistration and tax resistance. Peacemakers marks the birth of the modern pacifist tax resistance movement—and Sandin remained a life-long member. His memoir provides capsule accounts of many early war tax resisters and their actions. Although Sandin's written record in this chapter is important, he never transcends these biographical sketches and episodic stories to present a cogent summary of the war tax resistance movement. In August 1961, the IRS began garnishing Sandin's monthly social security ($116) and at times his Painters' Union pension ($31) checks, leaving him penniless. Claiming that he needed his social security checks to survive, Sandin conducted a sit-in and hunger strike outside Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon's office, vowing to remain until his checks were returned. He was arrested, taken to the District of Columbia General Hospital, and committed to the psychiatric ward. After a sanity hearing nearly two weeks later, Sandin was released. Here, at September 1961, this manuscript abruptly ends, although Sandin lived until 1971. In a postscript, the editors note that Sandin remained politically engaged for the next 5 years. Each year in Cleveland, he picketed the IRS on tax day (April 15) and vigiled on Hiroshima Day (August 6) against nuclear weapons and for a nuclear test ban treaty. In August 1963, Sandin took a bus from the Congress of Racial Equality's (CORE's) Harlem office to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, DC. Randy Kehler (1944–2024), in his moving Foreword, recounts how meeting Sandin “changed my life” (7). Boarding the same bus to Washington, Kehler took the only open seat, next to an elderly man. His seatmate handed him a booklet opened to a page titled “Max Sandin,” and said: “Read this.” Kehler obediently read about Sandin's remarkable life. Conversation followed, and in Washington, they attended the demonstration together. This encounter—and Sandin's insistence on placing principle above expediency—planted a seed. Several years later, Kehler became involved in the movement against the Vietnam War and served a prison term for draft resistance. He went on to play a leadership role in the early 1980s Nuclear Freeze Campaign, and, in his own celebrated war tax resistance case, had his home seized in 1989 by the federal government. Most notably, Kehler's speech at the 1969 War Resisters' International meeting at Haverford College led one attendee, Daniel Ellsberg, to leak the Pentagon Papers. In a fascinating Afterword, the editors disclose the manuscript's backstory and their own role. Sandin began writing his autobiography in 1955, and he continued to record his life story through 1963, a labor that he estimated totaled about 600 handwritten pages. But Sandin's extant handwritten manuscript, which his wife donated to Cleveland's Western Reserve Historical Society after his death, contains only 369 pages and ends in 1956. However, I Was Sentenced to be Shot is based on a different version, a copy of a “typed, restructured, and edited” (217) draft prepared by Al Uhrie, a radical pacifist who began editing the manuscript in the early 1960s. Uhrie's 228-page typescript draft ends mid-sentence, after recounting Sandin's 1961 sanity hearing. Both Sandin and Uhrie inserted newspaper articles, letters, reports, and other primary sources into the memoir. In 1966, after Uhrie was murdered, his wife moved, with his papers, to the Catholic Worker farm in Tivoli, New York. The Catholic Worker later donated the Uhrie-edited manuscript to the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, in Palo Alto, California. In 2013, after the Institute closed, Robert Cooney, who had consulted the manuscript while preparing (with Helen Michalowski) The Power of the People: Active Nonviolence in the United States (1977, rev. 1987) and who had learned about Randy Kehler's link to Sandin, sent it to Kehler. Then, in 2022, Kehler, who had health issues, asked Ruth Benn and Ed Hedemann to publish the manuscript. To prepare the manuscript for publication, the editors tracked down Sandin's and Uhrie's relatives, searched (unsuccessfully) for other copies of the manuscript, and added three appendices, an obituary of Sandin, and graphics (including photographs of Sandin, newspaper front pages, and Sandin's 1942 draft registration card). The editors compared Uhrie's version with Sandin's “to help clarify passages and, in the process, restore some of the stories left out of the Uhrie-edited manuscript,” but “also omitted many verbatim [newspaper] articles Max included…” (218). However, they did not conduct a word-by-word comparison of the two versions. All of this raises obvious questions: What happened to the manuscript's missing pages and years? How did Uhrie “restructure” and “edit” Sandin's manuscript? What stories did the editors “restore” and “omit”? Veteran activists in the radical pacifist and war tax resistance movements, Benn and Hedemann are skilled researchers and writers who have published movement books and materials including, most recently, a remarkable WRL traveling exhibit and accompanying booklet to mark the WRL's centennial (100 Years of Resistance to War and the Causes of War [1923–2023]). However, they are not “professional” historians and this book was not meant to be an academic project. The editors and Kehler wanted to publish Sandin's autobiography quickly, in a format accessible to the general public at a low price. These considerations led the editors to forego a scholarly edition and to self-publish rather than publish with an academic press. These decisions, all reasonable, shaped the final outcome. Although the editors include some helpful annotations, the text is not fully annotated. To keep the text uncluttered, the editors removed some of Sandin's insertions, even while restoring some material that Uhrie had removed. These are sensible editorial decisions; however, historians would have appreciated citations (in notes or brackets) to these restored or deleted primary materials. Finally, the editors—the authors of War Tax Resistance (6th edition, forthcoming)—might have provided a more comprehensive, though still concise, history of that movement than did Sandin. These minor reservations aside, this powerful autobiography will capture the attention of activists, the reading public, students, and scholars. Scott H. Bennett is professor of history at Georgian Court University. His writings on peace activism during the First World War include “Conscientious Objectors: Conscience, Courage, and Resistance,” in The Cambridge History of American Great War Literature and Culture (2021) and (co-edited with Chuck F. Howlett) Antiwar Dissent & Peace Activism in World War I America: A Documentary Reader (University of Nebraska Press, 2014).