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NPR

December 30, 2009

WWII Pacifists Exposed Mental Ward Horrors

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by Joseph Shapiro

In September of 1942, Warren Sawyer, a 23-year-old conscientious objector, reported for his volunteer assignment as an attendant at a state mental hospital. The young Quaker was one of thousands of pacifists who had refused to fight and instead were assigned to work in places few outsiders got to see — places like Philadelphia State Hospital, best known as Byberry.

"Byberry's the last stop on the bus here in Philadelphia," Sawyer recalls. "Any young man on the bus, other people knew that we were COs working at the hospital. And they'd make different kinds of remarks, supposedly talking to each other, but hoping that we hear. And you know: 'Yellowbellies, slackers.' "

Those slurs were harsh. But not nearly as harsh as what awaited the young men inside the gates of the chaotic and overcrowded hospital for people with mental illness and intellectual disabilities.

The young pacifists would be changed by what they saw in places like Byberry, and then become a force for change themselves.

Serving The Country At Home

Ten million men were drafted into the military during World War II. But more than 40,000 refused to go to war. These conscientious objectors came from more than 100 religions. But most were from the traditional peace churches: people from the Church of the Brethren, Mennonites and Quakers. Still, they wanted to serve their country. Many did serve in the military in noncombatant roles. Others did alternative service, like the 3,000 who were assigned to 62 state mental hospitals around the country.

"Well, I called them hellholes," says Sawyer. "Terribly overcrowded. All we did and all we could do was just custodial care. Because when you have three men taking care of 350 incontinent patients with everything all over the floor, feces and urine and all that kind of thing."

The smell got into his clothes and was so strong that even after he washed them, the smell lingered. "In the incontinent ward," he says, "it took a few weeks before you got used to eating supper with the smell all through your clothes and everything."

The "incontinent ward" was what the men called A Building. It was a large open room with a concrete slab for a floor. There were no chairs. There were no activities, no therapy, not even a radio to listen to. So hundreds of men — most of them naked — walked about aimlessly or hunched on the floor and huddled against the filthy bare walls.

Nearby was B Building; it was called the "violent ward" or the "death house," because angry men sometimes violently attacked one another. In one room, rows and rows of men were strapped and shackled to their bed frames.

Sawyer wrote frequent letters home, and those letters provide some of the best surviving historical record of the conditions in those grim wards and of the work of the conscientious objectors at Byberry.

"It was in B Building, the death house," he started in a letter written in September 1944 that explained one day of violence. "Due to the shortage of cuffs and straps and restraint locks that has prevailed in B Building for some time, one of the patients was able to get himself loose. He was a very dangerous fellow. He only had one cuff and strap on and he got out. He had a spoon that had been broken off at the end and was sharpened almost to a knife edge."

"After he was loose, he went to another patient and jabbed him in the side of the neck on top of his shoulder and drove the spoon down about one inch deep, just missing the jugular vein."

Testing Their Ideals

Sawyer is 89 now. He lives with his wife (who also worked as a volunteer at Byberry) in a Quaker retirement community, in Medford, N.J., outside Philadelphia.