Former students, friends remember 1965 draft card protest

IOWA CITY - E. Jon Tracy was a grade ahead of Stephen L. Smith, but they attended schools together in Marion in the 1950s and the early 1960s.

Later, in college on Oct. 20, 1965, a friend urged Tracy to stick around the Iowa Memorial Union on the University of Iowa campus because a student was planning a provocative demonstration - burning his Vietnam draft card in violation of a new congressional ban - during the open mic called Soapbox Soundoff.

Tracy was trying to get to class but stayed. He then spotted Smith, and redirected his focus to catching up with the friend he hadn't seen in years. But Smith was preoccupied.

'Steve said, ‘I am going up on stage and speak,' ” Tracy, 70, recalled Tuesday. ‘Why don't we talk after.' ”

Smith, who died in 2009, climbed on stage, uttered a few words and set his draft card on fire. Jaws dropped, the room buzzed, and it set off a chain of events, the significance of which hadn't sank in for Tracy.

Smith, a sophomore English major, was only 20 years old. He was acting on a moral conviction that came with a severe price.

Years later, that sense of courage still sticks with Tracy and other peers who came to pay their respects on the 50 year anniversary of the event. Tracy was among about 20 people who gathered Tuesday to read quotations from Smith and remember the incident, which in 1965 was a daring step of dissent against the government.

Congress banned draft card burning to stamp out this type of dissent, but such acts against the Vietnam War were still infrequent in 1965.

Smith acted alone without public opinion on his side. While some applauded Smith at the time, he faced harsh criticism in addition to criminal liability.

'I can imagine the sense of isolation he felt as a dissenter,” Shelton Stromquist, a former student and recently retired UI history professor.

Stromquist, who at the same time but separately from Smith, traveled to Mississippi in 1964 to register black voters. That period has been so 'sanitized” in history that the stakes people faced in standing up for what they believed is largely covered up, he said.

Protesting against war or for social issues such as civil rights came at the risk of physical violence, defying the government and alienating friends or family, said Jim Walters of Iowa City, who also was on hand this day in 1965.

'This was not an easy thing to do,” he said of Smith.

A week after the draft card burning, Tracy ran into Smith again outside a professor's office. Smith was concerned.

The FBI had been calling to speak with Smith. News of the transgressions, which carried a fine of up to $10,000 and up to five years in prison, covered the front pages of Iowa newspapers and spread nationwide.

'I think there should be a plaque or a statue here honoring what he did,” said Tracy, standing on the ground floor of the student union where the Soapbox Soundoff was held and where a Java House now serves coffee. 'This is something the university should do. They should not ignore what happened that day.”

After his arrest, Smith declared he would remain in jail until students contributed the money for his bail.

'I am doing this as a moral confrontation,” he said then. 'I can't help but think there are students who feel as I do. Your help in raising funds will be a vote of moral backing.”

Eventually, in 1966, he was sentenced to three years of probation.