ALEXANDRIA, Minn. — Breaking into the draft board office had been relatively easy.
The three men entered through the back of the building, using trash cans to hoist themselves up onto a small roof over the first floor rear entrance and going in through an open restroom window.
ADVERTISEMENT
Next they used a glass cutter to gain entrance into the draft board office.
It was about midnight, July 1970, and the men had just pried open the draft files when a voice called out to them — "Don't move or you're dead" — and they looked to see a figure with a gun silhouetted in the doorway.
Seven FBI agents and four Alexandria police officers were there. They had been tipped off.
The three men were placed under arrest.
_____
William Tilton, a native of St. Paul, became involved in anti-war activism as a student at the University of Minnesota. Active in student government since his freshman year, it was reported that he had sat on the Inter-Fraternity Council, the All-University Judiciary Council, the Morrill Hall Investigative Committee and served a term as vice president of the Student Association.
He also served as co-chair of the statewide umbrella organization, the Minnesota New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.
ADVERTISEMENT
"Everybody got involved," Tilton says today. "It was just the tenor of the times. I had a slightly more privileged route insofar as I was active in student government … and therefore oftentimes the official representative of student government at various anti-war meetings."
In an article from the Minneapolis Tribune from July 13, 1970, Tilton was credited with "cooling" a number of tense situations, including a confrontation between police and demonstrators on the Nicollet Mall.
"On that occasion, Tilton paced among the demonstrators pleading, 'Let's work for peace. Break it up. You're not doing any good for peace this way,'" it was reported.
As part of his roles on the mobilization committee and in student government, Tilton regularly gave speeches at schools, churches and social justice groups.
"In those speaking engagements, I would get asked all these questions," he says. "I wasn't a supporter of burning the flag, but I would get asked about draft board raids. And finally I had to admit that I (thought) what they were doing was necessary because other things (weren't) working to end the war, and you've got to throw a little grit in the war machine."
Once Tilton articulated his support of these raids, "I figured I had to do it myself," he says.
Tilton knew people involved in the planning of the raids and told them, "The next time you have an action, I want in."
ADVERTISEMENT
Shortly thereafter, he received a call saying, "We're going out this weekend."
_____
The plan was to hit five different draft boards in five different locations around the state, Alexandria being one of them.
According to information from the Douglas County Historical Society, the office was located in the old Alexandria State Bank building at 720 Broadway.
"We were decent burglars insofar as security in that era was pretty poor for most offices, because most people are honest," Tilton says.
It didn't end up mattering much, though, since the FBI and local police were waiting for them.
However, Tilton and his two associates, Charles Turchick and Clifton Ulen, weren't the only ones arrested that night. Arrests were also made in Winona and Little Falls, the group of those arrested coming to be known at the time as the "Minnesota Eight."
ADVERTISEMENT
"At (another location) they aborted the action because things looked weird," Tilton says. "At a fifth location" — Wabasha, Minn. — "there was a successful raid. They threw those records into the Mississippi River."
The men were arrested for violation of federal Selective Service laws, charges which carried penalties of up to a $10,000 fine, up to 10 years in prison, or both.
In a speech on July 12, 1970, Hubert H. Humphrey criticized the men, saying the nation's ills cannot be corrected by "men and women who break into Selective Service offices and try to destroy the records. … Change without order is chaos."
On the other side of the argument, a leaflet distributed in support of the Eight read in part, "These men acted out of allegiance to a higher law — a law of peace and sanity. They could no longer ignore or deny the life-denying contradictions in their midst."
_____
The Minnesota Eight were indicted that September by a federal grand jury, and arraigned on Oct. 12. Tilton's group was the first to go to trial in St. Paul — or at least, two of them were. Ulen pleaded guilty, and was ultimately the only member of the group not to receive jail time.
Tilton opted to act as his own attorney. The Minneapolis Star quoted him as saying at the time, "I know I'm going to prison for five years. So, if I'm going to prison, let me go defending myself. Let me go as a human being."
ADVERTISEMENT
Turchick was defended by Kenneth Tilsen, whom Tilton says "became my hero."
"We had sort of the best of both worlds," Tilton says. "I could say things that the lawyer couldn't say, but Ken Tilsen could say things and make motions in a legal way to put the proper posture on things."
It emerged during the trial that the FBI was tipped off about the raids from multiple informants, agent Donald Peterson saying that the FBI had not used any electronic surveillance or telephone tapping to gain information.
But when Tilsen asked for further information about the informants, such as their identities, he was shut down by Judge Edward Devitt.
The defense also had another issue to contend with: The war itself. They weren't allowed to mention it.
Both Tilton and Tilsen attempted to ask about how many people from Alexandria had died in Vietnam, but this was "declared to be irrelevant," Tilton remembers.
Judge Devitt admonished Tilsen three times in one day to stay away from questions about the war, the Minneapolis Star reported, telling him at one point, "You be quiet now."
ADVERTISEMENT
Tilton challenged Devitt's ruling, saying that "nothing in the world is more relevant" than deaths in Vietnam, the Star reported. He also said that the warrants for his and Turchick's arrests had mentioned their anti-war activities and their opposition to the Selective Service, it was reported.
"We wouldn't be here if the deaths hadn't taken place and we didn't think they should be stopped," Tilton was quoted as saying.
The judge sustained his challenged ruling.
_____
The jury took less than an hour to convict Tilton and Turchick, which Tilton says was not a surprise.
"We were guilty," he says. "We were guilty as could be."
However, they had hoped for jury nullification, which did not happen.
"Quite frankly, I don't think my final arguments with the jury, which everybody had hoped would be profound and meaningful and sway the jury, I don't think it was all that good," Tilton says.
The Minneapolis Tribune reported that Judge Devitt, in his instructions to the jurors, told them that "you have a very limited responsibility: Whether the defendants are guilty or not guilty. And that is all.
"You have no religious or philosophical or theological responsibility at all. If the Vietnam War is wrong, or the Selective Service System is unfair, the remedy lies in the political arena — the halls of Congress or the executive branch.
"It is the responsibility of Congress to enact laws, even bad ones if they have a mind to," the judge was quoted as saying.
He also said that "good motives alone are not a defense to the commission of a crime."
U.S. Attorney Robert Renner was quoted as saying, "I don't like the Vietnam War any more than Mr. Tilton does, but if you don't get your way at the ballot box, that doesn't give you the right to break the law."
As if going to war were a ballot box issue.
_____
They were sentenced to five years each in the federal penitentiary.
The Minneapolis Star quoted Judge Devitt as saying that the Eight's "criminal conduct strikes at the very foundation of government, and therefore at the security and well being of all.
"To condone their conduct, or to dismiss it with a slap on the wrist, would be to invite continued lawlessness and to approve violence as an agent for change," he was quoted as saying. "Freedom cannot exist in a society which permits violence."
The Minneapolis Tribune reported that the severity of the sentences drew groans from some audience members in the courtroom, with Turchick's father, David, angrily noting that the five-year terms were more than double the sentences for some offenders who actually destroyed draft records.
Tilton ended up serving a little more than 20 months in a Michigan prison, an experience he says wasn't that bad, relatively speaking.
"The main problem with prison is boredom," he says.
After he was released, he took the LSATs for a second time and went to law school beginning in the fall of 1974, working at Minnesota Public Radio at the same time.
"I was the first felon admitted to the Bar in the state of Minnesota," he remembers.
_____
Tilton now says he isn't sure if he would repeat his actions of 1970 if given another chance.
"None of us planned on getting arrested," he says. "This was an event that was going to occur and we were just going to go on with our lives."
But, if their plan to destroy the draft records had succeeded, it would have been a story for a week or two, maybe a little more.
"Because we were arrested and because there were trials, it had a much greater impact than it would otherwise have had," Tilton says.
The trials generated a defense committee, there were teach-ins and articles in papers all over the state.
Tilton says, "As far as being an anti-war activist and trying to heighten awareness of the impropriety of our war in Vietnam and move people to action, it was much more advantageous that we got arrested."
— The Echo Press thanks the Douglas County Historical Society for its assistance in providing information for this article.
The Trust Project
