Biography
Ben Salmon became one of the most visible U.S. conscientious objectors of World War I, arguing from Catholic pacifist convictions that participation in war was morally impossible. His refusal to cooperate with the draft and induction process led to arrest and a military court-martial in 1918; he was sentenced to 25 years of hard labor (after an initial death sentence was reduced) and imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth. In 1920 he launched a hunger strike over his treatment and was transferred to St. Elizabeths Hospital; public pressure for the release of wartime objectors grew, and he was pardoned and freed in November 1920. His ordeal—years of confinement and coercive punishment despite the war’s end—became a reference point in later conscientious-objection and antiwar movements.