Biography
Cornelius Voth was a Mennonite conscientious objector from Kansas who was drafted on August 5, 1918, and sent to Camp Funston. He refused to sign the army entrance card on the grounds that he was not a soldier, refused to wear the uniform, and declined all work under military control. He firmly believed he was completely within the law in refusing military orders, because he would have been willing to accept a farm furlough. Court-martialed on October 31, 1918, he was sentenced to twenty-five years and imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; he was released on January 27, 1919. He recounted his experience in a taped interview with James C. Juhnke on June 9, 1968, preserved in the Mennonite Central Committee's Civilian Public Service oral-history archive.
