Christopher Sinatra lives in Oswego, NY where he studies early American history at SUNY Oswego. He is working towards earning his MA in December ’15. Read Sinatra’s twice monthly blog, “
Sleepwalking Through History ,
”
on SyracuseNewTimes.com .
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On a chilly March day in 1968, a woman walked into the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in downtown Syracuse. The magnificent Gothic Revival structure was quiet and peaceful. She thought she was alone, but soon saw a teenager standing near the altar.
Sixteen year-old Ronald Brazee had thought he too was alone, and quickly exited through the side door, leaving his coat and a metal gasoline can behind.
Outside, he asked a man if he could spare a match.
Brazee’s quick departure probably seemed strange to the woman, but then again a lot of things seemed strange in 1968. Above everything else, the American war in Vietnam had become the focal point of world-wide protest against authority of all kinds. Having formally begun in 1964, the war was, to greatly understate it, proving incredibly divisive around the world.
However, Syracuse’s place in this story had deeper roots than the
1970 Student Strike .
President Lyndon B. Johnson attends the Newhouse 1 dedication, August 5, 1964, where he delivered the Gulf of Tonkin Speech.
On August 5, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson attended the dedication of Newhouse 1 at Syracuse University and
delivered the Gulf of Tonkin speech , which two days later would become the justification for expanding the conflict. However, protest was swift. David Miller, a student at Le Moyne College was one of – if not the – first to torch a draft card after Congress made the act a felony in 1965.
In Syracuse, Daniel Berrigan, who taught theology at Le Moyne, and his brother Philip, both priests, were part of the
Catonsville Nine , who burned almost four hundred draft cards using homemade napalm.
Catonsville Nine: Tom Melville puts more fuel on the burning draft cards at the Selective Service office in Catonsville on May 17, 1968.
Youth vs. their fathers, black vs. white, rich vs. poor, women vs. men and the burned vs. the unburned. There was not much to agree upon in 1968.
But one type of protest most likely made everyone uncomfortable. In 1963, Thích Quảng Đức , a South-Vietnamese Buddhist monk set himself on fire at a busy street intersection in Saigon. He self-immolated “to make a donation to the struggle” against the authoritarian Catholic leader, Ngo Dinh Diem.
The fiery image became an icon and was emulated around the world – even in the United States. Alice Hertz, Norman Morrison, Robert Chevalier, and George Winne, among others, were inspired by Quảng Đức. In 1965, a junior at West Chester State College, Patricia Ann Conway, told people she did so, “because I love God.” She insisted that she was not protesting the war, saying, “I did it because of a personal thing.”
VIDEO
No one can say for sure why 16-year old Ronald Brazee ran out of the Syracuse Cathedral that day and set himself on fire, dying a month later.
Ronald Brazee.
Reader’s Digest magazine, and under the American flag it said “Love It or Leave It.” He remembers being annoyed both by the sticker’s message and that it was perpetually peeling off at the edges.
The kids didn’t have much to rebel against. For such a large family, they got along fine. “We weren’t subversives, but we were independent.”
So you were like the Brady Bunch? I asked. “No, because we couldn’t sing,” he chuckled.
“Me and Ron were really close, very tight,” Mike says. “We collected all kinds of comic books – Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, X-Men – the first issues. Stan Lee was Ron’s hero.”
The brothers also liked to go to the movies and to listen to the Rolling Stones. But Ron’s favorite band by far was Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. Ron and his cousin went to see the band when they performed at the War Memorial in February of ’68.
The boys were waiting for Elaine to pick them up when they saw someone they knew walk outside.
“Meeting Zappa after the show was probably the highlight of Ron’s life – they talked for a good 15 minutes.” Mike says that Ron penned a review in the Central High School newspaper called Of Mothers and Morality . “He was a smart, smart kid,” Mike repeated over and over. “He was very sharp, sarcastic – no, not sarcastic. He had a dry sense of humor.”
Zappa was known for his inventive style, deeply political lyrics and a strong dislike of hippies. In the song, “Who Needs the Peace Corp,” he parodied them for their perceived rose-tinted hedonism.
“I will wander around barefoot
You know I’ll have a psychedelic gleam in my eye at all times
I will love everyone
I will love the police as they kick the shit out of me on the street.”
VIDEO
Ron was most definitely a heavy consumer of news as well, and won third place at Central High in Time Magazine ’s Current Events Contest, which consisted of, “100 questions about national and foreign affairs. Business, sports, entertainment, science, religion, literature and the arts.”
He was young, and so wasn’t as politically active as many of the college students across the country. But neither were most high-schoolers. It’s clear that Ron wasn’t living with his head in the sand. “If I could point to any direction he might have gone in, it would have been as a writer,” his brother said.
The day that Ron died, he skipped school and hitchhiked from Auburn to Syracuse with his cousin. Mike isn’t troubled that they played hooky, “It shows that he was a regular kid,” Mike says. “We used to hitchhike sometimes, it was more normal then.”
At one point the cousins split up and “sometime after 2 p.m.,” Ron walked into a gas station. The clerk refused to fill his plastic container so he returned with a proper metal gas can. He then went to the Cathedral and once inside, poured the gasoline over his body. When Catherine O’Connell entered, he fled. He quickly made his way around the building to the front of the Cathedral and asked Joseph Madden, of Solvay, for a light.
The elderly man told the Syracuse Post-Standard , “I gave him a match and he lit it and went up in flames and ran ahead.”
“Other passersby, including Charles Fahey, director of Catholic Charities, and Harry Honan, former deputy county executive, ran after the blazing youth, tore off their coats and used them to cover the flames,” the same article reported.
Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, Syracuse.
St Cross College, University of Oxford ) who researches self-inflicted suffering as protest, immolation is more complicated than many think.
“Protest by self-immolation has become associated with death by fire, but the etymological root of immolation is ‘sacrifice.’” He argues that as much as it is an old phenomenon, it has made a modern comeback since Quang Duc. The ability of images of the act to be transmitted by the mass media, as well as the diminishing visibility of execution by the state are two reasons for this resurgence. Quang Duc set himself on fire in full knowledge, and hope, that people would see his death.
In Ron’s case, the assistant superintendent at Auburn gave voice to this when he told the newspaper that images of the war on television might be, “too much to take at the age of 16.”
South Vietnamese National Police Chief Brig Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executes a Viet Cong officer with a single pistol shot in the head in Saigon, Vietnam on Feb. 1, 1968. The photo, by photojournalist Eddie Adams, became one of the Vietnam’s War’s most indelible images, winning a Pultizer Prize in 1969.
New York Times journalist Peter Arnett, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”
In other words, it was no accident that the Catonsville Nine used napalm as fuel.
The draft was also a pressing issue. In the March 20th edition of the Post-Standard below the announcement of Ron’s self-immolation, a headline read, “Draft Call for May put at 44,000” and noted that this was the third continuous month with such high numbers.
As Jimmy Brazee had told the newspaper, conflating the past and present, “He doesn’t like the war. He didn’t want to go there.”
Ron had almost no chance of making it out of the hospital, as he suffered burns over 90% of his body. Not many people could visit him because of the severity of his wounds, but Msgr. Fahey thinks that local peace activist and then-priest Frank Woolever did. Mike told me that to the end, Ronnie kept his sense of humor. “He would say to my mother that when he got home he would grow a beard. Up to that point he could only grow three or four whiskers.”
Ronald Brazee died on April 27, of pneumonia. There was no public vigil after his death – only before, shortly after he was first taken to St. Joe’s. A small crowd of approximately 75 silently paid tribute.
Photo provided by Dik Cool, founder of Syracuse Cultural Workers.
The Citizen-Advertiser entitled “The Peace Orphan,” memorializing both his life and his cause:
A saddened day, a quiet year,
The silence does not die.
The people’s minds are mild,
His yearning soul does cry.
Reflections gathered freely,
in the sea of tranquil thought,
Questions asked so quickly,
Answers to be sought.
A burning sun, a flame of
love,
No action was in vain,
Futile words of sympathy
A sacrifice profane.
Confusion’s crowd, contained
In cold,
The hate, it makes it dim.
Alas, poor peace, thy face is
warm,
To many more like him.
More soldiers and civilians from the United States and Vietnam would die or be injured during the war. Although many young men volunteered, those who were drafted had no choice but to enter the ranks, and they were disproportionately from poor families.
If their birthday wasn’t picked they were “there but for fortune.”
While substitute teaching in a social studies classroom, I was able to see Kevin Cook teach the draft in a way I will never forget. As students told him their birthdays, he would read to them the number that had been assigned. My birthday, April 25, was number 351. I would not have won the lottery. “But,” he said, “if you were born on April 24, you would have been number 2.”
David Miller, a young Catholic pacifist, became the first U.S. war protestor to burn his draft card in direct violation of a recently passed law forbidding such acts.
On August 5, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson attended the dedication of Newhouse 1 at Syracuse University and delivered the Gulf of Tonkin speech, which two days later would become the justification for expanding the conflict. However, protest was swift. David Miller, a student at Le Moyne College was one of – if not the – first to torch a draft card after Congress made the act a felony in 1965.
In Syracuse, Daniel Berrigan, who taught theology at Le Moyne, and his brother Philip, both priests, were part of the Catonsville Nine, who burned almost four hundred draft cards using homemade napalm.
Youth vs. their fathers, black vs. white, rich vs. poor, women vs. men and the burned vs. the unburned. There was not much to agree upon in 1968.
But one type of protest most likely made everyone uncomfortable. In 1963, Thích Quảng Đức , a South-Vietnamese Buddhist monk set himself on fire at a busy street intersection in Saigon. He self-immolated “to make a donation to the struggle” against the authoritarian Catholic leader, Ngo Dinh Diem.
The fiery image became an icon and was emulated around the world – even in the United States. Alice Hertz, Norman Morrison, Robert Chevalier, and George Winne, among others, were inspired by Quảng Đức. In 1965, a junior at West Chester State College, Patricia Ann Conway, told people she did so, “because I love God.” She insisted that she was not protesting the war, saying, “I did it because of a personal thing.”
