It’s like Christmas in July. Well, August anyway; a half dozen people, mostly in their 30s, are gathered about a large dining table. They joke as they pass around Scotch tape and wrapping paper. There is an air of celebration, almost giddiness.
Duane Bean is an ex-con, but he’s no thug–wouldn’t harm a fly. He’s a voracious reader and he prays, hard, when he has to make a decision. In fact, he was a lay Catholic minister at the University of Illinois at Chicago a few years back. Words like “the joint” and “the hole” sound ludicrous coming from the same person who mentions in passing ancient Native American philosophies and the writings of Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi. This gentle soul usually prefers a love story before he turns off his bedside lamp at night. Soon, though, he won’t even be able to turn off his own lamp. It’ll be lights out at ten.
Duane Bean, who began the last decade as the quintessential 80s man, enters the new one like a throwback to the 60s. People like Bean don’t get big headlines anymore, but there are at least several Chicagoans currently imprisoned for disarmament actions and thousands of people around the country have been arrested during dramatic actions demonstrating their opposition to nuclear arms and U.S. military policies. At any given moment, some two dozen people are doing time for nonviolent protests.
In August 1987 Bean and some 20 others climbed the fence at an Army reserve training base in Arlington Heights. When those resisters were brought to court they got a lucky break; a jury would hear their case. Most nonviolent resisters prefer a jury trial to a bench trial. They can play to a jury, which, according to Bean, is more likely to sympathize than a judge. On the stand a resister can bring up the Nuremberg defenses and say that he refuses to be a “good German” in the face of interventionism, the nuclear-arms buildup, ecological destruction, and a hundred other interrelated big-government/big-business sins. This time, the jury was sympathetic. Despite Judge John Madden’s strict orders to disregard the defenses raised by the defendants, the jury returned 22 not-guilty verdicts after three and a half hours of deliberation. “That was one of the greatest moments of my life,” Bean says. “We all wept when the verdict was read. It was truly a miracle of justice. None of us thought the conservative, white, middle-class jurors would have the guts to ignore the judge and the prosecutor. After hearing our pleas, I think they decided that the government had just gone too far and they weren’t going to play their part by convicting us.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In early August 1988, Bean was one of 22 people arrested for blocking the entrance to Williams International, a defense contractor near Detroit. He was convicted and given a 30-day suspended sentence.
Later that month Bean went all the way. He sold his possessions, quit his campus jobs, and gave up his apartment.
At one silo, Bean and Franciscan priest Jerry Zawada calmly cut a lock on the gate, entered, then locked the gate behind them with Kryptonite bicycle locks. “We had a lot of work to do and we didn’t want to be disturbed by the Air Force,” Bean says. They pasted family snapshots to the 120-ton concrete cap covering the missile and poured their own blood over it. Then they sat down and quietly celebrated Catholic mass.
