Vietnam War era poster promoting Resisting the Draft
 
[Vietnam War]. Cast Your Whole Vote. Nov. 14. The Resistance. [The Resistance], [1968]. 17” x 22-1/2”. Black printed broadside with off-white lettering and illustration of a draft card, large omega symbol printed in red. Soiling and evidence of hanging to verso, slight wear to edges, hint of waviness. Very Good.

A poster issued by The Resistance, a key organization in the draft resistance movement whose insignia was the letter omega (the symbol used for ohms, the unit of electrical resistance), most likely promoting “National Turn in Your Draft Day,” held on campuses nationwide on November 14, 1968. The poster features an illustration of a draft card bearing the signature of “local draft board clerk” Milo MinderBinder, the fictional war profiteer in Joseph Heller’s Catch – 22. Its statement borrows from Henry David Thoreau’s famous maxim in On the Duty of Civil Disobedience: “Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. . . . If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. That is in fact the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.”

The Resistance was founded in San Francisco by activist David Harris in March 1967, and soon became a national organization. It advocated for an end to the war through mass non-cooperation with the Selective Service System, sponsoring events around the country at which young men turned in or burned their draft cards. Harris was arrested in July 1969 and served 15 months in federal prison for draft evasion.

Scarce. We find only two copies held institutionally, at the Hoover Institute and OMCA.