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.
In the surviving oral-history excerpt, printed pages 8–12, Cornelius Voth describes refusing a uniform because he did not regard himself as a soldier, a conscientious-objector Board of Inquiry at Fort Riley, classification in the group eligible for farm furlough, and his belief that officers nevertheless obstructed furloughs. He recalls pressure and threats during the initial detention period, but distinguishes the officers who spoke from Major Walter S. Kellogg’s presence and says the Board itself tried to judge sincerity fairly. He also describes refusing transfer papers and ultimately remaining at Fort Riley when the company was sent toward Houston. These are Voth’s retrospective observations. The fragment contains no court-martial, sentencing or release dates and supplies no new measured custody interval. It is not evidence about the separate Albert Cornelius Voth of Camp Travis.
