Biography
Lowell Naeve, a young painter, refused to register and later to submit to induction for the Second World War, and was imprisoned more than once — at the West Street jail in New York and the federal correctional institution at Danbury, Connecticut — where he kept resisting from inside, joining work strikes and destroying his own draft paperwork. His illustrated memoir A Field of Broken Stones (1950) became a classic first-person account of the wartime resisters. He was released after the war.
Freedom's May 27, 1950 review of A Field of Broken Stones describes Naeve returning his torn draft card in 1940, subsequent detention at West Street Jail, and a one-year-and-one-day Danbury sentence. He declined conditional release in April 1942 and was actually released in June 1942. Later arrested in Anthony, Texas, for lacking a draft card, he passed through several prisons and was released on bail. The review also recounts his hunger strike outside court in support of two Danbury war resisters, detention and forced feeding in Bellevue Hospital's prison ward, and a further three-year Danbury sentence. These were separate episodes with release and bail gaps; the existing 1941–1946 year markers do not establish continuous confinement or an exact total.
Naeve’s memoir dates his renewed detention at West Street and forced feeding at Bellevue to May 1943, followed by another Danbury sentence. It also describes an earlier ninety-seven-day period in segregation. His May 1946 Ashland diary anticipates release; that forecast does not establish a physical discharge day.
