In 1934, Philadelphia Friend and co-founder of the American Friends Service Committee Henry Cadbury gave a speech to a conference of American rabbis in which he urged them to call off a boycott of Nazi Germany. A New York Times report about the speech was tweeted out last week and has gone viral over the internet. The 1930s doesn’t look so far away in an era when authoritarians are on the rise and liberals worry about the lines of civility and fairness.
Make no mistake: Cadbury’s speech is cringeworthy. Some of the quotes as reported by the Times:
You can prove to your oppressors that their objectives and methods are not only wrong, but unavailing in the face of the world’s protests and universal disapproval of the injustices the Hitler program entails.
By hating Hitler and trying to fight back, Jews are only increasing the severity of his policies against them.
If Jews throughout the world try to instill into the minds of Hitler and his supporters recognition of the ideals for which the race stands, and if Jews appeal to the German sense of justice and the German national conscience, I am sure the problem will be solved more effectively and earlier than otherwise.
The idea that we might be able to appease Hitler was obviously wrong-headed. To tell Jews that they should do this is patronizing to the extreme.
But in many ways, all this is also vintage Quaker. It is in line with how many Friends saw themselves in the world. To understand Cadbury’s reaction, you have to know that Quakers of the era were very suspicious of collective action. He described any boycott of Nazi Germany as a kind of warfare. They felt this way too about unionization – workers getting together on strike were warring against the factory owners.
When John Woolman spoke out about slavery in the 1700s, he went one-on-one as a minister to fellow Quakers. During the Civil War, Friends wrote letters one-on-one with Abraham Lincoln urging him to seek peace (they got some return letters too!). Cadbury naively thought that these sorts of personal tactics could yield results against authoritarian twentieth-century states.
Missing in Cadbury’s analysis is an appreciation of how much the concentration of power in industrializing societies and the growth of a managerial class between owners and workers has changed things. Workers negotiating one-on-one with an owner/operator in a factory with twenty workers is very different than negotiating in a factory of thousands run by a CEO on behalf of hundreds of stockholders. Germany as a unified state was only a dozen years old when Cadbury was born. The era of total war was still relatively new and many people naively thought a rule of law could prevail after the First World War. The idea of industrializing pogroms and killing Jews by the millions must have seen fantastical.
Some of this worldview also came from theology: if we have direct access to the divine, then we can appeal to that of God in our adversary and win his or her heart and soul without resort to coercion. It’s a nice sentiment and it even sometimes works.
I won’t claim that all Friends have abandoned this worldview, but I would say it’s a political minority, especially with more activist Friends. We understand the world better and routinely use boycotts as a strategic lever. Cadbury’s American Friends Service Committee itself pivoted away from the kind of direct aid work that had exemplified its early years. For half a century it has been working in strategic advocacy.
Friends still have problems. We’re still way more stuck on racial issues among ourselves than one would think we would be given our participation in Civil Rights activism. Like many in the U.S., we’re struggling with the limitation of civility in a political system where rules have broken down. No AFSC head would give a lecture like Cadbury’s today. But I think it’s good to know where we come from. Some of Cadbury’s cautions might still hold lessons for us; understanding his blind spots could help expose ours.
