Quakerspeisungen and an Oscar Schindler connection

November 13, 2018

11/13/2018 · Martin Kelley

This week marks the hundred-year anniversary of the end of the “Great War,” World War I, branded as the war to end all wars. Our annual commemoration of the armistice in the U.S. largely went by the wayside in 1954 when Congress changed the name from Armistice Day to Veterans Day. Instead of marking the end of a horrific war that literally consumed much of European resources and people for years in trenches that never moved, we now spend the day filling lectures with cliches of military service.

But the hundred year anniversary also means we can start remembering the aftermath of the war. The First World War set up the second. We largely think of the mistakes and half-efforts of the victorious powers but Quakers were part of more righteous storyline:

Even more food was sent by American Quakers under the leadership of Herbert Hoover, providing daily meals for 60,0000 starving Berliners for five years. The Germans labelled this massive effort, Quakerspeisungen: “Quaker Feedings.” It saved thousands of lives, including those of the family of Oscar Schindler who famously went on to help 700 Jews to escape the gas chambers at Auschwitz in the Second World War. Schindler’s sisters spent six months recuperating with the Hall family and one even attended Thirsk Grammar School for a term.

Friends Journal Bonuses: Quaker work in Germany in the 1920s and 30s was the subject ofQuakers in Germany during and after the World Wars from 2010. Relief efforts in Spain were part of a more recent story that tied it to present-day refugee assistance in Gota de Leche.

https://www.darlingtonandstocktontimes.co.uk/news/17207689.heroic-quakers-and-a-fascinating-link-between-oscar-schindler-and-thirsk/?ref=twtrec

In the New Yorker, an article on atheism leads with a Daniel Seeger’s 1965 Supreme Court case

October 30, 2018

10/30/201810/30/2018 · Martin Kelley

A review of two books on atheism starts with the take of Dan Seeger, who’s landmark Supreme Court case extended the right to conscientious objector status to agnostics and atheists:

Daniel Seeger was twenty-one when he wrote to his local draft board to say, “I have concluded that war, from the practical standpoint, is futile and self-defeating, and from the more important moral standpoint, it is unethical.” Some time later, he received the United States Selective Service System’s Form 150, asking him to detail his objections to military service. It took him a few days to reply, because he had no answer for the form’s first question: “Do you believe in a Supreme Being?” Unsatisfied with the two available options — “Yes” and “No” — Seeger finally decided to draw and check a third box: “See attached pages.”

Seeger’s victory helped mark a turning point for a minority that had once been denied so much as the right to testify in court, even in their own defense. Atheists, long discriminated against by civil authorities and derided by their fellow-citizens, were suddenly eligible for some of the exemptions and protections that had previously been restricted to believers.

Daniel Seeger has written for and been featured in the pages of Friends Journal many times over the ensuing decades but last year he wrote a great feature for us about the court case, An AFSC Defense of the Rights of Conscience. A tip of the hat to Carol Holmes Alpern for sending this New Yorker article way!

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/why-are-americans-still-uncomfortable-with-atheism

Hometown Heroes

May 22, 2018

05/22/201805/22/2018 · Martin Kelley

Josh Talbot is back looking at public recognitions that imply that patriotism is exclusive to military service:

Within the last month I became aware of the “Hometown Heroes” program. Hanging from lampposts in our downtown, and other downtown districts in the region, are banners with the pictures and names of former military personnel. I was looking at one of the banners hanging outside of my bank and I started thinking to myself. “Why is it always soldiers?

Off the top of my head I can think of plenty of other members of the community that are heros from my standpoint. Activists for justice and conscience. Civic-minded gadflies. Shopowners who provide so-called “third places” for for people to congregegate. Traffic engineers who push back against corner-cutting in safety issues. The most important heros are often everyday people who simply do the right thing when chance puts a dangerous moral dilemma right in their path.

I push back against a simple military-are-heros narratives because in times of authoritarianism the military often become the enforcers. There’s the jingoistic nonsense you hear that the military is protecting our freedom to protest. No: in most cases our liberty has been preserved by people standing up and practicing their liberty despitee intimidation by authoritarian bullies and their police forces. I have friends in the military and I respect their choices and honor their commitments. I know heros can be found throughout the enlisted ranks and in our police forces but so are scoundrels. We need to recognize hometown heroism wherever it happens and resist the mindset that it’s exclusive to state forces.

https://quakerreturns.blogspot.com/2018/05/hometown-heroes.html

The Quaker who lived with the CIA

March 8, 2018

03/08/201803/08/2018 · Martin Kelley

I usually find stories of Friends by tracking a list of a hundred-plus Quaker-related RSS feeds. I’ll also find them being shared on Facebook or in the Reddit Quakers group. For the first time ever I stumbled on one in Twitter Moments. Another likely first: I’m linking to the CIA website. Read the story of the Quaker pacifist who lived with the CIA .

Margaret [Scattergood] was far more skeptical of CIA and considered the organization’s mission to be in violation of her pacifist beliefs. She used her trust fund to financially contribute to antiwar causes. She lobbied Congress to cut the US Intelligence and military budgets. In the 1980s Margaret opened her home to Sandinistas from Nicaragua, while CIA supported the opposition.

Inviting Sandinistas to her home in the middle of the CIA headquarters compound is easily the most kickass Quaker stories I’ve heard in awhile. Chuck Fager also shared some of this story in a nice remembrance in a 1987 Friends Journal shortly after she died; apparently the land purchases in the 1940s weren’t quite so neighborly as the CIA public relations team seem to make out.

The not-so-ancient Quaker clearness committee

February 28, 2018

02/28/201802/28/2018 · Martin Kelley

I could probably start a column of Quaker pet peeve of the day. I especially get bent out of shape with misremembered history. One peeve is the myth that Quaker clearness committees are ancient. These committees are typically convened for Friends who are facing a major life decision, like marriage or a career. Parker Palmer is one of the most well-known practitioners of this and gives the best description:

For people who have experienced this dilemma, I want to describe a method invented by the Quakers, a method that protects individual identity and integrity while drawing on the wisdom of other people. It is called a “Clearness Committee.” If that name sounds like it is from the sixties, it is — the 1660’s!

While it’s true that you can see references to “being clear” in writings by George Fox and William Penn around issues of early Quaker marriages, what they’re describing is not a spiritual process but a checklist item. By law you could only get married in England under the auspicious of the Church of England. Quakers were one of the groups rebelling against that. This meant they had to perform some of the functions typically handled by clergy – and nowadays by the state. One checklist item: make sure neither person in the couple is already married or has children. That’s primarily what they meant they asked whether a couple was cleared for marriage (Mark Wutka has found a great reference in Samuel Bownas that implies that the practice also included checking with the bride and groom’s parents).

One reason I can be so obnoxiously definitive about my opinions is because I have the Friends Journal archives on my laptop. I can do an instant keyword search for “clearness committee” on every issue from 1955 to 2018. The phrase doesn’t appear in any issue until 1969. That article is by Jennifer Haines and Deborah Haines. Here it is, the debut of the concept of the Quaker clearness committee:

We were challenged repeatedly to test our lives against our beliefs. We labored long over concerns raised by our belief in the way of peace. We agreed to urge that each Monthly Meeting, through a clearness committee or other committees, take the responsibility for working through with Friends the tensions raised in their lives by the Quaker peace testimony. To this committee could be brought problems created by draft or employment in institutions implicated with the military and the question of whether applicants for membership who find themselves in opposition to the peace testimony should be accepted.

The context suggests it was an outgrowth of the new practice of worship sharing. I did do a deep dive on that a few years ago in a piece that was also based on Friends Journal archives. Deborah Haines continued to be very involved in Friends General Conference and I worked with her when I was FGC’s Advancement and Outreach coordinator and she the committee clerk.

In the early 1970s the references to clearness committees continued to focus on discernment of antiwar activities. Within a few years it was extended to preparation for marriages. A notice from 1982 gives a good summary of its uses then:

Meetings for clearness, for friends unfamiliar with the term, are composed of people who meet by request with persons seeking clarity in an important life decision — marriage, separation, divorce, adoption, resolution of family differences, a job change, etc.

Notably absent in this list is the process for new member applications. The first use of the term for this process in the FJ archives came in 1989! Why did it take twenty years for the concept to be applied here?

Why does it matter that this isn’t an ancient practice? A few things: one is that is nice to acknowledge that our tradition is a living, breathing one and that it can and does evolve. The clearness committee is a great innovation. Decoupling it from ancient Quakerism also makes it more easily adaptable for non-Quaker contexts.

Worship sharing came out of the longtime work of Rachel Davis DuBois. I would argue that she is one of the most important Quakers of the twentieth century. What, you haven’t heard of her? Exactly: most of the most influential Friends that came out of the Hicksite tradition in the twentieth century didn’t develop the cult of personalities you see with Orthodox Friends like Rufus Jones and Howard Brinton. It’s a shame, because DuBois probably has more influence in our day-to-day Quaker practice than either of them.

Other links: This has turned into an awesome thread on Facebook (it’s public so jump in!). There was also a good discussion on worship sharing on QuakerQuaker a few years ago: When did Quakers start worship sharing? Back in 2003, Deborah Haines wrote about Rachel Davis DuBois for FGConnections, the awesome magazine that Barbara Hirshkowitz used to produce for FGC. I posted it online then, which is why I remember it; Archive.org saved it, which is why I can link to it.

Caveats: Yes there were Quaker processes before this. On Facebook Bill Samuel quotes the 1806 Faith and Practice on the membership process and argues it’s describing a clearness committee. I’d be very surprised if the 1812 process had anywhere near the same tone as the modern-day clearness or even shared much in the way of the philosophical underpinning. I decided to pop over to Thomas Clarkson’s 1806 A Portrait of Quakerism (discussed here) to see how he described the membership application process. I often find him useful, as he avoids Quaker terminology and our somewhat unhelpful way of understating things back then to give a useful snapshot of conditions on the ground. In three volumes I can’t find him talking about new members at all. I’m wondering if entry into the Society of Friends was more theoretical than actual back then, so unusual that Clarkson didn’t even think about.

The Quaker Wars?

June 29, 2016

06/29/201603/17/2021 · Martin Kelley

Over on Quora, a question that is more fascinating than it might at first appear: What wars in history were fought in the name of Quakerism (Society of Friends)?:

This question is neither sarcastic nor rhetoric. As many people insist that violence and atrocities are an inherent part of religions, that religions would cause wars, I really want to know if that is the truth. Personally I believe religions can be peaceful, such as in the cases of the Quakers and the Baha’i, but I might be wrong.

The obvious answer should be “none.” Quakers are well-known as pacifists (fun fact: fake cannon used to deceive the enemy into thinking an army is more fortified than it actually is are called “Quaker guns.”) Individual Quakers have rarely been quite as united around the peace testimony as our reputation would suggest, but as a group it’s true we’ve never called for a war. I can’t think of any military skirmish or battle waged to rallying cries of “Remember the Quakers!”

Quaker guns at Manassas Junction, 1862. Via Wikimedia.

And yet: all of modern civilization has been shaped by war. Our political boundaries, our religions, our demographic make-up – even the languages we speak are all remnants of long-ago battles. One of the most influential Quaker thinkers, the eighteenth century minister John Woolman, constantly reminded his brethren to consider those luxuries that are the fruit of war and slavery. When we broaden the scope like this, we’ve been involved in quite a few wars.

We like to remember how William Penn founded the colony of Pennsylvania as a religious refuge. But the king of England held European title to the mid-Atlantic seaboard because of regional wars with the Dutch and Swedes (and later held onto it only after a much larger war with the Canadian French settlements).

The king’s grant of “Penn’s Woods” was the settlement of a very large war debt owed to Penn’s father, a wealthy admiral. The senior William Penn was something of a scoundrel, playing off both sides in ever-shifting royalist/Roundhead seesaw of power. When the musical chairs were over he was on the side of the winner, who owed him and later his son. The admiral’s longest-lasting accomplishment was disobeying orders and capturing Jamaica for the British (Bob Marley sang his songs of oppression and injustice in English because of Sir William).

By most accounts, William Penn the younger was fair and also bought the land from local Lenape nations. Mostly forgotten is that the Lenape and Susquehannock population had been devastated in a recent regional war against the Iroquois over access to beaver-trapping territories. They were now subject nations to the Iroquois Confederacy, which skillfully played global politics by keeping the English and French colonial empires in enough strategic tension that both left the Iroquois homeland alone. It was in the Iroquois’s best interest to have another British colony on their southern flank and who would make a better buffer than these idealistic pacifists? The Lenape land reimbursement was secondary consideration to continental politics from their perspective. (One could easily make a case that the biological genocide of indigenous America by diseases brought over by uncaring colonists was also a form of war.)

The thousands of acres Penn deeded to his fellow Quakers were thus the fruits of at least four sets of wars: colonial wars over European claims to the Delaware Valley; debt-fueled English civil wars; English wars against Spanish Caribbean colonies, and Native American wars fought over access to commercial resources. Much of original Quaker wealth in succeeding generations is indebted to the huge land transfer in the 1680s, either directly (we still hold some valuable real estate) or indirectly (the real estate’s sale could be funneled into promising businesses).

Not all of the fruits of war were secondhand and coincidental to Friends themselves. Many wealthy Friends in the mid-Atlantic colonies had slaves who did much of the backbreaking work of clearing fields and building houses. Many of those oppressed souls were put into bondage in Africa as prisoners of war (John Woolman would probably point out that slavery itself is a form of war). That quaint old brick meetinghouse set back on a flower-covered field? It was probably built at least in part by enslaved hands.

Today, it’s impossible to step free of war. Most of our houses are set on land once owned by others. Our computers and cell phones have components mined in war zones. Our lights and cars are powered by fossil fuels. And even with solar panels and electric cars, the infrastructure of the daily living of most Americans is still based on extraction and control of resources.

This is not to say we can’t continue to work for a world free of war. But it seems important to be clear-eyed and acknowledge the debts we have.

Taxes then and now

March 13, 2015

03/13/2015 · Martin Kelley

Every year as April’s tax deadlines comes near, the War Resisters League produces a pie chart showing military spending as a percentage of the federal budget. This year Ed Hedemann went back in time to see what the chart would have looked like during World War I:

A striking difference between this fictional WW I era pie chart and today’s version is how much simpler the federal budget was back then. Not only was it a lot smaller – vastly smaller – there were many fewer categories. A hundred years ago, the budget was mostly military (75% of the budget) – even before entry into WW I – a large part of which was to pay off expenses incurred during the Civil War from 50 years earlier and the recently-ended Spanish-American War. The nonmilitary portions were labeled “Indians,” “Postal Deficiencies,” and “Civil and Miscellaneous.”

H/t The Pickett Line

Arnold: Losing Our Religion

December 31, 2003

12/31/200310/18/2013 · Martin Kelley

Johann Christoph Arnold has an interesting piece on the intersection of peace activism and religion [originally published on Nonviolence.org]. Here’s a taste:

The day before Martin Luther King was murdered he said, “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life…But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will.” We must have this same desire if we are going to survive the fear and violence and mass confusion of our time. And we should be as unabashed about letting people know that it is our religious faith that motivates us, regardless of the setting or the consequences.

Many peace activists are driven by religious motivations, which is often all that keeps them going through all the hard times and non-appreciation. Yet we often present ourselves to the world in a secular way using rational arguments.

It took me a few years to really admit to myself that Nonviolence.org is a ministry intimately connected with my Quaker faith. In the eight years it’s been going, thousands of websites have sprung up with good intentions and hype only to disappear into oblivion (or the internet equivalent, the line reading “Last updated July 7, 1997”). I have a separate forum for “Quaker religious and peace issues” [which later became the general QuakerRanter blog] In my essay on the Quaker peace testimony, I worry that modern religious pacifists have spent so much effort convincing the world that pacifism makes sense from a strictly rationalist viewpoint that we’ve largely forgotten our own motivations. Don’t get me wrong: I think pacifism also makes sense as a pragmatic policy; while military solutions might be quicker, pacifism can bring about the long-term changes that break the cycle of militarism. But how can we learn to balance the sharing of both our pragmatic and religious motivations?

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