Material History of American ReligionProject
Material Pacifism
A lot of the research we’ve done in the project has found fairly accidental uses of material culture in American religious life. Its users are often unaware of its symbolism. In this paper, however, Patricia Appelbaum (who has recently completed her doctorate in American religion from Boston University). reveals the profoundly thoughtful symbolic activity of mid-twentieth century American pacifists. For these people, material practices carry a profoundly important political, religious, and ethical meaning.
When I was at work on my dissertation on the religious culture of Protestant pacifism, I sometimes explained my project to casual acquaintances by means of a shorthand question, “Why do pacifists wear Birkenstock sandals?” Of course not every pacifist does so, nor is everyone who wears Birkenstocks a pacifist. But the question evoked an immediately recognizable image, one that suggests that pacifists do have a distinctive and visible material culture.
Although its mythic antecedents go back
centuries, the immediate origins of that culture lie in the peace movements of
the twentieth century. The end of the
First World War precipitated the first broad popular groundswell against war in
United States history. This movement
encompassed both “religious” and “secular” organizations. In its religious manifestations, it owed
less to radical pacifist sectarians such as Quakers and Mennonites than to
modernist “mainline” Protestants, who constituted much of its leadership,
shaped much of its rhetoric, and contributed a substantial proportion of the
rank and file.[1] Mainline Protestants shaped and participated
in nominally secular organizations as well as in explicitly religious ones.[2]
Pacifism redefined itself gradually during
the turbulent 1930s, when events challenged and fragmented the confident
postwar peace movement. By the
beginning of World War II pacifism had become a separatist position rather than
one embedded in the mainstream; absolute-pacifist organizations grew while more
broad-based peace groups collapsed. The
character of pacifism also changed.
Drawing on elements that were already present in the post-World War I
movement, this new pacifism laid the groundwork for Vietnam-era and later peace
movements. This essay will cover
Protestant pacifism from World War I until about 1960, just before the
large-scale peace movement of the Vietnam period.
Religious pacifists have never been known for
attention to material things. Yet, as
in other religious communities, material signs and practices were everywhere in
Protestant pacifism. The activist and
lecturer Muriel Lester, a Baptist and later an independent Protestant,
practiced and signified voluntary poverty by wearing a cape instead of a coat.[3] The pacifist writer Sarah Cleghorn,
Episcopalian and later Quaker, wore a homemade paper badge during World War I
on which she wrote a text from the Sermon on the Mount, “Love Your Enemies.” The ecumenical, Protestant-based pacifist
organization Fellowship of Reconciliation issued Christmas cards. The visual realm of Protestant peace
posters, statuary, and commemorative pieces was extensive. Pacifists also experimented with film. All these material manifestations signified,
communicated, and negotiated meanings of pacifism.[4]
The present essay is concerned with three
material manifestations of religious pacifism between World War I and the
Vietnam period: Protestant peace iconography, international-friendship items,
and a phenomenon I call whole-life pacifism.
It will also look briefly at some connections between pacifism and the
business world. Protestant peace
iconography flourished particularly during the interwar peace movement. The international-friendship approach to
peace focused on building mutual appreciation and warm relationships among the
peoples of the world. It relied in part
on material things to make other peoples real to an American audience. Whole-life pacifism was the attempt to make
the whole of one’s life consistent with one’s pacifist beliefs. Those who embraced it scrutinized their
occupations, clothing, food, housing, and possessions for evidence of
complicity with the material order that led to war and social injustice.
The material history of religious pacifism
illustrates the complicated relationship between mainstream Protestantism and
pacifism. We have already noted the
permeable boundaries between “religious” and “secular” pacifism in the interwar
period. At the end of that period,
around 1940, the strongly mainstream-Protestant pacifism of the interwar years
diverged into three manifestations: pacifist organizations constituting a
minority voice within mainstream Protestant institutions, individual Protestant
pacifists exercising a private religious option within a more broadly construed
religion of pacifism, and various ideas and practices that arose from
Protestant pacifism but were no longer associated with explicit professions of
Protestantism. Iconography and international-friendship practices crossed
boundaries between religious and secular institutions, but operated within a
distinctly Christian and, for the most part, mainline Protestant conceptual
framework. The material aspects of
whole-life material pacifism, on the other hand, were integral to the religion
of pacifism that emerged in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Instead of insisting that pacifism was a
requirement and result of true Christianity, these religious pacifists
emphasized a more broadly defined spiritual life and a general ethic of
love. This broad theology, however, was
in large measure Protestant-derived, and many Protestants participated in
groups that adopted it.
Pacifist
iconography
The Bible visualized.
Pacifists often cited biblical texts in support of their position; their
favorites were the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” (Ex 20:13, KJV), the
Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5-7), and the prophecy “They shall beat their swords
into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks” (Is 2:4 and Mic 4:3,
KJV). These texts, especially the
latter two, were translated into a variety of visual images. Many of these images appeared in “secular”
settings, a fact that indicates the wide reach and recognizability of biblical
allusions in the interwar period.
I will focus here on the image of swords and
plowshares, which lent itself particularly well to material uses.[5] It was probably the most common image in
posters, which made use of several associations audiences might have had with
plows. Plows could evoke peace, by
contrast with the instruments of war; productivity, because of their use in
food production; and rural life, farm work, and land.
For example, a 1919 broadsheet, reprinted
from the New York Tribune of Easter Sunday, 1919, urged people to join
the League of Free Nations Association “for the building of the New Kingdom”
(fig. 1). The center of the broadsheet
was filled with text. In the right
border was a standing Christ figure from whom rays of light emanated across the
printed text. Across the top of the sheet
were war scenes; down the left border spilled guns and swords as far as the
point where the rays of light crossed the page. Below that point were scythes, spading forks, and sickles, and
across the bottom of the page a man plowed a field with oxen.[6]
An Armistice Day poster from 1920, headed
“Let us have peace,” incorporated an array of symbols (fig. 2). Two men, one holding a book and one a hoe,
stood one on each side of a enthroned mother and child. The border behind them rose in a circular
shape suggestive of a halo. A dove
hovered overhead. In the background was
a city skyline, in the left foreground a pile of the implements of peacetime
progress, such as books and a telescope.[7] The right foreground was dominated by a
plow.[8]
An undated Methodist Peace Fellowship poster
interpreted the text somewhat more freely, but by quoting it at the top, the
poster made sure the audience could not miss the point. The image, in an industrial-art style,
showed a male worker at a set of factory controls. Implements of war flew into a hopper above him, and by some
unclear means, his machinery transformed them into wheelbarrows, teakettles,
furniture, etc. Below were scenes of
peacetime productivity: factories, farms, laboratories, houses.[9]
The image of swords and plowshares appeared
in the stained-glass windows of progressive churches built in the 1920s. The 1928 “peace window” of a Methodist
church depicted “a sower, a reaper, a child standing beside a cannon, and a blacksmith
beating swords into ploughshares.”[10] A window in Trinity Methodist Church,
Springfield, Massachusetts, was one of a series representing “The Final Triumph
of the Kingdom” (fig. 3). It showed a
blacksmith hammering a sword on an anvil, with a finished plowshare beside
it. The text said simply, “Peace.”
The uses of this image went far beyond the
two-dimensional, into drama, parade floats, statuary, and more.[11] A three-dimensional object attempted to make
associations with swords and plowshares even more timely than the Methodist
poster. Here, the “sword” was a World War I artillery shell, and the
“plowshare” was a table lamp (fig. 4).
The shell was the base of the lamp.
Around it ran a metal band inscribed with the Isaiah text. A fringed lace shade looked somewhat
incongruous, but perhaps made a point about embedding peace in everyday
domestic life.[12] 
Another three-dimensional rendition was
entirely literal: a plow made out of discarded swords. It predated the period covered in this
work—it was made for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, out of Civil War weapons—but was
resurrected in a different context in the 1930s. Zonia Baber, a professor of geography and a member of the Women’s
International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), made a project of
collecting and publicizing “peace symbols,” principally public monuments of
various kinds.[13] She assembled pictures and explanations of
these objects into books, traveling exhibits, and presentations, which
circulated in both religious and secular settings: “schools, churches,
conferences, or missionary societies.”
A photograph of the peace plow figured prominently in her productions.[14]
The “swords into plowshares” text continued
to generate images after the Second World War.
When the Community Church of New York, whose founding minister was the
well-known Unitarian pacifist John Haynes Holmes, constructed a new building in
the late 1950s, it included a statue of the prophet Isaiah “snapping a sword to
bits and holding up the broken pieces as he stands beside a ploughshare in the
fields.”[15] This piece accompanied existing statues of
other pacifist icons: St. Francis of Assisi and Mahatma Gandhi.[16]
Protestants, then, did not resist making
biblical texts into visual images and using the images for self-representation,
persuasion, and religious formation.
Since the images were not confined to institutional Protestant settings,
it is clear that their users expected them to be recognizable to “secular”
audiences. Verbal imagery from the
Bible became visual imagery in a largely Protestant world despite Protestant
resistance to images.
Extrabiblical narratives.
Pacifism also developed a set of narratives of its own. I have treated these elsewhere as “exempla,”
stories and anecdotes that were used to teach a lesson, make a point, or model
a way of acting. A number of them
generated visual images or had close associations with such images.
For example, both the story and the picture
of the “Christ of the Andes” circulated freely among educational, missionary,
and peace enterprises. The story
concerned the resolution of a boundary dispute between Chile and Argentina in
1902. Instead of going to war, the two
nations turned to Edward VII of the United Kingdom to mediate the dispute. Peace narratives emphasized the role of Christian
leadership and popular pressure in averting armed conflict and in the
subsequent decision to build a peace monument.
This monument was a statue of Christ standing
on a globe with his feet on a map of South America, his right hand gesturing
upward, his left holding a tall, narrow cross, like a processional cross. A plaque, added in 1937, showed the words of
a pledge made at the dedication of the statue: an English rendition is “These
mountains will crumble into dust before the people of Argentina and Chile break
the peace which at the feet of Christ, the Redeemer, they have given their word
to keep.” The bronze for the statue came from unused weapons—swords turned into
plowshares, so to speak. Pictures of
the statue appeared in exhibits, in “picture talks,” on postcards, and in
children’s books (fig. 5).[17]
Other narratives presented “heroes of
peace.” Initially, during the 1920s,
peace heroes were most often individualists who practiced moral equivalents of
war such as exploration, “conquest” of diseases, and scientific discovery.[18] The archetypal “peace hero” of the late
1920s was Charles Lindbergh, a popular public figure whom the burgeoning peace
movement adapted for its own purposes.
After his transatlantic flight in 1927, Lindbergh made international
“goodwill flights,” carrying messages of friendship among nations and
symbolically enacting international connection and communication. These themes of goodwill and international
friendship were compatible with 1920s pacifism. The ideals of technological progress and of the pioneering
individual—the “Lone Eagle,” as Lindbergh was nicknamed—were also appealing.
Trinity Methodist Church of Springfield,
Massachusetts, built in 1929, used the visual language of iconography to make
Lindbergh a modern saint (fig. 6).[19] The window depicted Lindbergh standing,
dressed in aviation clothing. The words
“Good Will” appeared on a banner behind his head. Circular insets in the two upper corners of the window showed,
respectively, a map of the world marked with latitude and longitude lines and a
flying airplane, which cast a shadow on the ground in the form of a cross. Allusions to the “Lone Eagle” appeared in
the stylized image of an eagle at the top center and in a biblical text, “They
shall mount up with wings as eagles” (Is 40:31, KJV). A rectangular inset beneath Lindbergh’s feet depicted the signing
of the Kellogg-Briand Pact in 1928.[20] Like the image of a saint, this image placed
the heroic figure in a network of associations: the Bible, the cross, the saint
as bearer of the cross, the multiple meanings of the eagle, the pacifist virtue
of good will, and anecdotes of Lindbergh’s life and accomplishments.[21]
In these images Protestants moved beyond the
Bible into a language of symbolism asociated with peace. References ranging from the “swords into
plowshares” text to the Kellogg-Briand pact were recognizable enough to form a
pacifist iconography.
International
friendship
The practices of “international friendship”
linked material culture with a broadly defined ideal of international
peace. Like peace iconography,
international-friendship practices crossed boundaries, not only between
“religious” and “secular” settings but between absolute pacifists and peace
workers of less certain commitment.
Advocates of international friendship thought that a friendly
appreciation of other societies would be conducive to peace. The way to cultivate this appreciation, they
maintained, was to study and practice the customs of other nations—to try on
their national costumes, sample their food, learn their folk songs and dances,
tell their favorite stories, and so on.
For children, these activities were often part of educational programs
in churches and schools. For youth
groups and adults, international-friendship practices—particularly folk songs
and dances—occurred at social events and in informal rituals as well as in
educational settings. “International
friendship” was a seedbed of the later connection between folklife and pacifism.
In education, the practices of international
friendship drew on earlier habits in missionary education. Missionaries visiting Sunday schools had
long shared the dress, food, and other customs of the countries where they
served. In the 1920s some Protestants,
especially women, began to draw connections between missions and peace: for
example, mission committees wrote peace curricula and supplied costumes for
“international friendship” lessons.[22]
One favorite enactment of
international-friendship, exchanging dolls in international dress, had been a
staple of missionary communications.[23] In 1927 the Committee for World Friendship
among Children, a Protestant peace effort whose advisory board included several
prominent pacifists, organized a shipment of dolls bearing “messages of peace”
to Japan.[24] This event lived a long time in pacifist
memory, and one peace-education text recounted the story of the “doll
messengers” alongside such pacifist icons as the Christ of the Andes narrative
and the work of the missionary and mystic Frank Laubach.[25] A similar use of dolls occurred at
Fellowship House, a pacifist-influenced interracial project in Philadelphia:
the project maintained a lending library of interracial and international dolls
for instructional purposes. Other
educators recommended dolls in international dress as suitable toys for
teaching peace.[26]
Gardens were another favorite representation
of international friendship. Zonia
Baber, the collector of “peace symbols,” described some twenty “peace gardens”
along the US-Canadian border.[27]
These were built after World War I in
commemoration of the Rush-Bagot agreement a hundred years earlier.[28] During the 1950s the Peace Garden project in
Lemont, Illinois, sought metaphorically to cultivate peace by growing seeds
from around the world. Its tireless
volunteer director, Mary Phillips, was a Methodist and a member of WILPF. She acquired seeds initially from Methodist
missionaries and later from individual citizens, with the aim of building
concrete connections between nations.[29] The Peace Gardens generated a particularly
noteworthy doll: a representation of Jane Addams, founder and icon of WILPF,
made from gourds. Together with half a
dozen smaller dolls representing children of various races, it was exhibited at
the Gourd Society of America in a display entitled “Gourds for World
Friendship.” The display’s peace
message was intellectual as well: two books were exhibited with the dolls. These were an early pacifist work, Addams’s Peace
and Bread in Time of War (1922), and a late one, Philip Noel-Baker’s The
Arms Race: A Programme for World Disarmament (1958).[30] Gardens and dolls, then, were not merely
exercises in sentimentality.
Peace
and business
The interwar peace movement was extensive
enough to make some connections with the business world. The advertising man Bruce Barton, author of
the Protestant bestseller The Man Nobody Knows, was particularly attuned
to the possibilities of material pacifism.
In his 1932 article “Let’s Advertise This Hell!”, Barton argued that
peace advocates should not rely only on reasoned persuasion to promote peace,
but should use more colorful advertising techniques in their posters and
slogans.[31] This proposal had far-reaching effects: the
publicity organization World Peaceways, founded in response to Barton’s
article, was one of the most influential of interwar peace organizations.[32]
I cannot resist noting another use of
pacifism in business, though it is only peripherally related to religious
pacifism. Warren Bowman, a Philadelphia
businessman, made surprising profits during the late 1930s from a product
called “Horrors of War Bubble Gum” (fig. 7).
Each piece of gum, which sold for one cent, came with picture card
depicting the “horrors of war”— mostly atrocities committed by the
Japanese. There was some suspicion that
older children bought the gum precisely for the gruesome pictures. The manufacturer insisted, however, that he
was trying to teach peace by “exposing the horrors of war,” and he claimed to
have received commendations from World Peaceways.[33] If nothing else, Bowman’s rationale for
producing Horrors of War Bubble Gum confirms that the ideal of peace carried
substantial weight with the public.
Material pacifism, then, moved beyond
iconography into objects that could be touched and handled, made and worn. The genres of iconography and international
friendship survive down to the present, though their content in some cases has
changed. Dorothy Day, not Charles Lindbergh,
is now the preeminent iconic figure of pacifism.[34] International-friendship practices were not
so different from the lessons in “multiculturalism” we now have. An outdoor sculpture in Hartford,
Connecticut, erected in 1993, uses a representation of swords and plowshares to
call gang members to lives of peace.[35]
But a different form of material pacifism
took precedence beginning in the late 1930s.
Pacifists began to develop personal, everyday forms of material
expression and to reflect intentionally on their ownership and use of material
things. The habit of careful examination
of conscience, already well established among pacifists, began at that time to
extend into the realm of the pacifist’s possessions and standard of living.
Whole-life
pacifism: Simplicity, poverty, and anticapitalism
Serious modernist Protestants typically
argued that true Christianity was not a set of doctrines but a “way of life,”
and after World War I many of them were persuaded that absolute pacifism was
part of that life. But it was not until
the late 1930s that pacifists developed a “way of life” that explicitly
incorporated bodily and material practices.
The most important of these practices were handwork, physical labor,
folk arts, and cooperative living, and their economic standard was simplicity
or frugality. Not all pacifists adopted
this “way of life” in all its aspects, but most took it for an ideal.
This phenomenon was not completely new, of
course; consider Muriel Lester’s cloak.
Pacifists believed that their historical models—Jesus and the disciples,
the early church, separatist Anabaptists, Franciscans—had practiced community
of goods and simple modes of living.
The eighteenth-century Quaker John Woolman had admonished his readers to
“try whether the seeds of war have any nourishment in these our possessions.”[36] Pacifist heroes Tolstoi and Gandhi had both,
at various times, admired peasant life and advocated rural
self-sufficiency.
Whole-life pacifism also had nearer
antecedents. During the 1920s and 1930s the pacifist press followed experiments
in cooperative economics, government and church-based rural aid, and
homesteading. Protestant activists
including Reinhold Niebuhr and pacifist Sherwood Eddy organized Delta
Cooperative Farm in 1936, and its neighbor Providence Farm in 1939, to assist
and teach struggling farmers in southern Mississippi. The American Friends Service Committee promoted homesteading for
displaced West Virginia coal miners in the early 1930s. Educational trends were also a factor. Some pacifists experimented with folk
schools, after the Danish model, which fostered traditional crafts for both
practical and ideological reasons: crafts honored survival skills and rural
self-sufficiency, and they signified resistance to the dehumanizing tendencies
of industrialism, both by preserving self-reliance and by allowing individual
variations in products. Similarly, the
progressive-education movement that followed John Dewey’s philosophy valued
individuality over uniformity. This
appreciation of individuality dovetailed with the modernist Protestant emphasis
on the value of “personality,” meaning individual uniqueness. A third factor in the emergence of
whole-life pacifism was the American tradition of high regard for the natural
world, a view that pacifists shared.[37]
In contrast to the Protestant-dominated
religious culture of interwar pacifism, whole-life pacifism took a step away
from mainline Protestantism. Although
many of the pacifists who participated in this movement were Protestants or had
come from Protestant backgrounds, they often subordinated their individual
confessional commitments to a broad theology that was meant to accommodate many
religious affiliations, or indeed none at all.
Yet this broad theology was in large measure derived from modernist
Protestant piety. It emphasized the
essential goodness of humanity, the loving nature of God, the possibility of
unmediated divine-human communication, the supreme value of love, and, of
course, the practice of religion as a “way of life” rather than a belief
system. Its ethical and practical
center was pacifism rather than Christ or the triune God.[38]
Richard Gregg and material culture. A catalyst of the whole-life pacifist
movement was the work of Richard B. Gregg.
Gregg, a convert to Quakerism from a Congregational minister’s family,
went to India in 1925 to study Gandhi and began in 1929 to interpret Gandhi’s
work to Americans. His most significant
book, The Power of Non-Violence (1934), described Gandhi’s
spiritually-based nonviolent political action in terms accessible to modernist
Protestants.[39] Its importance lay in the fact that it
offered American pacifists a way out of the apparent dichotomy between absolute
pacifism and political effectiveness—and it was only after pacifists absorbed
this message that “active nonviolence,” rather than opposition to war or
refusal to bear arms, became the litmus test of true pacifism.
Gregg followed The Power of Non-Violence
with several practical guides to the nonviolent way of life, two of which are
of particular interest here. The first
one, The Value of Voluntary Simplicity, was published by Pendle Hill, a
Quaker intentional community devoted to education.[40] Gregg defined simplicity as a harmonious
combination of inner singleness of purpose with removal of “exterior clutter,”
or material possessions beyond the necessities.[41] Advances in technology, he said, had
promised to make life simpler but had not in fact done so. Faster communication and transportation
meant only that people had to communicate more often and travel farther. The abundance of goods meant that they had
to work harder to acquire and maintain these material things. Moreover, the production of unnecessary
luxuries tended to exploit workers, who were treated as dispensable with every
change of fashion, and who were deprived of the moral satisfaction of producing
useful goods.
Citing Arnold Toynbee, Gregg argued that the
highest goal of civilization was not technological progress but
relationship. Simplicity—which for most
people meant reducing consumption—would move society toward this goal, he thought. Free of the preoccupation with material
goods, people who lived simply would be available to others, open to their
needs, and free to love them.
Simplicity thus accorded with the principal values of many
religions. In Christian terms, for
instance, the simple stored up treasure in heaven; in Buddhist terms, they
practiced detachment. Gregg also noted
that beauty was available without luxury, citing as an example the typical
Japanese house, in which beauty resided in proportion and arrangement.
Most significantly, Gregg wrote that
simplicity was integral to nonviolence.
Inequality of wealth, he argued, necessarily led to violence in the form
of police protection for the rich and envy on the part of the poor. The practitioner of nonviolence who lived
simply would have more credibility.
Simplicity also meant that he or she would be ready for anything: jail,
if necessary, or hospitality to the needy, or geographical mobility, or rapid
social change.
The second booklet, Training for
Peace, outlined in some forty pages the shape of pacifist culture for the
next two generations. “Like war,” Gregg wrote, nonviolence “requires training
and discipline.”[42] Under the dual threats of fascism and war,
Gregg and his readers expected to lie low and practice resistance in small,
intimate groups, which they later called “cells.” The groups would build moral and physical discipline and would
model and preserve a better way of life. Gregg laid out a pattern for building group solidarity which
is still familiar in pacifist circles: study, discussion, meditation, singing,
folk dancing, handcrafts, and physical labor.
Training recommended “manual work” of all kinds. Gregg devoted twelve of his forty pages to physical activities
based in folk and traditional practice.[43] While such activities should, he thought,
ideally serve the wider human community in some way, any kind of domestic or
local activity—sweeping, cooking, making beds, carrying coal—was desirable. “Men,” added Gregg severely, “should get
over the foolish idea that it is not fitting or is beneath their dignity to do
any of such things.” Manual work, he
wrote, would not only diffuse tension and restrain “mystical or sentimental”
tendencies, it would help pacifists develop a common “imagery” with the unemployed
and undereducated.[44]
The paradigm of manual work in Training
was knitting, presumably the functional equivalent for the United States of
Gandhi’s spinning. Knitting, said
Gregg, was practical, accessible, and morally pure. It produced one of the necessities of life, clothing, from
materials that were at least theoretically available outside the industrial
economy. Within the pacifist movement,
it would be a way for everyone to contribute—the elderly and disabled, women
caring for small children, children themselves. It would offer the gratification of reaching short-term goals in
a context where the long-term goals were out of reach. And it was portable and could be done
concurrently with mental activities such as discussion. “In the context of this movement,” said
Gregg, “spinning or knitting would be work for a better order of society.”
Gregg also argued that manual work would
have wider social benefits, particularly for the unemployed. It would provide tangible goods and increase
self-reliance and self-esteem, thus helping the unemployed help themselves.[45] “The spindle, knitting needle, loom, pick,
shovel, hoe and other hand tools are the creative pacifist’s substitute for the
soldier’s weapons,” wrote Gregg. In
other words, these tools were the equivalent of plowshares instead of swords.[46]
Material pacifism here moved a step away from
imagery and instruction to production of goods and rejection of industrial
systems. It also shifted its gaze from
international to interclass solidarity; it encouraged pacifists to identify
with the experience of other social classes as well as with citizens of other
nations.
Cooperatives. “Can it be said, ‘Rural life is the pacifist
pattern?’” asked the Rural Life Committee of the FOR in 1942. “Should a rural
culture be the foundation of pacifism?”[47] The idea of the cooperative farm as the
ideal mode of pacifist living caught fire quite suddenly around 1940, and
pacifist cooperatives, especially farms, proliferated over the next two years. A second wave of cooperative farming began
after the war and continued into the late 1950s. Yet there is no necessary, self-evident, or biblical connection
between milking goats, grinding one’s own wheat, and world peace. Why did pacifists make this connection?
First, cooperative living was the logical end
point of Protestant pacifist thought and action. It is not surprising that peacemaking as a “way of life” would
ultimately be thought to encompass livelihood, housing, food, family life, and
community. And Richard Gregg’s work
elevated the status of small communities, manual work, and folk arts to
pacifist essentials. It is only a short
step from practicing simplicity and manual labor in intimate groups to settling
on a communal farm.
Cooperative farming was also a concrete,
material way to avoid participating in a system—economic, political, and
social—that produced war. Despite
pacifists’ hopes, no large-scale system of cooperative economics emerged during
the 1930s, and after Stalin, communism no longer appeared to be a reasonable
alternative. The small cooperative or
commune and the individual homestead were virtually the only alternatives
left. Homesteading, wrote one pacifist,
“goes far to remove one from the errors of materialistic, exploitive
culture.” And it “makes it almost
possible to secede from the government, too.”[48] Ralph Templin of the School of Living in
Suffern, New York, justified linking pacifism with farming in this way: “‘Total
pacifism’ takes the soil as ‘radical’ (‘getting at the roots’),” he wrote. Farming was a way of “opposing centralized,
intrenched privilege with its violence.”
Cooperative farming involved the whole
person, necessarily and inescapably. It
was material by its very nature. To be
sure, most coops tried to attend to intellectual and spiritual life. And some succeeded, at least some of the
time. A member of Ahimsa Farm, one of
the first coops, wrote in 1940:
A day’s WORK AT THE FARM started at seven . .
. At eight, we each went to whatever work was to be done that day. As for my personal work, I was from time to
time, bookkeeper, electrician, baker, cook, ditch-digger, farmer—including
plow-jocky [sic], house-keeper, & plumber, besides the more
specialized but less obvious—educator. . . . After lunch, we spent time in reading,
writing, discussing, and planning. This
period was followed by preparing for dinner, feeding the chickens, and
finishing up odd jobs. The evenings were free for reading, discussing,
visiting, and going to meetings . . . [49]
Similarly, in 1952 a longtime pacifist and
communard described a balanced life. He
rose early, he wrote, to milk the cows.
Afterward, “Mary [had] breakfast ready . . . eggs that were laid
yesterday, toast from whole wheat bread that Mary baked, coffee, some honey
from Koinonia [another cooperative farm].”
He had managed to find time for playing the recorder with his wife and
for reading and writing in “the cool quiet of our open, stone-walled
home.” The community held biweekly
suppers “with singing and folk dancing.”
But such balance between the material and the
spiritual was more the exception than the rule. Few of the coops ever realized the economic self-sufficiency for
which they hoped. Many relied on
benefactors for land or cash. Lack of
skill often hampered their progress: the pacifists who joined them were seldom
experienced farmers. Most came from the
educated middle to upper class, not from farm families; they were more likely
to be Congregationalists than Mennonites.
Even those who learned the skills and persisted in the life found the
work never-ending:
But, you say, it’s the simple life for me. .
. . Does it sound simple to you to be able to wake up in the morning and think
that, besides getting in 4 or 8 or 10 hours at whatever your remunerative work
is, you really should, before you go to bed again, fix that flat tire,
fertilize the orchard, clean the chicken house, mow the weeds in the would-be
“patio,” burn rubbish, dig a new hole for cans, detick the dog, get at those
kitchen cupboards you scheduled to build month before last, stop putting off
building a swing for Johnny, and more and more and more?[50]
Whole-life pacifism, as it developed in the
form of rural cooperative living, was inescapably material; was indeed embedded
in material things. These things were
not consumer goods, however, but were signs of opposition to consumerism and
capitalism. They symbolized and
embodied self-reliance, traditional crafts, and interclass solidarity. Unlike pacifist iconography and
international-friendship items, the material aspects of whole-life pacifism did
not represent peace explicitly.
Instead, they signified it indirectly by enacting withdrawal from and
resistance to the systems that produced war.
Pacifist poverty. The
ideals of simplicity and anticapitalism persisted in pacifist life until the
beginning of the Vietnam era, and most probably beyond it. In an article in The Nation in 1960,
the journalist and radical pacifist Barbara Deming described the first time she
participated in active nonviolence, at Polaris Action in Groton,
Connecticut.
...[M]y first impression was vivid but
disheartening. An abandoned three-story
tenement had been rented for the occasion . . . The place had been furnished
hastily with rented folding chairs, three long tables, stove, icebox and enough
army cots for some (the rest slept on the floor). Water dropped from the ceiling . . . The first evening, as the
group sat about in discussion, a sudden crackling report brought us all to our
feet. I thought for a moment that a
bomb had been thrown in among us; but it turned out that a beam in the cellar
had just given way. Not long after, the
building was condemned.[51]
Deming went on to describe the
participants. First there were young
men in “dirty bluejeans and khakis.”
Later came women and families, of whom “none looked prosperous.” Deming soon realized that most of them were
practicing “voluntary poverty.” She
also showed the reader the incongruous source of much of this activity: “an
older man, gray-haired, mild and grave, dressed in a neat brown business suit .
. . This was Richard Gregg.”[52]
Deming made two points about these material
conditions. The first was explicit: the
protesters, she said, connected voluntary poverty with protest because poverty
gave them freedom to take risks, including the risk of imprisonment. Her second point was more subtle; she
suggested that material conditions were a social signal of membership in one
group and rejection of another. Deming
recounted an exchange between a reporter and a protester on the way to a ritual
trespass at the submarine base. The
reporter asked repeatedly about the possible effect of the marchers’ “sloppy
clothes” on public opinion. The
protester thought the reporter seemed inordinately worried about “middle-class
conventions.” “Why be nervous about it [one’s appearance]?” she asked.[53]
This mutual incomprehension suggests that
clothing was by this time a mark of pacifist identity. To be sure, it was anti-consumerist,
anti-capitalist clothing: plain, worn, and lacking the appearance of
prosperity. It was clothing that
conveyed a paradoxical lack of concern with clothing. Nevertheless, it constituted both a personal statement and a
signal to people of like mind: individuals did adopt this mode of dress and
sympathizers recognized its symbolic meaning, while outsiders were left in the
dark. Condemned housing and make-do
furnishings were probably becoming similar marks of identity.
Conclusions
Religious pacifism between World War I and
the Vietnam era had a distinctive vocabulary of visual and material
images. When this vocabulary was
developing, Christian pacifism was closely allied with modernist mainline
Protestantism. Pacifists did not so much
generate the visual and material vocabulary as select and assimilate imagery from
Protestant Christianity and from wider American culture. They also used media available in the wider
culture. Pacifist culture incorporated
narratives of heroes and saints, iconography, metaphors for peace, and
representations of other nations and peoples.
In the decade of the thirties—with the
depression, the rise of fascism, military aggression in Europe and
Asia—pacifists’ optimism was increasingly difficult to sustain. Progressive movements such as labor and socialism
refused to renounce violence; cooperative economics never took hold. Gandhi’s ideas and practices, as mediated by
Richard Gregg and others, provided the catalyst for a new set of pacifist
practices allied with a generalized theology and building on numerous
antecedents—social action, alternative economics, folk education—in earlier
Protestant pacifism. Material life was
integral to these practices. Pacifism
developed a material culture that embodied anticapitalism, privileged
traditional and rural cultures, fostered mutual support, and represented
interclass and international solidarity.
And what about Birkenstock sandals? Here my conclusions are somewhat
speculative, but perhaps they will stimulate further thought. To begin with, sandals of any kind evoke a range
of associations: with the hippies of the Vietnam era, with St. Francis, with
Jesus, with wandering and traveling, with simplicity. Birkenstocks seem to have primarily to do with “natural” health,
the urge to maintain and strengthen the body as given, rather than altering
it. To wear them signifies closeness to
nature, rejection of artificiality, and rejection of the standards of fashion,
with their overtones of corporate power and mass appeal.[54] In all these meanings Birkenstocks overlap
with pacifist values—including those associated with sandals in general.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Fig. 1. L F N A: Do You Want Peace?,
[1919]
Broadsheet, League of Free Nations
Association
Poster Collection, Swarthmore College Peace
Collection (SCPC)
Fig. 2.
Let Us Have Peace/Armistice Day
Poster, source unknown
SCPC Poster Collection
Fig. 3. Swords into plowshares peace window
Photograph by the author
Trinity Methodist Church, Springfield, Mass.
Fig. 4. Lamp made from World War I artillery
shell, with inscription: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and
their spears into pruning hooks,” 192?
Photographs by the author
Memorabilia, SCPC
Fig. 5. The Christ of the Andes
From an illustration in Florence Brewer
Boeckel, Through the Gateway (1926)
Fig. 6. Charles Lindbergh peace window
Photographs by the author
Trinity Methodist Church, Springfield, Mass.
Fig. 7. Horrors of War Bubble Gum wrapper,
1938 (photocopy)
Art in War and Peace, SCPC