David L. Hostetter The Anatomy of Truth 4/21/2017 The Anatomy of Truth: Speak Truth to Power,
Anatomy of Anti-Communism, and AFSC Strategy to Thaw the Cold War.
During the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union the American
Friends Service Committee (AFSC) gave voice to the vision of a peaceful relationship between the superpowers. The Service Committee asserted its programmatic witness for nuclear disarmament and against war through publications it produced in response to a world riven by clashing ideologies and alliances. Aiming to engage those in power while mobilizing citizen activism, AFSC publications contributed important ideas and arguments to the international debate. AFSC brought together activists and scholars who produced documents aimed at broadening the conversation about how to ameliorate the conflict.
Pamphlets such as Speak Truth to Power (1955) and Anatomy of Anticommunism
(1969) provided analysis and inspiration to grassroots activists striving to be heard.
Published more than a decade apart, the two pamphlets elicit three broad questions. How did the authors envision peacemaking for the nuclear age? What prompted the move from accepting containment to critical solidarity with liberation movements? Did their nonviolent approach influence the Cold War policy debate? Speak Truth and Anatomy represent three relationships connected to how AFSC confronted the Cold War.
Two all male committees developed policy analyses that reckoned with applying nonviolent means to international conflict in the nuclear age. Speak Truth and Anatomy reflect the move from a tacit acceptance of the containment of Communism to a stance more sympathetic to the ends of national liberation movements while not endorsing violent means used in prosecuting those struggles. The two pamphlets show the
1 David L. Hostetter The Anatomy of Truth 4/21/2017 evolution of the progressive era ideas of AFSC as some of its best thinkers tried to
translate that legacy for an era when activism drew more from existentialism than from
the Social Gospel. Through comparison of two key publications AFSC produced in
response to the Cold War, this paper will evaluate the unique evolution of a faith-based
nongovernmental organization’s attempts to shape public debate about the Cold War.
Three years prior to the publication Speak Truth, President-elect Dwight
Eisenhower explained that, in his view, “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply-felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is. With us, of course, it is the Judeo-Christian concept, but it must be a religion with (sic) all men are created equal.”1 Eisenhower, of Mennonite heritage and his Vice President Richard Nixon, of
Quaker background (Nixon’s uncle Oscar served with AFSC in France during World War
I) 2 governed during an era when the assumption that America’s Judeo-Christian
traditions provided spiritual protection against godless Communism held sway. In 1954
Congress had added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in response to lobbying by
the Knights of Columbus. 3 At the time of Speak Truth’s publication Friend Elton
Trueblood, served as Chief of Religious Policy for the United States Information Agency
and was profiled in a TIME Magazine article titled “Truth Salesman.”4
The threat of nuclear war gave new relevance to the nonviolent worldview of
pacifists who had lived through World War II. The public consensus that the Second
World War had been a just war and that pacifism had proved irrelevant in the fight
against fascism received some reconsideration under the threat of nuclear holocaust. The
charge of cowardice faced by conscientious objectors and war resisters in the face of
2 David L. Hostetter The Anatomy of Truth 4/21/2017 conventional war had changed because in a nuclear war, everyone faced being at the
front.
Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence appeared
at a moment when the role of faithful conscience intertwined with debate over Cold War
foreign policy and the threat of nuclear war. The fourteen men who met at Haverford
College in 1954, convened by AFSC’s Stephen Cary, brought a wealth of knowledge and
experience to their task. All members of the group had some association with Friends, several worked for the Service Committee. Senior members of the group included
AFSC’s Clarence Pickett and A.J. Muste, who had recently retired from the leadership of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
In addition to academic expertise, most were veteran activists. Robert Gilmore
served as executive director of the Manhattan office of AFSC. Amiya Chakravarty had
been an associate of Tagore and Gandhi in India. Milton Mayer and Robert Pickus were
Friends of Jewish heritage. Bayard Rustin, a gay African American Quaker who played a
pivotal role in the creation of Speak Truth, did not receive acknowledgement in the
published product, a result of pressure on Rustin and the committee to erase his
contribution due to fear that public reaction to his 1953 conviction for a morals charge
would jeopardize the project.5
Arranged in seven chapters, the product of the weeklong Haverford conclave
drew upon the insights of the contributors as well as the wisdom of John Woolman,
Lucretia Mott, the New Testament as well as contemporary thinkers including George
Orwell, Simone Weil, Albert Luthuli, Mohandas Gandhi, and Alan Paton. Truth
employed history, the social sciences and theology to make the case that if the US and the
3 David L. Hostetter The Anatomy of Truth 4/21/2017 USSR, in pursuit of geopolitical gain, could endanger the planet through nuclear war,
then it was more rational for the US to risk disarmament and nonviolent defense than
nuclear annihilation. Further, the pursuit of security through permanent military
mobilization was already corroding the democratic and spiritual values that US defense
strategy purported to protect.
Speak Truth is a statement of faith in the power of nonviolence, bolstered by
contemporary examples. Citing Gandhi’s application of nonviolence in the struggle for
independence in India as well as the 1952 Defiance Campaign against apartheid in South
Africa led by the African National Congress, Truth made the case that proven and
practical models already existed and deserved consideration in the planning of national
security. Marshaling arguments for the application of nonviolence to de-escalate the
superpowers confrontation, Truth called for activism on an individual and global scale,
underscored by Gandhi’s maxim that “The best politics is right action.”6
Speak Truth received wide distribution and comment. Published in the spring of
1955, the pamphlet appeared in abridged form in the October 1955 issue of The
Progressive magazine, with commentary and rejoinders from George Kennan, Reinhold
Niebuhr, Norman Thomas, Dwight MacDonald, and Karl Menninger. On the magazine’s cover the discussion is introduced as “Is There Another Way? A Memorable Debate on the Crisis of Our Time.” The editors described Speak Truth to Power as “the most significant symposium it has been our privilege to publish in many years.” Of the group only Menninger, the psychiatrist, fully endorsed the study’s recommendations. Kennan, while remaining a partisan of military preparedness, asserted that in his proposal for containment of the Soviet Union he had not thought of the policy has primarily military.7
4 David L. Hostetter The Anatomy of Truth 4/21/2017 Robert Pickus authored the summation of the 72 page original pamphlet, under
the title “A Revolutionary Approach in the Search for Peace,” into an eight-page article;
he and Steve Cary wrote the rejoinders to the replies of the contributors. Pickus had
served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner to the CIA, in Sweden
and England during WWII. Pickus studied nonviolence in India and did graduate work in
political science at the University of Chicago. He served as peace secretary with the
AFSC’s Chicago office. Pickus went on to initiate Acts for Peace with the hope that it
would inspire individuals to act as agents of change, and move beyond what had become
the conventional style of organizing peace-themed educational events. He contended that
pacifists should work “not at polarizing, but at permeating the society.”8
When a new wave of peace activism arose in the late 1950s, the Committee for a
Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) and Nonviolent Action Against Nuclear Weapons, which
became the Committee for Nonviolent Action (CNVA), emphasized demands on both the
US and USSR to take steps to end the nuclear arms race. In May 1960 Senator Thomas
Dodd (D-CT), then chair of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and an advocate of continued nuclear testing, subpoenaed the SANE leadership regarding allegations of
Communist infiltration of SANE chapters in New York. Dodd aimed to force SANE to be “openly inhospitable” to Communists. Conflict caused by Dodd’s investigation led to the resignation of key SANE board members including Robert Gilmore, Clarence Pickett, who had participate in the writing of Truth, and Stewart Meacham of the AFSC. The anticommunist political climate created by Congressional investigations and blacklisting of writers, actors and activists, had contained organizing for superpower arms reduction in the early Cold War years.9
5 David L. Hostetter The Anatomy of Truth 4/21/2017 It was in this context that Pickus helped initiate Turn Toward Peace in 1961. Its stated purpose was to be “a joint national effort of over 70 organizations working for a disarmed world under law, in which free societies can flourish.” Staff members included
Robert Pickus; initially, Norman Thomas chaired TTP. Subsequently Robert Gilmore held the post. In 1962 author Michael Harrington described TTP as “a politically responsible,” meaning anticommunist, peace movement for the 1960s. In February 1962 co-sponsorship of a series of student activities in Washington, DC, called Student Turn
Toward Peace, enabled TTP to influence the incipient student movement. The actions became famous when, while picketing the White House in blustery weather, the students received an urn of hot chocolate from President Kennedy.10
TTP was the grand peace movement coalition that was not to be. The AFSC
withdrew its support because of the rigid organizational structure imposed to prevent the
redbaiting treatment that SANE had suffered. Thus the effort became largely a
supplement to SANE rather than an independent network. In the wake of the 1963 Partial
Test Ban treaty, TTP mounted "Voluntary Organizations and World Without War"
conferences in various cities around the country. Disarmament activist Jerome Grossman
likened the muted discussions at the New York conclave to “a meeting of the Soviet
Peace Committee” because of the lack of criticism of the US government or the Johnson
Administration.11
The organizing strategy promoted by TTP did not survive the upsurge in
opposition to US intervention in Vietnam. In April of 1965, Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS) organized a large demonstration in Washington, DC, against the Vietnam
War. On the eve of the march Robert Gilmore, in alliance with Robert Pickus and
6 David L. Hostetter The Anatomy of Truth 4/21/2017 Bayard Rustin, issued a statement with the endorsement of other peace movement leaders
that criticized the policy of non-exclusion of pro-Viet Cong and Communist groups. The
statement, rooted in the anticommunism of TTP, aggravated the divide between student
organizers and their elders in the peace movement.12
In May of 1965 when war critics gathered for a teach-in at the University of
California in Berkeley, Robert Pickus participated as a critic of the new antiwar
movement more than an opponent of the war. He opposed immediate U.S. withdrawal
from Vietnam and rejected the more radical analysis presented by Quaker historian
Staughton Lynd and others as “so much pure crap.”13 Pickus used TTP to legitimize his
challenges to the antiwar movement, working to prevent endorsements by SANE of antiwar demonstrations like the March on the Pentagon in October 1967. Subsequently
Pickus reorganized the remnants of the TTP network into the World Without War
Council, while the broader peace movement rejected the cost of containment as shown by the human costs of the war in Vietnam.
In 1969 AFSC’s Peace Education Division published Anatomy of Anti-
Communism. The pamphlet appeared the year that Richard Nixon became President, during a period when AFSC had taken leadership in antiwar protests14 and helped to organize mass, nonviolent demonstrations. Authored by a committee of eight male academics and activists including Speak Truth contributors Milton Mayer and Jim
Bristol, the report elaborated a vision of American foreign policy that looked beyond the
Manichean dichotomy of the Cold War. The authors argued that reflexive anti- communism had led the US into the Vietnam debacle and allied America to repressive and undemocratic regimes around the world based solely on their opposition to
7 David L. Hostetter The Anatomy of Truth 4/21/2017 communism rather than whether they supported democracy and human rights. Anatomy
moved beyond the tacit acceptance of containment advanced in Truth.
The 138 page report asserted that “the need now is not to ‘stop Communism’—or to go on trying in vain to do so by military means—but to see the good in it as well as the bad and to see the failures of capitalism, even of enlightened capitalism, as we now see the good.”15 Calling for the US to provide credible moral leadership to match its
economic and military prowess, Anatomy declared that: “If the denial of individual
liberty, which we profess so disturbs us about Communist government, is really a
concern of ours, then we should show a similar concern when non-Communist
governments reveal a lack of sensitivity toward those who differ politically or racially
from those in power.” The report advocated bringing “economic pressure” to bear on
“repressive nations to move them toward greater freedom.”16 Reiterating the call of the
African National Congress (ANC) and the global movement against apartheid, the AFSC
authors called for economic sanctions against South Africa in order to “avert what can
become the greatest African tragedy of our time.”17
In the tumultuous years between 1955 and 1969, the peace witness of the Service
Committee evolved with the changing circumstances of the Cold War. Critic of AFSC
Guenter Lewy has argued that in this period AFSC joined the New Left.18 Given that we
are here celebrating the centennial of AFSC, not the 55th anniversary of the founding of
Students for a Democratic Society, it might now be said that AFSC helped channel some of the New Left’s vibrant energy into work for peace and social change. AFSC’s role as what sociologist Aldon Morris described as “movement halfway house,” 19 training
8 David L. Hostetter The Anatomy of Truth 4/21/2017 activists and providing the tools necessary to sustain campaigns for social change, including accessible analyses of the threat of war and the things that might make for peace.
The phrase “Speak Truth to Power” has morphed into a meme. Derived from
Quaker history and deployed by Bayard Rustin, whose name was restored to the document by AFSC in 2012, its origins are unknown to most who employ it today. Its broad usage is similar to the now ubiquitous peace symbol that dates to the same era.
This influence on political culture suggests that, despite the continued reliance on militarism in foreign relations, nonviolent activism, as Robert Pickus might have said, can permeate the politics in positive ways.
Prompted by the threat of nuclear extinction and engagement with struggles against military intervention, AFSC adapted its progressive era social gospel stance to the existentialist anxiety of the nuclear age. In an era when books such as The Other
America, Silent Spring, The Feminine Mystique, and My Lai 4 spurred public debate and policy reform, AFSC’s Speak Truth to Power and Anatomy of Anti-Communism shaped education and action for peace. Arguing that war in the nuclear age was both practically and morally obsolete, AFSC reconfigured the case for pacifism for the era of superpower conflict by promoting peace through nonviolence as a way to thaw the Cold War.
9 David L. Hostetter The Anatomy of Truth 4/21/2017 ENDNOTES
1 Patrick Henry. "And I Don't Care What It Is": The Tradition-History Of A Civil Religion Proof- Text," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, March 1981, Vol. 49, Issue 1, pp. 35-47.
2 Nixon, Richard Milhous. The Memoirs of Richard Nixon. New York: Warner Books, 1979, p. 33.
3 Jeffrey Owen Jones. The Pledge: A History of the Pledge of Allegiance. New York, NY: Thomas Dunne Books, 2010.
4 “Truth Salesman,” TIME, March 15, 1954.
5 Wendy Chmielewski, “Speak Truth to Power: Religion, Race and Sexuality, and Politics During the Cold War.” Paper presented to Peace Movements in the Cold War and Beyond: An International Conference at the London School of Economics, February 1-2, 2008.
6 Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence; A Study of International Conflict. (Philadelphia: American Friends Service Committee), 1955.
7 “Speak Truth to Power.” The Progressive, October 1955, p. 3-23.
8 Charles DeBenedetti and Charles Chatfield. An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam era. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press), 1990.
9 Katz, Milton S. Ban the Bomb: a History of SANE, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, 1957-1985. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986.
10 Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left. (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1993), 197.
11 Grossman, Jerome. "The Peace 'Crowd"." The Nation, October 20, 1963, 66-68.
12 DeBenedetti, Ordeal, 111.
13 DeBenedetti, Ordeal, 116.
14 Guenter Lewy, Peace and Revolution: The Moral Crisis of American Pacifism (Grand Rapids (Mich.): Eerdmans, 1988). Chapter 2 is titled “The American Friends Service Committee Joins the New Left.”
15 American Friends Service Committee, Anatomy of Anti-Communism (New York: Hill and Wang, 1969), vi.
16 AFSC, Anatomy of Anti-Communism, 126.
17 AFSC, Anatomy of Anti-Communism, 126.
10 David L. Hostetter The Anatomy of Truth 4/21/2017
18 Guenter Lewy, Peace and Revolution: The Moral Crisis of American Pacifism (Grand Rapids (Mich.): Eerdmans, 1988). Chapter 2 is titled “The American Friends Service Committee Joins the New Left.”
19 Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: The Free Press, 1984), 138.
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