QUAKER YOUTH INCARCERATED: ABANDONED PACIFIST DOCTRINES OF THE OHIO VALLEY FRIENDS DURING WORLD WAR II A Dissertation Presented to The Graduate Faculty of The University of Akron In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Peter S. Guiler August 2011 QUAKER YOUTH INCARCERATED: ABANDONED PACIFIST DOCTRINES OF THE OHIO VALLEY FRIENDS DURING WORLD WAR II Peter S. Guiler Dissertation Approved: Accepted: _______________________________ _____________________________ Advisor Department Chair Dr. Walter Hixson Dr. Michael M. Sheng _______________________________ ______________________________ Co-Advisor/Committee Member Dean of College Dr. Kenneth Bindas Dr. Chand Midha ______________________________ ______________________________ Committee Member Dean of Graduate School Dr. Kathryn Feltey Dr. George R. Newkome ______________________________ ______________________________ Committee Member Date Dr. Kevin Kern ______________________________ Committee Member Dr. Elizabeth Mancke ii ABSTRACT Religious groups use strong doctrinal markers to ensure and maintain their integrity and more importantly, their identity. The Ohio Valley Friends counted themselves among the traditional pacifist denominations throughout the United States in the twentieth century. With the onset of World War II, they dutifully followed this doctrine of pacifism incarcerating their youth in their own sponsored conscientious objector camp in Coshocton, Ohio. Driven by this central tenet of pacifism, through an ageist struggle to maintain identity, the Friends lost both their identity and their youth. Within two years of the entrance of the United States into the war, a sudden shift in the Ohio Valley Friend’s collective affirmations caused them to try to abandon the camp’s sponsorship, and patriotically support the U.S. militarist goal of victory. Their monthly newsletters and actions showed no changes in their theology nor radical reordering of their allegiance to their supernatural God, but rather the embrace of this same God, co- opted into a newly founded nationalist civil religion. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER Page I. THE FALL OF THE OHIO VALLEY FRIENDS’ PACIFISM TO U.S. CIVIL RELIGION DURING WORLD WAR II…………………………………….1 II. THE QUAKERS 300 YEARS OF PACIFIST HERITAGE ………………………...21 III. THE OHIO YEARLY MEETING: A PEOPLE OF SEVENTEENTH CENTURY ENGLAND LIVING IN THE UNITED STATES DURING 1812 –1939 .…………….51 IV. THE MAKING OF AMERICAN FRIENDS SERVICE COMMITTEE CAMP COSHOCTON IN OHIO, 1942-1943……………………………………..…………….78 V. THE INGRAINING OF FRIENDS’ PACIFISM IN CAMP COSHOCTON, 1942- 1944 ……………………………………….…………..124 VI. THE OHIO YEARLY MEETINGS’ ABANDONMENT OF PACIFISM IN W.W.II, 1944-1946…………………………………………....……….157 VII. THE COLLAPSE OF PACIFISM IN CAMP COSHOCTON, 1944 -1945………201 VIII. CONCLUSION …………………………………………………………………..234 BIBLIOGRAPHY ……………………………………………………………………...236 APPENDIX……………………………………………………………………………..260 iv CHAPTER I THE FALL OF THE OHIO VALLEY FRIEND’S PACIFISM TO U.S. CIVIL RELIGION DURING WORLD WAR II In April 1946, a remnant group of twenty-six incarcerated conscientious objectors left a remote converted Civilian Conservation Corps camp in the low hills of southeastern Ohio. The United States’ Selective Service Administration (SSA) counted them among the millions of demobilized soldiers returning from World War II, from which a newly dominant United States had emerged as victor. The SSA released them, after having entered into a partnership years before with a Christian religious group called the Friends. This liberated remnant of conscientious objector (CO) camp internees stood as a stark testimony to the over 300 incarcerated youth placed in the camp at the behest of their parents and their nation. They left not only their years of youth behind them, but also any identity the Friends had once held as pacifists. The twenty-six men, no longer youth, had been overwhelmed in the wave of an aggressive national foreign policy cloaked in civil religion. Concurrently, the Friends themselves had been overcome by an emerging theistic nationalism that forged a new identity linking the United States of America and God as one. In this new conceptualization, God had granted the safety and victory of the people of the United States in World War II. The same God that rebelling 1 colonists had evoked 150 years earlier as the “Providence” in their Declaration of Independence had granted present-day United States triumphant victory over fascism. This same God of the United States, the one who had given this stunning victory, consequently replaced the Friends’ previous pacifist mentor – Jesus Christ the Prince of Peace. The Friends’ pacifist identity dissolved into nationalism. The Friends had a separate identity throughout their time in the Americas. Having lived through 300 years of episodic persecution and marginalization since their founding in England, the Friends, or “Quakers,” as they were widely known, had developed a series of bulwarks and strategies to maintain their “peculiar” identity.1 Arriving in the Americas in the seventeenth century, they quickly rose to prominence both politically and economically. Their reputation for honest business dealings in early eighteenth-century Philadelphia equaled their ardent pacifist stance. Though trusted by First Nation peoples, this pacifism led to their radical estrangement from much of the American populace, one that thrived on continuous violent aggression in foreign and domestic relations.2 Rebuffed for their failure to join in a series of French and Indian wars, reviled for excusing themselves from the Revolutionary War, maligned for their lack of military support in the Civil War, and incarcerated and tortured for lack of patriotic zeal in World War I, the Friends as a group developed a set of strategies for dealing with their hostile fellow citizens. As the United States in tandem with Europe prepared for World War II, the Friends sought to isolate their own youth in an effort to preserve their pacifist identity. This effort included incarcerating them in complicity with the United States government. Occupying, administering, and maintaining one of the many American Friends Service 2 Committee (AFSC) conscientious objector (CO) camps of 1941, they sought in Coshocton, Ohio, to save their youth and preserve their identity as a pacifist people of God. By 1943, in the heat of U.S. wartime patriotism, they exhausted this zeal for their pacifism, asking the SSA to be relieved of the camp, as they collapsed into deference to the new nationalism intensified by global war. In the minds of a vocal number of Friends, the U.S. involvement in a world war had changed them from a pacifist abhorrence to a war to support an endeavor solidly for God and by God. Who were the Ohio Valley Friends to dare say otherwise? In 1946, three delayed years later, their youth left the CO camps of the SSA. This event in a small town in Ohio played across a huge landscape of foreign policies, domestic policies, questions of who truly was “of God” and religious debates over Jesus and pacifism. The event also raises some historical questions. Why did the Ohio Valley Friends abdicate their central pacifist tenet so soon into World War II, bowing to the nationalist zeal of violent foreign policy? Why in their quest for societal identity were they willing to sacrifice their own youth? How can historians explain religious motivation as a cultural and social activity without lapsing into opaque denigration, contempt, and dismissal? For the historian, this seemingly remote event, repeated throughout the war years in multiple other CO camps on U.S. soil offers an intriguing yet difficult challenge. Camp Fresno in Coshocton offers the historian the dilemma of acknowledging that two mighty mind-sets - religion and nationalism - came to an impasse within these minimally secured camp perimeters. An almost 300-year-old tradition of pacifism, undergirded by the undeterred belief in the supernatural, came to direct loggerheads with an newly 3 forming tradition of militarism and nationalism, manifested through foreign policy, and nurtured by an emerging national U.S. identity as a World Power, a new national identity shedding its shell of non-intervention and Great Depression paralysis. How could a group, with such a heritage and tradition of religious fervor, succumb to such an infidelity to their central tenets and doctrines? How could 300 years of established and endured separateness melt away in just two years of the twentieth century? It is the premise of this study that the dissolution of resolve for pacifism in the Ohio Valley Friends stemmed from the overwhelming force of a competing nationalism. Propelled by their ageist obsession with their youth and their perceived relocation of God, the Friends would re-align their identity with the nationalist Civil Religion of the United States. This American construct of Civil Religion as it found expression in the twentieth century offered a crucial bridge for the Friends’ transition and adaption to a growing national identity. For the Ohio Valley Friends, national identity would trump religious identity. The pertinence of such an investigation is not lost today. Two major U.S. foreign wars have transpired in the past decade, both undergirded with the strong backing of religious fervor. Yellow ribbons abound calling for troop-directed prayer and omnipresent beseeching of “God Bless America.” Mainline denominations and independent denominations embrace a U.S. foreign policy