Bk Gandhi Peace Awards

In Gandhi’s Footsteps: The Gandhi Peace Awards 1960-1996 by James Van Pelt for PROMOTING ENDURING PEACE 112 BEACH AVENUE • WOODMONT CT 06460 2 IN GANDHI’S FOOTSTEPS: THE GANDHI PEACE AWARDS Promoting Enduring Peace Gandhi Peace Award Recipients 1960-1996 Introduction Chapter Year Award Recipient Page 1 1960 Eleanor Roosevelt 1960 Edwin T. Dahlberg 2 1961 Maurice N. Eisendrath 1961 John Haynes Holmes 3 1962 Linus C. Pauling 1962 James Paul Warburg 4 1963 E. Stanley Jones 5 1965-66 A.J. Muste 6 1967 Norman Thomas 7 1967 William Sloane Coffin, Jr. 1967 Jerome Davis 8 1968 Benjamin Spock 9 1970 Wayne Morse 1970 Willard Uphaus 10 1971-72 U Thant 11 1973 Daniel Berrigan RE- SIGNED 12 1974-75 Dorothy Day 13 1975-76 Daniel Ellsberg 14 1977-78 Peter Benenson Martin Ennals 15 1979 Roland Bainton 16 1980 Helen Caldicott 17 1981 Corliss Lamont 18 1982 Randall Forsberg 19 1983-84 Robert Jay Lifton 20 1984 Kay Camp 21 1985-86 Bernard Lown 22 1986-87 John Somerville 23 1988-89 César Chávez 24 1989-90 Marian Wright Edelman 25 1991 George S. McGovern 26 1992 Ramsey Clark 27 1993 Lucius Walker, Jr. 28 1994 Roy Bourgeois 29 1995 Edith Ballantyne 30 1996 New Haven/León Sister City Project 31 1997 Howard & Alice Frazier Conclusion Note: A listing of dual years (e.g. 1988-89) indicates that the decision to present the Award to the recipient was made in one year, with the Award actually being presented the following year. 4 IN GANDHI’S FOOTSTEPS: THE GANDHI PEACE AWARDS Introduction he Gandhi Peace Award: it is a certificate, calligraphed with an inscription T summing up the work for peace of a distinguished citizen of the world. It is a medallion featuring the profile of Mohandas Kaharamchand Gandhi, with his words “Love Ever Suffers / Never Revenges Itself” cast in bronze. It is a name plate on a weighty carved statue of the Mahatma. It is a ceremony held approximately once a year, at which a distinguished peacemaker is recognized and given the opportunity to present a message of challenge and hope. It is to be awarded annually “for contribu- tions made in the promoting of international peace and good will.” It has been received by the likes of El- eanor Roosevelt, Benjamin Spock, and César Chávez. Martin Luther King, Jr., was chosen but had to pass when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace a few months later. Three other times the Nobel Committee seemed to follow P.E.P.’s lead, Mohandas K. “Mahatma” Gandhi choosing to bestow the Peace Prize on someone who just a few months before had won the Gandhi Peace Award: Linus Pau- ling, Peter Benenson, and Bernard Lown. Daniel Berrigan first accepted then angrily refused it. Pete Seeger politely declined, suggesting that P.E.P. give the Award to someone equally deserving but less thoroughly “awarded”. U Thant politely accepted, after having turned down the Nobel Peace Prize a few years before. ii IN GANDHI’S FOOTSTEPS: THE GANDHI PEACE AWARDS In preparing this account I have been struck by my own ignorance, despite decades of peace work, about many of the outstanding personages who have received the Award. Even those I had heard of I found I knew little about in terms of their specific accomplishments and their particular strategies for peacemaking. In checking around, I was flabbergasted to find that very many of my friends, intelligent and well-read, knew virtually nothing about most of the recipients. I know that there are biographies about many of them, but they are rarely read, at least in my encounters at the local libraries. There are some other surveys of peacemakers, such as Peter Rinaldo’s Trying to Change the World and Elizabeth Anne McGuinness’s People Waging Peace, which are somewhat arbitrary selections of leading activists from a variety of fields. This book is unique in being a survey of peacemakers selected not by me, but by peace activists contemporary with them, over the greater part of the history of the Cold War and beyond, representing an amazingly complete range of the varieties that peace activism has taken. In a sense it counters the usual TIME “Man of the Year” treatment of recent histor- ical personages, which so frequently ignores great peacemakers. (In the midst of the phe- nomenal Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign in 1982, TIME chose for its “Man of the Year” not Freeze originator Randall Forsberg but the personal computer!) Take a look at the schedule for the popular cable television network, The History Channel. What constitutes history? The schedule has the common answer: wars, bat- tles, weapons, soldiers, and wartime leaders compose at least three-quarters of the programs offered—a reasonable guide to the impression today’s television-oriented youth is gathering. But that is the “yang” of history, when humanity’s worst instincts drive us toward destruction. The “yin” without which history would be overwhelmed in conflagration is the untold story—the years of patient, thoughtful, unwavering struggles to “give peace a chance”. The stories that follow are the stories of the best of humanity—the people who, in a better world, would have our authority and trust. It is time we learn to recognize them, and perhaps as well to become them. James Van Pelt October 1996 Chapter One 1960: Beginning a P.E.P. Tradition— Eleanor Roosevelt & Edwin Dahlberg Like all of the perennial activities of Promoting Enduring Peace (P.E.P.), the Gan- dhi Peace Award was conceived by the organization’s founder, Jerome Davis, possi- bly as early as the late nineteen forties. At the Board of Directors meeting on March 13, 1959, he formally proposed that a yearly award be given to persons outstanding in their work for world peace. In his view, the recipient need not be a pacifist. Each recipient’s name would be inscribed on a permanent trophy and each would receive a cita- tion. The Board approved the idea. At the next meeting that year, on September 24, Board member Rabbi Eugene J. Lipman volunteered to secure a suitable trophy for what would be known as the Gan- dhi Peace Award, an offer that was accepted “with deep gratitude.” Dr. Davis, as Ex- ecutive Director, ordered a stock of one hundred heavy bronze medallions to be presented to the recipients. Dr. Davis was known to be an unusually parsimonious person, who would rather tear two sheets of paper together than consume a paper clip; the size of his medallion order expressed his faith in the continuity of his organization and the Award—and undoubtedly took advantage of quantity pricing. Rabbi Lipman commissioned a famous New York sculptor named Don Benaron— who later used his given name, Don Katz—to create a work of art to serve as the sym- bol of the Award. Mr. Katz researched Gandhi at the library of India House in New York City and by 1960 had carved a striking portrait of the founder of the century’s international movement for non-violent change. In 1985 he wrote, “I have been won- dering what became of the statue. I was delighted to learn that it was in good condi- tion and being used for a good cause. … I think the wood used is mahogany. I carved the Gujarati word for peace on one side, and on the other a symbolic plowshare and pruninghook—inspired by Isaiah 2:4”: They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. 2 IN GANDHI’S FOOTSTEPS: THE GANDHI PEACE AWARDS The Board nominated four well-known figures in connection with world peace: Dr. Edwin T. Dahlberg, Frederick Nolde, Eleanor Roosevelt, and James Paul War- burg. After some discussion, they selected the first two recipients of what was intended to be a new award of international significance: Eleanor Roosevelt and Edwin Dahl- berg. Both were residents of New York City, then the center of much of P.E.P.’s pub- lic activities, so their attendance at an awards presentation posed no problems of travel. It was the end of the Eisenhower era, a time when a forthright stand for international peace might mean a brand of disloyalty. The first presentation of the Award was scheduled to be made at the height of the Kennedy-Nixon Presidential campaign, which would define the onset of the new decade. The atmosphere would be charged with politics, with the sense of new possibilities attendant to the beginning of a new decade, and with the hope that the new President might be more representative of the liberal values shared by most of the individuals whose names were listed as the na- tional Board on the stationery of Promoting Enduring Peace. Eleanor Roosevelt The better-known of the two initial recipients of the Award was one of the most prominent liberal Democratic leaders of the century: Eleanor Roosevelt, niece of one President and wife of another. By 1960, two years before her death at age 78, Mrs. Roosevelt had accomplished far more than most men of any rank or time. Even before her marriage to Franklin in 1905 she had been a dynamic social activist. Prior to be- coming First Lady in 1932 she had raised five children, saved her husband from politi- cal oblivion after he was stricken with polio in 1921, continued her work for social bet- terment through numerous organizations, became a major influence in New York democratic politics, and served as Franklin’s Eleanor Roosevelt 1960 • ELEANOR ROOSEVELT & EDWIN DAHLBERG 3 very active partner during his terms as state assemblyman and Governor of New York.

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