Quakers Prefer Lies

WHEN QUAKERS PREFER LIES

All too frequently I have listened to Quakers who speak during silent worship, who tend to personalize “their” truth, declaring this or that to amount to “my truth.” This tendency troubles me, because their remarks seem to amount to locating objectivity within the realm of their subjectivity. That is to say, such personalizations of the truth seem to me to amount to declarations that the matters of which we can be the most certain are the things that are closest to our hearts and spirits and souls. My own take on the matter is more or less the opposite of this. People do not lie to others with anywhere near the frequency with which they feel compelled to lie to themselves! In reality, the matters that are the closest to our being are the matters in regard to which we are most likely, not the least likely, to be deceived — or self-deceived. These subjective self-evaluations tend to be the matters in which we are deprived of any objectivity at all. I also listen as too many Quakers attempt to “Balkanize” the truth, by issuing statements that amount to descriptions of “our” truth. These seem to me to be nothing more than exercises in groupthink, and as such, they seem inherently dangerous. Many Quakers are trivializing the truth by characterizing the attitudes of others as “your truth,” or problematizing it with posers such as: “whose truth?” — and that gets the situation precisely backward. Ever since its inception during the English Civil War, Quakerism has been sponsoring a subjective attitude of “me in direct communication with my God.” Historically, this began as our way of reacting against the established English church’s theological declarations and credos. However, reacting against someone else’s error does not amount to the same thing as overcoming one’s own error! Bearing this history in mind, we can see that what is happening now (as of the year 2019) isn’t at all President Donald John Trump’s fault. Liar though he is, he didn’t originate any of this lying. We ourselves, we Quakers, were pulling such stunts long before any American president came along to define the truth, in his shamelessness, as merely whatever he finds it useful for him to tweet. This amounts to the sin of pridefulness. Now, it seems to me, we Quakers have a special responsibility to end such madness — for after all wasn’t it us who so long ago pioneered this? A title to this present writing, “Quakers are Liars,” sic, was suggested to me by a hostile Quaker historian affiliated with a well-regarded Friends school in Washington DC. This person had for months been avoiding my emails and phone-calls but, finally, I had managed to get him inadvertently to pick up while he was distracted by commuting. When he found that it was me who was on the line, he commented about my efforts to obtain historical objectivity “You’re the one who is calling Quakers liars.” Having announced who I was and what I amounted to, he proceeded to offer me a pack of lies during which his telephone reception kept getting worse and worse, evidently by putting his smart-phone on the seat and covering it with a coat, and then speaking more and more softly and HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES unintelligibly, while I pleaded with him to telephone me or email me, until finally he terminated this pretense by announcing that he was going through a highway tunnel (of which there are none in the District of Columbia area), while hanging up on me. I thought, well, if he is going to characterize efforts to obtain historical objectivity as “calling Quakers liars,” then his only agenda was to get me to play the role of the nasty man, “the one who is calling Quakers liars.” So I decided not to agree to play that game. I decided to give this writing the somewhat less confrontational title “When Quakers prefer Lies,” and provide this internet URL file with the label “RichardNixonAndOtherQuakerLiars.pdf”.

This title “When Quakers prefer Lies” allows us to be aware not only that not all liars are Quakers:

purple = Quakers blue = liars = Donald Trump

But also, this title “When Quakers prefer Lies” allows for the HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS fact that that not all Quakers are liars:

purple = Quakers blue = liars

= Austin Meredith, yours truly

This title “When Quakers prefer Lies” also allows for the fact that although not all Quakers are liars, some Quakers must HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES indeed to be described in that manner:

purple = Quakers blue = liars

= Friend Richard Nixon

Also, this title “When Quakers prefer Lies” allows for the fact that what passes popularly for Quaker History does happen for HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS some strange reason to be riddled with self-serving falsehoods:

purple = Quakers blue = liars

= self-serving falsehoods

This URL file “RichardNixonAndOtherQuakerLiars.pdf” consists of a chronological list of various of these self-serving falsehoods that Quakers have been telling themselves —and eagerly telling anyone else who will listen– about their past trajectory.

Τί ἐστιν ἀλήθεια? During my childhood in Indiana I attended a Chautauqua in the local park one night, one that featured a hypnotism act. The stage mesmerist hypnotized a couple and told the husband his wife was a chicken that needed to be prepared for supper. He then handed the husband a pillow declaring that it was a hatchet, and we children all howled with delight as this husband chased his wife around the platform, whopping her over the head with the pillow. It would have been a foolish mesmerist, however, who would have handed an actually hypnotized husband an actual hatchet, instead of this being perhaps merely an amusing stage act — because then there might well have been blood all over that platform, real blood. In this real world, fake facts have awfully real consequences. Craziness abounds: a husband who actually supposed his wife to be a chicken might actually have attempted to prepare her for supper. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES As Henry David Thoreau wrote in his conclusion to WALDEN,

WALDEN: No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well. For the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out. In sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that is.

THE QUAKER TESTIMONY OF OBJECTIVITY The moral I draw here is very broad and consequential: that having good intentions is simply not sufficient to enable one to fulfill ones duties as a decent person leading a decent life; that there is in fact no way for us to become and remain decent and moral people in this real world around us unless we know –know correctly– a broad category of actually true things about the nature of this very real world in which we actually do live; that we need to be savvy enough to refuse to credit various preposterous stories that would mislead us, about the nature of this actual world we actually do live in.

For instance, when our nation went to war in Iraq we were willing to do so because we credited some lies we had been told by our President George W. Bush and his cadre of liars ensconced in a special office in the Pentagon building, about Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction. Do you remember the following quote? — “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality —judiciously, as you will— we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” Look what has happened because of a collection of Fake Facts!

We know that one of the things that had enabled the Holocaust, in central Europe during World War II, was that there had been a massive long-term campaign under Adolf Hitler to portray the Jews as “vermin.” Hitler and the Nazis had found the simple slogan they repeated again and again to discredit accurate reports: “Lügenpresse.” Today the extreme right in Germany has revived this term, and also, it has been revived in the English language, by President Trump, as “fake news.” Now, one might reasonably offer, the Nazis may have been evil but they were surely not stupid, they were in fact aware that Jews were in every sense fellow human beings — that they were not in any sense a different species, a rodent species say or an insect species. One might aver that the Nazis were well aware that the metaphor they were so carefully deploying, “vermin,” was a mere metaphor, metaphors being something of which we know to handle with care. That could be alleged! However, I would maintain that making long-term and pervasive use of such a metaphor blurred a boundary, enabling the anti-Semites to deal with Jews in the same way we deal with bothersome rodents or insect pests — with an application of Zyklon- B pesticide gas. This is what happened, we cannot avoid that this is what in fact happened to the world’s eternal shame.

I had an opportunity to teach a Sophomore class Introduction to Ethics 201 in 1959, in Mezes Hall at the University of Texas, for an occasion on which the faculty professor was otherwise distracted. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS

What I quickly discerned was that the students in the class divided into two distinctly different groups. One group of the students was using this class

A.) in order to study how to persuade themselves to live lives of decency and honor,

whereas the other group was using this class in a different manner,

B.) in order to study how to fabricate facile justifications for whatever it was that they wanted or needed to do in order to make their lives work satisfactorily for themselves. The motto of this other group seemed to me to amount to something like: “Ethics isn’t just for losers!”

These two groups of students had nothing whatever in common other than that they both happened to be seated in the same room of Mezes Hall during the same class hour. The one group was studying Ethics 201 while the other group was studying Opportunism 201.

I also observed, during our class’s hour on the Kantian Categorical Imperative (kategorischer Imperativ) “Act on maxims which can at the same time have for their object themselves as universal laws of nature,” that these TxU sophomores studying Opportunism 201 seemed quite competent to create their own sets of Fake Facts, whereby they would be empowered to permute the ethical teachings of Immanuel Kant in any manner that would tend to facilitate their own life (it would not be until several years later, 1961, that I would become educated, courtesy of a trial in Israel, in how easy it had been for Adolf Eichmann to permute the Categorical Imperative by the deployment of the fake absolute categories of Nazi Germany totalitarianism, in such manner as to legitimate that regime’s destruction of International Jewry — this faceless bureaucrat asshole had been competent to dream up dozens of Fake Facts while standing on his head and stacking BBs).

There is a thingie that is making the rounds, something about how Quakers insist on telling the truth. We are “Friends of the Truth.” We embrace a “Testimony of Integrity.” As much as anybody does, I want that to be the fact of the matter — but there is a problem. The problem is that the pseudo-history of Quakerism that is ever popular among Quakers happens to be replete with huuuge, even Trumpian, Fake News frauds! There has been a popular Fake News fraud about a meeting for worship in Easton, New York in which our religious piety disarmed the hostile impulses of some lurking Feather Indians, there has been a popular Fake News fraud that during King Phillip’s War in New England we holy folk safely remained on the sidelines and were not attacked because the Narragansett natives understood our benevolent motives, there has been a popular Fake News fraud about refusing to doff one’s Quakerly broad-brimmed hat in the presence of the British monarch, there has been a popular Fake News fraud according to which it was we Quakers who secured in English law a legal principle of Jury Nullification, there has been a popular Fake News fraud (credited by one of the members of my meeting for worship because he had been told about it on NPR!) according to which Quakers were responsible for the HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES initiation of solitary confinement in our American prison systems, and so on and so forth ad infinitum. One of the boldest and brightest of this genre of wildly popular Quaker Fake News frauds (accounts all of which make Quakers out to be righteous, or at the very least make them out to be important) happens to be the one about a conversation between Friend George Fox and Friend William Penn, in regard to Penn’s continuing to wear the sword of British nobility after he has declared himself to have become a member of our society. The problem is that this blatant Fake News is commonly retailed in conjunction with some historically accurate and important historical records about our Peace Testimony, and thus may have a tendency to bring this historically accurate and important stuff about our Peace Testimony into disrepute. Perhaps it will be worthwhile to deal in detail with this fraud, and the utter lack of any historical basis for its accuracy, in some detail. We need to understand just how bad it gets. For clarity, I will break what follows apart into two questions: 1st, do we have any historical evidence at all that suggests it to be likely that Friend George Fox actually said to Friend William Penn, in regard to his sword, “Wear it as long as you can”? and 2d, might it be that this sword-story that appears too good not to be true may have been the truth despite a lamentable lack of preserved historical documentation? • We have never possessed any fragment of historical evidence that would support the truth of this sword story. The fraud 1st surfaced in print, suspiciously, in an account by a Quaker of a considerably later generation, a generation in which there was no possibility whatever of that source having heard this story from any elder who had been alive in the Fox/Penn timeframe, and thus might conceivably have had the benefit of private personal information. This Quaker source who initially retailed this had recounted it as merely something he had heard from another Quaker who had heard it from another Quaker, with no indication whatever that this friend-of-a-friend hearsay had benefited from any privileged information. His informant was not a historian, nor was his informant’s informant a historian, and he did not assert that he himself had any basis for crediting this story that had been passed along to him, 3d- hand, after some 8 generations of intervening human life, to be true. This, of course, does in no sense amount to historical provenance or evidence, and nobody with any wits would ever have paid the slightest attention to it. The sword stuff is not to be found in any existing correspondence of Friend George Fox, or in his published writings. It is not to be found in any existing correspondence of Friend William Penn, or in his published writings. Actually, we lack evidence that Friend George Fox ever did leave off wearing his sword of nobility, although we have ample reason to presume he must have because in his mature years he became so obese that he would have needed to prepare an enormously lengthy new sword belt, and anyway such a rig would have made the old fat man appear just ridiculous. Then, in his seniority he had become so senile that one doubts his caretakers would have allowed him to be near a sharpened crayon. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS • Since there is no written evidence, no letters or anything like that, the fraud is commonly retailed in the form of a conversation — conversations, you know, leave no written residue, and since there is no written residue, it follows that this must have been a conversation, one that someone overheard, QED. Absence of evidence is evidence, like that Arthur Conan Doyle dog that didn’t bark in the night. For such a conversation, however, wouldn’t these two gents have needed to be on the same landmass at the same time, or perchance aboard the same vessel (this being long before the telegraph and telephone)? The earliest such a conversation could conceivably have taken place would have been the year in which William Penn first sought to identify himself as a Quaker, and the latest such a conversation could conceivably have taken place would have been the year in which he died. Within that timeframe we can identify no year in which the two of them were simultaneously on the same landmass or aboard the same vessel. Their lives do not ever intersect in such manner, not ever, not so much as once. Therefore this sword-story could not possibly be true and the situation does not reduce to merely an unfortunate lack of preserved documentation for a story that’s too useful to be falsifiable.

Well, that was such a long time ago — it was ’way back when! So, so what? However, recently, I was informed by a member of my monthly meeting of Friends that despite misgivings he had cast his ballot for Donald Trump, and had done so, he explained, because Hillary Clinton is a traitor to our nation. This Quaker had learned via Fox News that she had taken bribes, polished through her “Clinton Foundation,” and in return for these payments had granted enormous quantities of our uranium ores to Russia so that this hostile state could build more atomic weapons with which to threaten our very existence. He knew this for a fact for he had heard of it via news media that he trusted, rather than the lamestream media that always lies! He had learned this from the news mogul who tells the truth — Rupert Murdoch. (Never mind the actual fact that everyone knows, that the movement of dangerous radioactive materials since the 1991 disintegration of the Soviet Union has been in the direction of safekeeping, rather than the other way around!) On this basis I later offered some general testimony during our Silent Worship, naming no names but warning all my fellow Quakers (including him, as he sat there in silent worship) that we need to be most careful about what we accept as the truth. I tried to soften this by telling an old Quaker joke about two elders who were out for a walk — one went “That flock of sheep over there has recently been shorn” and the other responded “Well, on this side at least.” There is no excuse for passing along a fraud such as this sword story, that never has had any provenance. It is simply inept, and what I fear is that a competent historian might bring into question the history of our Peace Testimony, since this is a history that has been collected by a bunch of people, us, who are so foolish that we credit a whole bunch of Fake News frauds, about George Fox and William Penn, etc. Why should they believe what we tell them about Quaker life during the period of the English Civil War and the true origins of our Peace Testimony, when we so thoroughly HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES discredit ourselves and in such a transparent manner? I immediately got blowback. I was approached by Friends who wanted to speak about these Quakerly thingies as “parts of our oral tradition.” The issue of whether or not they were historically accurate, or were instead the sheerest self-serving inventions, was claimed not to be the relevant issue. The issue in regard to these Quakerly thingies that made up important parts of our “oral tradition” was whether or not they represented Truth in a much broader sense than the mere historical, that is, whether or not they helped us understand where we were coming from, helped us accomplish our mission. My response was that in my experience in discussing these matters with other Quakers, I had found it always being insisted that they can only constitute actual facts, that they are the true history of the matter, that these are things that did in fact happen. Their attitude was that these things merely hadn’t been adequately documented, and because they hadn’t been adequately documented, they provided opportunities to mess around with matters religious to real-world folks who shouldn’t be allowed to mess around with matters religious. Over and above that, I have heard that we have an argument about Quakerism, that it is a religion that bases itself, not on a theology, but instead on a shared lived experience over generations. “Quakerism is a historical religion.” We inculcate the values of our society on each generation of new children not by teaching them to recite some Apostles’ Creed, or by telling them that they can be saved if only their theology is the correct one, but by communicating to them the shared wisdom of their predecessors. If that is indeed the case, then it is unfortunate indeed, that ordinarily when a Friend rises to recite something about this shared lived experience over generations, commonly what they recount is merely one or another of a standard set of Fake Facts, which is to say, inventive fakelore taken as historical reality. What are we supposed to be, are we supposed to be “Mr. Speak Truth to Power, While Lying To Our Little Children”? No, that sounds to me like a nonstarter. I responded, therefore, to this “oral tradition” explanation by demanding “Continue to speak truth to power (supposing that is what we really do), but meanwhile — stop lying to our little children!” Self-congratulation, rather than being the friend of religiosity, actually constitutes our enemy within. We are not the Friends Of Truthiness! Our Testimony on Integrity does not amount to a Testimony on Comfortableness! This is not 1984 and HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS the Religious Society of Friends is not an Orwellian Ministry of Truth devoted to the manufacture of Fake Facts under some easy-on-the-mind rubric such as “oral tradition”! There is no excuse for us to traffic in any such fakery. What we need to do is, we need to take this “oral tradition” garbage out and once and for all get rid of it. Such tall tales (example: “Fierce Feathers”) are less than useful in our teaching our children to know the truth and tell the truth, and they accomplish nothing — instead, they plainly get in the way of what we actually need to be doing. Thoreau pointed out that “It takes two to speak the truth, — one to speak and another to hear”:

A WEEK: All the abuses which are the object of reform with the philanthropist, the statesman, and the housekeeper are unconsciously amended in the intercourse of Friends. A Friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us. It takes two to speak the truth, — one to speak, and another to hear. How can one treat with magnanimity mere wood and stone? If we dealt only with the false and dishonest, we should at last forget how to speak truth. Only lovers know the value and magnanimity of truth, while traders prize a cheap honesty, and neighbors and acquaintance a cheap civility. In our daily intercourse with men, our nobler faculties are dormant and suffered to rust. None will pay us the compliment to expect nobleness from us. Though we have gold to give, they demand only copper. We ask our neighbor to suffer himself to be dealt with truly, sincerely, nobly; but he answers no by his deafness. He does not even hear this prayer. He says practically, I will be content if you treat me as “no better than I should be,” as deceitful, mean, dishonest, and selfish. For the most part, we are contented so to deal and to be dealt with, and we do not think that for the mass of men there is any truer and nobler relation possible. A man may have good neighbors, so called, and acquaintances, and even companions, wife, parents, brothers, sisters, children, who meet himself and one another on this ground only. The State does not demand justice of its members, but thinks that it succeeds very well with the least degree of it, hardly more than rogues practise; and so do the neighborhood and the family. What is commonly called Friendship even is only a little more honor among rogues.

THE QUAKER TESTIMONY OF OBJECTIVITY I urge you to watch this new NetFlix documentary about speaking truth to power in America today. It really expresses my personal view, that we Quakers cannot afford any longer to countenance the “fakelore” that has down through many generations been allowed to fester within our religious culture. We must renounce that sort of thing and instead make ourselves again what we once were as we began our adventure, the Friends of the Truth. We have allowed our Testimony of Integrity to become subjective, self-serving, self- patronizing, and comfortable, comfortable even for such opportunists as Friend Richard Milhous Nixon. We need to call on our religious fellows for greater objectivity, for a more rigorous testability of truth claims — for an expansion of our present Testimony of mere Integrity into a full-fledged Testimony of Objectivity. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES •

המוסיף על הצריך גורם לחיסרון - סנהדרין כט, א • — Babylonian TALMUD (Talmud Bavli) created in the 3d to 6th Centuries CE in what is now Iraq warns (Sanhedrin 29) “adding to the truth subtracts from it.”

The 6 currently recognized Quaker Testimonies are known by the initialism “S-P-I-C-E-S” in which “I” stands for “Integrity.” Of these currently recognized Quaker values, Integrity has been summarized as: • Let your outer life reflect your inner life. • Nurture one another’s inner moral compass, cultivating motivations not touched by externals such as rewards or punishments. • Treat others with respect and honesty. • Set a tone of high expectations of conduct and demeanor, encouraging others in their process of self-assessment. • Acknowledge interconnectedness and essential oneness. • Draw out the teacher within.

Many times, when I have spoken with other Quakers about our need for a Testimony of Truth, I have encountered vigorous disagreement. One of the objections usually is “We already have a Testimony of Truth, it is merely that we refer to it as the Testimony of Integrity.” Some have insisted “What’s the intent here, I am oblivious that we have ever had any habit of lying to each other.” Some were fearful that were we to confine ourselves artificially to “telling nothing but the truth,” we would be unable to offer moral fables in the process of educating our young (after all, in court we Quakers have been known to decline a judge’s order that we “swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”). A cluster of objections seemed to have to do with a reluctance to prioritize what are seen as mere material facts over the important spiritual values. Eventually I was forced to abandon this terminology “new Testimony of Truth or Truthfulness,” abandon it as for negotiating reasons a nonstarter, and venture off in the direction of “a new Testimony of Objectivity that can provide a needed buttress and support for our existing S-P-I-C-E-S Testimony of Integrity.” The key phrase of this new testimony, which is derivative of “Let your yea be yea and your nay be nay,” would be “Quakers say only what we know is so.” The fact is, as I see it, that we have a crying need for a buttressing testimony, one which will recognize once and for all that objectivity and therefore truthfulness is not to be found in wanna-believe subjectivity, but only in matter-of-fact objectivity itself. Things are as they are, not some other way, so we need to know how things actually are or we will be unable to prevent matters from going seriously wrong. I had asked my monthly meeting to allow me a Clearness Committee by which I might test my leading for a new, 7th, Testimony, but I could not get even so far as to persuade its business meeting to write HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS down a record of my having made this request. The members of the M&C committee had been fully involved in thus stonewalling me, perhaps because –I’m guessing here– they had committed to memory a number of fanciful Quaker just-so fables during their childhoods, which they were not prepared to re-evaluate — stories such as the racist lies spread for so many decades by Easton monthly meeting. Therefore, one possible explanation for these church ladies spreading gossip and slander about me while I was struggling for my life, was that they were resenting my having requested this Clearness Committee. We have been informed in the book that has sometimes been referred to as the “Good Book,” that men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil (JOHN 3:19). Do we not disregard this wisdom at our peril?

“Surely, men love darkness rather than light.” — Henry Thoreau, “THE SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES”

The word of the year, for the year 2016, in the OXFORD DICTIONARY, was “post-truth.” What I am wondering is whether the Quaker testimony on integrity, in its avoidance of making any appeal to the telling of the truth, amounts to a inadequate “post-truth” sort of attitude. That dictionary defined “post-truth” as relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. Now, granting that what goes on in a Quaker meetinghouse has little to do with general public opinion, the fact of the matter is that for Quakers assembled in a meetinghouse, the subset of the public that is there assembled constitutes its public. Therefore, the question becomes whether the Quaker testimony on integrity, as we express it to one another within those protected and circumscribed groupings, amounts to relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping our own attitudes than appeals to emotion and personal belief. Also, granting that our testimony on integrity is not exactly an appeal to emotion and personal belief, but rather an appeal to a sense of personal and group identity supported by our own emotional self-attachments, the question becomes whether the Quaker testimony on integrity amounts to relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping our own attitudes than appeals to our sense of personal and group identity supported by our own emotional self-attachments. What I am concerned about, obviously, is the entirely subjective nature of such self-assessments, and the manner in which we currently sidestep all objective testability. We started out as the People of Truth — but have we since become the People of Truthiness?

I would say that Friend Richard Nixon fully incorporated our Quaker Testimony of Integrity and, in addition, fully demonstrated its obvious shortcomings. According to our Testimony of Integrity it is not in a Book that truth is to be found, but in the fountainhead HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES which originally generated that Book in the minds of its human writers. Look inward for that truth, look inward to that fountainhead. As we have seen in Friend Richard’s case, this can be made into a testimony of “something is true if and only if it works for me, making my life what I desire for it to be. Don’t try to come between me and God (by the way, my god is me).” Again and again I have heard a Quaker stand during silent worship and deliver themselves of this unholy sentiment. You have not? Another way to put this is that standing alone, unbuttressed by a Testimony of Objectivity, this Testimony of Integrity is all too likely to lead to self-privileging. People demonstrably do tend to interpret our Testimony of Integrity as a Testimony of Subjectivity; it can be transformed into the salesman’s creed according to which the more subjective and self-regarding the belief, the truer it must be. God, thank you that you did not allow The Donald to be reared in the Quaker tradition! How easy it would have been for Donald John Trump To have been born as a birthright Friend — and then to have gone on to be everything that he is and do everything that he has done? Aren’t we grateful that Fred and Mary Trump were instead members of the Marble Collegiate congregation of the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale? What a hell our life as Quakers would have become, if Friend Richard Milhous Nixon’s disgracing us in the White House had eventually been followed by a Friend Donald John Trump disgracing us in the White House, tweeting in the early dawn hours about his Quaker righteousness based on his Doctrine of Integrity! The peril I see in this Friend Richard Testimony is that it can be made congruent with a doctrine that objectivity is to be found in the subjective. “Every man his own Pope in his own home,” in the Quaker tradition, can all to easily transform into “every man his own God in his own heart.” This is why I am urging that we Quakers embrace a new Testimony, one that will balance and buttress our Testimony of Integrity, and deem this our Testimony of Objectivity. Our new testimony will be based on the dictum, that objectivity is not to be found in the subjective.

Obviously it can do no-one any good that I as a historian research the truth about the spurious origins of these “oral tradition” Fake Facts so often taught by Quakers to their unsuspecting and quite defenseless young, if the only reaction I encounter from other Quakers is for them to make themselves simplemindedly resistive, and satisfied with the Fake News tales that are readily legitimated simply because we have always told them to one another. Tales that were good enough for our father and mother to tell us ought to be good enough for us in turn to pass along down the generations!

But no, what is it that we actually need to be doing? –We need to make ourselves be the Friends of the Truth by being much more persistent than we have been to date, in regard to our Testimony of Objectivity. We require additional fact-checking, additional Truthfulness, additional reluctance to get involved in foolishness. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS SET AN EXAMPLE

The world, not merely Quakers universally but the world universally, is desperately in need of spiritual guidance, and the need for such spirituality is growing demonstrably more desperate day by day. The problem the world has been encountering has something to do with Fake News, it has something to do with elaborations and embroideries on reality that have been swamping our sense of the real and, by swamping us in this manner, causing us to lose all sense of bearings. I would like to see Quakers leading the way, to help the world withdraw from this syndrome that is consuming us all. — And I think I perceive a way for us to supply that so-badly-needed leadership. All we have to do is set a positive real example, of what it is like to abandon lies and deceptions and place our trust in the solid verities. We could set that example, by publicly abandoning the large number of pseudohistorical accretions that have demonstrably grown up over our centuries of existence, and then the rest of the world could look at our example and say with growing confidence “Well, if the stupid Quakers can do that, we can do it as well!” The world, and Quakers too, are (is?) very clearly committing the error of adding when it should be subtracting. As Thoreau said, Simplify, simplify. Can we set an example of such simplification? I think that, as a historian, I have uncovered any number of cases in which Quaker lore has become over the centuries encrusted with just-so stories, stories which are not only unnecessary but also factually false. Why do I need a Clearness Committee? Well, first, this compendium of error which I have supposedly created needs to be tested, to verify publicly that the items on this list of errors are indeed what I am supposing them to be, errors, falsehoods, just- so stories lacking in evidentiary foundation. I can’t do that without a whole bunch of serious people who will tell me, are some of the items on this list actually true and actually of value and salvageable, or is my historical judgment correct, and these pseudofactoids mere figments of folks’ imaginations? I am 82 and my heart is giving me problems and time is running out and I can’t do this alone. If we can’t be a shining light to the world, why can’t we be a shining light to the world? Are we too stupid to perceive the opportunity here, the opportunity to give the world an example when what the world so desperately needs now is an example? The cure for our world problem of Fake News is not a Quaker cure, it is a Jewish cure. In the Babylonian TALMUD, wisdom dating to the days of captivity in Babylon, an injunction was set down: adding to the truth sometimes amounts to subtracting from the truth. Some Quakers have asked me whether what I am attempting to do is proselytize. No, the world no more needs to become Quaker than it needs to become Jewish. The world simply needs to recognize that it is finding itself on a false, over-elaborate, deceptive course, and needs to go back by restricting itself to what it actually does know. — We need in the future to restrict ourselves to those items of information for which we actually possess clear chains of affirmative evidence. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES

17TH CENTURY

1657

Not all Quakers have attempted to transform what happened in the year 1657 into a Quaker lie, only some of them, some of them who would have a bone to pick with the Quaker Peace Testimony. What they would develop would be a close textual analysis of a message that Friend George Fox sent to Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell. This close textual analysis that they would sponsor would be to the effect that Friend George hadn’t actually believed in the Peace Testimony as it would subsequently develop. Actually, they would insist, the psyche of Friend George was hostile to the Peace Testimony! (Fortunately, these Quaker opponents of the Peace Testimony would persuade only a very few Quakers, such as some “Quaker churches” in Indiana, to disown the Peace Testimony.)

Friends John Perrot and John Luffe (Love) traveled on the Italian peninsula to convert Catholics and Jews to Quakerism. Eventually they would seek an audience with Pope Alexander VII at the Vatican in Rome and be imprisoned.

In this year Friend George Fox is said to have written in reproach to an aged and failing Oliver Cromwell: “O Oliver, hadst thou been faithful and thundered down the deceit, the Hollander had been thy subject and tributary, Germany had given up to have done thy will, and the Spaniard had quivered like a dry leaf wanting the virtue of God, the King of France should have bowed his neck under thee, the Pope should have withered as in winter, the Turk in all of his fatness should have smoked, thou shouldst not have stood trifling about small things, but minded the work of the Lord as He began with thee at first.”

Some Quakers have taken this to mean that Friend George was rebuking Cromwell for not having had English soldiers adorn their armor with the big red cross of the Crusader, and gone off on a 5th Crusade against Islam, and have offered this as a limitation on the early understanding of the Quaker Peace Testimony: that the testimony was at this early point entirely compatible with the use of war as an instrument of the monarch. My own contention would be, however, that when Friend George wrote “O Oliver, hadst thou been faithful and thundered down the deceit,” he was writing a phrase that is to us at the very least indefinite, or ambiguous. Precisely what would it be for a person to be faithful as Friend George proposed? Being faithful does not, of HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS course, intrinsically, involve armies and shedding the blood of others, for one can on occasion be faithful even when one has no army at one’s disposal and even when one is refusing to shed the blood of others. Exactly what is it for a person to thunder down deceit as Friend George proposed? Thundering down deceit does not, of course, intrinsically, involve the use of cannon and gunpowder, for one can on occasion thunder down deceit, even if one is out of gunpowder and all one’s cannon have become Quaker cannon, fallen entirely silent. So if one is going to insist that when Friend George told the Lord Protector that “the Turk in all of his fatness should have smoked” what he meant was that Cromwell should have sent the English army off on a 5th Crusade to kill so many of them that the ones still alive would fear the Lord Protector and do his will,1 one is going to have to admit also that by the same token, “the Hollander had been thy subject and tributary” would have meant that Cromwell should have killed so many Hollanders that the ones still alive would fear him and do his will, and one is going to have to admit also that by the same token, “Germany had given up to have done thy will” would have meant that Cromwell should have killed so many Germans that the ones still alive would fear him and do his will, and one is going to have to admit also that by the same token, “the Spaniard had quivered like a dry leaf wanting the virtue of God” would have meant that Cromwell should have killed so many Spaniards that the ones still alive would fear him and do his will, and one is going to have to admit also that by the same token, “the King of France should have bowed his neck under thee” would have meant that Cromwell should have killed so many Frenchmen that the ones still alive would fear him and do his will, and one is going to have to admit also that by the same token, “the Pope should have withered as in winter” would have meant that Cromwell should have killed so many Roman Catholics that the ones still alive would fear him and do his will. What a spasm of 17th-Century conquest and bloodshed and terror this Quaker of today seems to suppose Friend George to have been imagining! But this is preposterous. Friend George certainly was not suggesting to Lord Protector Cromwell that he should have played Alexander the Great and conquered the known world. Had he meant that he would have said that. Where might any Quaker scholar have acquired such a conceit? And why would a Quaker now be furthering such a conceit?

Please notice once and for all that the phrase “O Oliver, hadst thou been faithful and thundered down the deceit” is consistent also with an attitude that if Lord Protector Cromwell had studied to make himself a man of the spirit of God rather than a man of violence, he would have had a greater and more lasting influence upon his fellows, rather than experiencing, as he was, in his declining years, that for all the blood he had caused to be shed his life had produced no lasting benefit.

FAKE NEWS So these Quakers were mistaken, in proposing that Friend George was rebuking Cromwell for not having had English soldiers adorn their armor with the big red cross of the Crusader, and for not having gone off on a 5th Crusade against Islam. They are mistaken in having offered this as a limitation on the early understanding of the Quaker Peace Testimony: that the testimony was at this early point entirely compatible with the use of war as an instrument of the monarch. Quite to the contrary, what Friend George was offering to the Lord Protector was a Truth Testimony, as recorded in WALDEN by Henry David Thoreau:

1. Note that Friend Mary Fisher’s missionary voyage to the court of the Great Turk was at this point an entirely unknown and unimagined, because future, event. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES

THE QUAKER TESTIMONY OF OBJECTIVITY

QUAKER FAKELORE

CONTINGENCY ALTHOUGH VERY MANY OUTCOMES ARE OVERDETERMINED, WE TRUST THAT SOMETIMES WE ACTUALLY MAKE REAL CHOICES. “THIS IS THE ONLY WAY, WE SAY, BUT THERE ARE AS MANY WAYS AS THERE CAN BE DRAWN RADII FROM ONE CENTRE.”

Quakers “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS

1661

This year produced an angry, drumming spirit for the 1st time, in England, disturbing primarily those who were religiously inclined, one that would be appearing again in 1730 on the other side of the pond, near Quaker Philadelphia, again disturbing primarily those who were religiously inclined.

March: Henry Woodhouse (Woodis) purchased from Captain Thomas Marshall 350 acres in Concord for £240, Nawshawtuck Hill, that apparently had once belonged to Simon Willard, one of the town’s founders.

Also in the course of this month, during the trial of Friend William Leddra of Barbados, another expelled Quaker who had returned to Boston to “try its bloody laws,” a Quaker from Salem, Friend Wenlock Christison, rose in the courtroom and defied the court, promising that for every Quaker hanged, 5 or 10 would appear and volunteer to be thus honored. Arrested, he also would be sentenced to the gallows.

Also during this month, John Mompesson of Tedworth in Wiltshire, England brought a lawsuit against a local drummer accused of collecting money under false pretenses. The court found the drummer guilty, confiscated his drum, and gave it to Mompesson. Soon afterwards, Mompesson discovered that an angry, drumming spirit had invaded his house. The spirit drummed loud tunes on the bed of his children, moved objects around in the house, threw shoes, and wrestled with servants. The case of the ghostly drummer of Tedworth soon became famous throughout England. Its notoriety prompted Joseph Glanvill, a clergyman and member of the Royal Society, to visit the Mompesson household and investigate the spirit. He collected eyewitness accounts of the spirit’s activities, recorded hearing noises HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES himself, and eventually became convinced that the spirit was real. He would publish this conclusion in 1668 in a work titled A BLOW AT MODERN SADDUCISM ... TO WHICH IS ADDED, THE RELATION OF THE FAM’D DISTURBANCE BY THE DRUMMER, IN THE HOUSE OF MR. JOHN MOMPESSON. Many witnesses of the ghostly drummer would conclude that the human drummer whom Mompesson had tried was somehow responsible (through witchcraft) for the mysterious sounds and spectral disturbance, but when they would try to locate the human drummer they would learn that he had been recently deported to the colonies for other crimes. However, the man in question would eventually escape from his exile and return to England, whereupon Mr. Mompesson would charge him with the crime of employing an evil spirit. The drummer would be found guilty and sent to Salisbury Gaol, though eventually he would appeal and gain release. Others, however, would come to consider that there had never been a ghostly drummer and that Mr. Mompesson had concocted the entire story, either as a way to make some money or as a way to bring himself to notice. These critics would point out that no one was ever allowed to inspect Mr. Mompesson’s cellar. Why not? Had someone been secreted down there, creating all the sounds and commotion? Also, the drumming almost always happened at night and seemed to be coming from outside the house, rather than inside of it. Actually, someone could have been outside in the dark banging on the walls. Finally, the King himself sent some gentlemen to investigate the haunting and they found no evidence whatever of spectral activity. Whether Mr. Mompesson was really beset by an angry spirit or whether the entire event was an elaborate hoax would never be determined, and so the ghostly drummer of Tedworth would pass into legend. However, the case has a 2d American chapter because, decades later, the spectral timpanist would reappear on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean, near Philadelphia. His reappearance would be announced during April 1730 in a letter in the Pennsylvania Gazette. The correspondent told the story of a pair of local Reverends who had recently encountered an angry, drum-beating ghost described as being “not a whit less obstreperous, than the Tedsworth Tympanist.” According to this letter, the Reverends had been attending a meeting of ministerial brethren at a town near Philadelphia. The clergymen, sharing a room in an inn, had retired to bed but were kept awake the entire night by a drum-beating spirit. The spirit had beat repeatedly on one side of the bed and then the other. It drummed out popular tunes such as the “Scots Traveler” and the “Grenadiers March.” The drumming continued all night but, to the surprise of the exhausted clergymen as they staggered down to breakfast the next morning, no one else in the inn had heard a thing. The next night when the duo again retired, they were able to go to sleep but soon one of them was seized violently and forcibly by the great Toe, ... but that upon the Beating of the Drum, which happen’d at the same Instant, his Toe was released; and that to prevent any future Attacks, they hoisted their Knees up to their very Noses; and the Noise still growing louder, they felt a most prodigious Weight on them, heavier, as he said, than the Night-Mare; that by his voice they presently discovered it to be one of their Brethren, who had come into their Room on purpose to scare them; either believing that they had told him a Fib, or that they were under such potent Influences the Night before, as made them imagine they heard a Drum, when in Reality they did not. The letter-writer concluded his account by claiming that after learning the Reverends’ experience “I who used to sleep without drawing my Curtains, am now so fearful, that I pin them every Night I go to Bed with corking Pins, and cover my self Head over Ears with the Clothes.” This letter, obviously, is in a satirical tone. In fact, the primary goal of the correspondent seemed to be to mock the credulity of these clergymen who credited that they had been set upon by a ghost, and also to fun at local clergy who were known to be fairly liberal with the imbibing of spirits, i.e. the “potent influences” the two clergymen had been imbibing. Two weeks later a letter of protest would be printed in the Pennsylvania Gazette. This new missive, signed PHILOCLERUS, defended the clergymen. The argument of Philoclerus was that religion was necessary for the maintenance of an orderly society, and therefore ministers should never be subjected to ridicule. He argued that the clergymen were not credulous for considering that they had been attacked by a ghost, because there is nothing fantastic or implausible about being attacked by ghosts. In fact, we need to credit their story because there were two of them, who “concur’d in the same Testimony; and it cannot be imagin’d what Interest they HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS should have in contriving together to impose a Falshood of that Nature ... since they could expect Nothing but to be ridicul’d for their Pains.” The initial letter that mocked a pair of credulous clergymen, and the follow-on missive had ostensibly defended them, may have amounted to an extended literary hoax by Benjamin Franklin, publisher of the gazette in question. Franklin was well known for his deistic rationalism and for his disdain of clericalism, and is known to have perpetrated other such hoaxes, for instance the witch trial at Mount Holly, which he published on October 22d, 1730.

So the ghostly drummer of Tedworth can be said to have made two appearances in the course of history — in 1661 and then again in 1730. The 2d appearance being so obviously a piece of fake news, we are tempted to presume that the original appearance had also been a concoction. QUAKER FAKELORE HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES

1668

This year produced one of the favorite pieces of Quaker Fake News, that the noble son of Admiral Sir William Penn declined to take off his hat to do honor to his monarch.

Friend William Penn, son of Admiral Sir William Penn, allegedly declined to do “hat honour” to the King of England.2

PHILADELPHIA In the late, antinomian sixties, a student who called ANTINOMIANISM the president of an ancient university a “motherfucker” to his face and in front of parents and the student body (and got away with it) was attacking the authority structure of his society much as William Penn did by keeping his hat on in the presence of King Charles II. — Edward Digby Baltzell. PURITAN BOSTON AND QUAKER PHILADELPHIA: TWO PROTESTANT ETHICS AND THE SPIRIT OF CLASS AUTHORITY AND LEADERSHIP. NY: The Free Press of Macmillan Publishing Company, 1979, page 21.

RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

2. We have no record that young William ever was permitted to enter the presence of the monarch. Therefore, was what actually happened that young Penn the convert asserted that, were he ever granted such an opportunity as to do the monarch hat honour, he intended to decline? –We all know how these “obligate” stories –an “obligate” story is a story that needs to be true– can become truer and truer every time they get repeated! QUAKER FAKELORE HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS SET AN EXAMPLE

QUAKERS LIES

1670

This year produced a favorite piece of Quaker Fake News, that we had had a significant impact on British jurispudence, or British juris-impudence.

September 1, 3, 4, and 5: THE TRYAL OF WILLIAM PENN & WILLIAM MEAD FOR CAUSING A TUMOLT, ETC. 1670. (This edition Boston: Marshall Jones, 1919) would prove significant in the development of free speech. This record of the transcript was made by Friend William Penn, who also listed himself as the “Observer”:

This case would give rise to a fakelore always prevalent among Quakers, that they have accomplished an improvement in the law, by establishing a legal principle of jury nullification:

THE TRYAL of WILLIAM PENN and WILLIAM MEAD, at the Sessions held at the Old Baily in London, the 1st, 3d, 4th, and 5th of September, 1670.

Done by themselves.

Reprinted Boston: Marshall Jones Co., 1919. PRESENT SAM. STARLING, Mayor. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS THO. HOWEL, Recorder. THO. BLOODWORTH, Alderm. WILLIAM PEAK, Alderm. JOHN ROBINSON, Alderm. RICHARD FORD, Alderman. JOSEPH SHELDEN, Alderman. JOHN SMITH and JAMES EDWARDS, Sheriffs. RICHARD BROWNE. CRYER. O yes, Thomas Veer, Edward Bushel, John Hammond, Charles Milson, Gregory Walklet, John Brightman, William Plumstead, Henry Henley, Thomas Damask, Henry Michel, William Lever, John Baily. The Form of the OATH. “You shall well and truly Try, and true “Deliverance make betwixt our Sovereign Lord the King, and the Prisoners at the Bar, according to your Evidence. So help you God.” That William Penn, Gent. and William Mead, late of London, Linnen-Draper, with divers other Persons to the Jurors unknown, to the Number of 300, the 14th Day of August, in the 22d Year of the King, about Eleven of the Clock in the Forenoon, the same Day, with Force and Arms, &c. in the Parish of St. Bennet Gracechurch in Bridge-Ward, London, in the Street called Gracechurch-Street, unlawfully and tumultuously did Assemble and Congregate themselves together, to the Disturbance of the Peace of the said Lord the King: And the aforesaid William Penn and William Mead, together with other Persons to the Jurors aforesaid unknown, then and there so Assembled and Congregated together; the aforesaid William Penn, by Agreement between him and William Mead before made, and by Abetment of the aforesaid William Mead, then and there, in the open Street, did take upon himself to Preach and Speak, and then and there did Preach and Speak unto the aforesaid William Mead, and other Persons there, in the Street aforesaid, being Assembled and Congregated together, by Reason whereof a great Concourse and Tumult of People in the Street aforesaid, then and there, a long time did remain and continue, in contempt of the said Lord the King, and of his Law, to the great Disturbance of his Peace; to the great Terror and Disturbance of many of his Leige People and Subjects, to the ill Example of all others in the like Case Offenders, and against the Peace of the said Lord the King, his Crown and Dignity. What say you, William Penn and William Mead, are you Guilty, as you stand indicted, in Manner and Form, as aforesaid, or Not Guilty? PENN. It is impossible, that we should be able to remember the Indictment verbatim, and therefore we desire a Copy of it, as is customary in the like Occasions. RECORDER. You must first plead to the Indictment, before you can have a Copy of it. PEN. I am unacquainted with the Formality of the Law, and therefore, before I shall answer directly, I request two Things of the Court. First, that no Advantage may be taken against me, nor I deprived of any Benefit, which I might otherwise have received. Secondly, that you will promise me a fair hearing, and liberty of making my Defence. COURT. No Advantage shall be taken against you; you shall have Liberty; you shall be heard. PEN. Then I plead Not guilty in Manner and Form. CLERK. What sayest thou, William Mead, art thou Guilty in Manner and Form, as thou standest indicted, or Not guilty? MEAD. I shall desire the same Liberty as is promised William Penn. COURT. You shall have it. MEAD. Then I plead Not guilty in Manner and Form. The Court adjourn’d until the Afternoon. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES CRYER. O Yes, etc. CLER. Bring William Penn and William Mead to the Bar. OBSERV. The said Prisoners were brought, but were set aside, and other Business prosecuted. Where we cannot choose but observe, that it was the constant and unkind Practices of the Court to the Prisoners, to make them wait upon the Trials of Felons and Murderers, thereby designing, in all probability, both to affront and tire them. After five Hours Attendance, the Court broke up and adjourned to the third Instant. The third of September 1670, the Court sate. CRYER. O Yes, etc. CLER. Bring William Penn and William Mead to the Bar. MAYOR. Sirrah, who bid you put off their Hats. Put on their Hats again. OBSER. Whereupon one of the Officers putting the Prisoners Hats upon their heads (pursuant to the Order of the court) brought them to the Bar. RECORD. Do you know where you are? PEN. Yes. RECORD. Do not it is the King’s Court? PEN. I know it to be a Court, and I suppose it to be the King’s Court. RECORD. Do you not know there is Respect due to the Court? PEN. Yes. RECORD. Why do you not pay it then? PEN. I do so. RECORD. Why do you not pull off your Hat then? PEN. Because I do not believe that to be any Respect. RECORD. Well, the Court sets forty Marks a piece upon your Heads, as a Fine for your Contempt of the Court. PEN. I desire it might be observed, that we came into the Court with our Hats off (that is, taken off) and if they have been put on since, it was by Order from the Bench; and therefore not we, but the Bench should be fined. MEAD. I have a Question to ask the Recorder. Am I fined also? RECORD. Yes. MEAD. I desire the Jury, and all People to take notice of this Injustice of the Recorder; who spake to me to pull off my Hat? and yet hath he put a Fine upon my Head. O fear the Lord, and dread his Power, and yield to the Guidance of his Holy Spirit, for he is not far from every one of you. The Jury sworn again. OBSER. J. Robinson, Lieutenant of the Tower, disingenuously objected against —- Bushel, as if he had not kiss’d the Book, and therefore would have him sworn again; tho’ indeed it was on purpose to have made use of his Tenderness of Conscience in avoiding reiterated Oaths, to have put him by his being a Jury-man, apprehending him to be a Person not fit to answer their Arbitrary Ends. The Clerk read the Indictment, as aforesaid. CLERK. Cryer, Call James Cook into the Court, give him his Oath. CLERK. James Cook, lay your Hand upon the Book. The Evidence you shall give to the Court, betwixt our Sovereign the King, and the prisoners at the Bar, shall be the Truth, and the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth. So help you God. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS COOK. I was sent for, from the Exchange, to go and disperse a Meeting in Gracechurch-Street, where I saw Mr. Penn speaking to the People, but I could not hear what he said, because of the Noise; I endeavoured to make way to take him, but I could not get to him for the Crowd of People; upon which Capt. Mead came to me, about the Kennel of the Street, and desired me to let him go on; for when he had done, he would bring Mr. Penn to me. COURT. What Number do you think might be there? COOK. About three or four Hundred People. COURT. Call Richard Read, give him his Oath. READ being sworn was ask’d, what do you know concerning the Prisoners at the Bar? READ. My Lord, I went to Gracechurch Street, where I found a great Crowd of People, and I heard Mr. Penn preach to them; and I saw Capt. Mead speaking to Lieutenant Cook, but what he said, I could not tell. MEAD. What did William Penn say? READ. There was such a great Noise, that I could not tell what he said. MEAD. Jury, observe this Evidence, He saith he heard him Preach, and yet faith, he doth not know what he said. Jury, take notice, he swears now a clean contrary thing to what he swore me in Gracechurch-Street, and yet swore before the Mayor, when I was committed, that he did not see me there. I appeal to the Mayor himself, if this be not true. But no Answer was given. COURT. What Number do you think might be there? READ. About four or five hundred. PENN. I desire to know of him what Day it was? READ. The 14th Day of August. PEN. Did he speak to me, or let me know he was there; for I am very sure I never saw him. CLER. Cryer, call ——- ——- into the Court. CLER. Give him his Oath. ——-. My Lord, I saw a great Number of People, and Mr. Penn I suppose was speaking; I see him make a Motion with his Hands, and heard some Noise, but could not understand what he said. But for Capt. Mead, I did not see him there. REC. What say you, Mr. Mead, were you there? MEAD. It is a Maxim in your own Law, Nemo tenetur accusare seipsum, which if it be not true Latin, I am sure it is true English, That no Man is bound to accuse himself: And why dost thou offer to ensnare me with such a Question? Doth not this shew thy Malice? Is this like unto a Judge, that ought to be Counsel for the Prisoner at the Bar? REC. Sir, hold your Tongue, I did not go about to ensnare you. PEN. I desire we may come more close to the Point, and that Silence be commanded in the Court. CRY. O yes, all manner of Persons keep Silence upon Pain of Imprisonment — Silence Court. PEN. We confess our selves to be so far from recanting, or declining to vindicate the Assembling of our selves to Preach, Pray, or Worship the Eternal, Holy, Just God, that we declare to all the World, that we do believe it to be our indispensable Duty, to meet incessantly upon so good an Account; nor shall all the Powers upon Earth be able to divert us from reverencing and adoring our God who made it. BROWN. You are not here for worshipping God, but for breaking the Law; you do yourselves a great deal of Wrong in going on in that Discourse. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES PEN. I affirm I have broken no Law, nor am I guilty of the Indictment that is laid to my Charge; and to the End the Bench, the Jury, and my self, with these that hear us, may have a more direct Understanding of this Procedure, I desire you would let me know by what Law it is you prosecute me, and upon what Law you ground my Indictment. REC. Upon the Common Law. PEN. Where is that Common Law? REC. You must not think that I am able to run up so many Years, and over so many adjudged Cases, which we call Common Law, to answer your Curiosity. PEN. This Answer I am sure is very short of my Question, for if it be Common, it should not be so hard to produce. REC. Sir, will you plead to your Indictment? PEN. Shall I, plead to an Indictment that hath no Foundation in Law? If it contain that Law you say I have broken, why should you decline to produce that Law, since it will be impossible for the Jury to determine, or agree to bring in their Verdict, who have not the Law produced, by which they should measure the Truth of this Indictment, and the Guilt, or contrary of my Fact? REC. You are a sawcy Fellow, speak to the Indictment. PEN. I say, it is my place to speak to Matter of Law; I am arraign’d a Prisoner; my Liberty, which is next to Life it self, is now concerned: You are many Mouths and Ears against me, and if I must not be allowed to make the best of my Case, it is hard. I say again, unless you shew me, and the People, the Law you ground your Indictment upon, I shall take it for granted your Proceedings are meerly Arbitrary. OBSER. At this time several upon the Bench urged hard upon the Prisoner to bear him down. REC. The Question is, whether you are guilty of this Indictment? PEN. The Question is not whether I am guilty of this Indictment, but whether this Indictment be legal. It is too general and imperfect an Answer, to say it is the. Common Law, unless we knew both where, and what it is: For where there is no Law, there is no Transgression; and that Law which is not in being, is so far from being Common, that it is no Law at all. REC. You are an impertinent Fellow, will you teach the Court what Law is? It’s Lex non scripta, that which many have studied thirty or forty Years to know, and would you have me to tell you in a Moment? PEN. Certainly, if the Common Law be so hard to be understood, it’s far from being very Common; but if the Lord Cook, in his Institutes, be of any Consideration, he tells us, That Common Law is Common Right, and that Common Right is the Great Charter-Privileges: Confirmed 9 Hen. 3. 29. 25, Edw. I. i. 2, Edw. 3. 8, Cook Instit. 2 p. 56. REC. Sir, you are a troublesome Fellow, and it is not for the Honour of the Court to suffer you to go on. PEN. I have asked but one Question, and you have not answer’d me; tho’ the Rights and Privileges of every Englishman be concerned in it. REC. If I should suffer you to ask Questions till to Morrow Morning, you would be never the wiser. PEN. That is according as the Answers are. REC. Sir, we must not stand to hear you talk all Night. PEN. I design no Affront to the Court, but to be heard in my just Plea: And I must plainly tell you, that if you will deny me Oyer of that Law, which you suggest I have broken, you do at once deny me an acknowledged Right, and evidence to the whole World your Resolution to sacrifice the Privileges of Englishmen to your sinister and Arbitrary Designs. REC. Take him away. My Lord, if you take not some Course with this pestilent Fellow, to stop his Mouth, We shall not be able to do any thing to Night. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS MAYOR. Take him away, take him away, turn him into the Bale-dock. PEN. These are but so many vain Exclamations; is this Justice or true Judgment? Must I therefore be taken away because I plead for the Fundamental Laws of England? However, this I leave upon your Consciences, who are of the Jury (and my sole Judges) that if these Ancient Fundamental Laws, which relate to Liberty and Property, and (are not limited to particular Persuasions in Matters of Religion) must not be indispensibly maintained and observed. Who can say he hath Right to the Coat upon his Back? Certainly our Liberties are openly to be invaded, our Wives to be ravished, our Children slaved, our Families ruined, and our Estates led away in Triumph, by every sturdy Beggar and malicious Informer, as their Trophies, but our (pretended) Forfeits for Conscience sake. The Lord of Heaven and Earth will be Judge between us in this Matter. REC. Be silent there. REC. Be silent there. PEN. I am not to be silent in a Case wherein I am so much concerned, and not only my self, but many ten thousand Families besides. OBSER. They having rudely haled him into the Bale-dock, William Mead they left in Court, who spake as followeth. MEAD. You Men of the Jury, here I do now stand, to answer to an Indictment against me, which is a Bundle of Stuff, full of Lyes and Falshoods; for therein I am accused, that I met Vi & armis, illicite & tumultuose: Time was, when I had Freedom to use a carnal Weapon, and then I thought I feared no Man; but now I fear the Living God, and dare not make use thereof, nor hurt any Man; nor do I know I demeaned my self as a tumultuous Person: I say, I am a peaceable Man, therefore it is a very proper Question what William Penn demanded in this Case, An Oyer of the Law, in which our Indictment is grounded. REC. I have made Answer to that already. MEAD. Turning his Face to the Jury, saith, you Men of the Jury, who are my Judges, if the Recorder will not tell you what makes a Riot, a Rout, or an unlawful Assembly, Cook, he that once they called the Lord Cook, tells us what makes a Riot, a Rout, and an unlawful Assembly — A Riot is when three, or more, are met together to beat a Man, or to enter forcibly into another Man’s Land, to cut down his Grass, his Wood, or break down his Pales. OBSER. Here the Recorder interrupted him, and said, I thank you Sir, that you will tell me what the Law is, scornfully pulling off his Hat. MEAD. Thou mayst put on thy Hat, I have never a Free for thee now. BROWN. He talks at random, one while an Independent, another while some other Religion, and now a Quaker, and next a Papist. MEAD. Turpe est doctori cum culpa redarguit ad ipsum. MAY. You deserve to have your Tongue cut out. REC. If you discourse on this Manner, I shall take Occasion against you. MEAD. Thou didst promise me, I should have fair Liberty to be heard; why may I not have the Privilege of an Englishman? I am an Englishman, and you might be ashamed of this dealing. REC. I look upon you to be an Enemy to the Laws of England, which ought to be observed and kept, nor are you worthy of such Privileges, as others have. MEAD. The Lord is Judge between me and thee in this Matter. OBSER. Upon which they took him away into the Bale-dock, and the Recorder proceeded to give the Jury their Charge, as followeth. REC. You have heard what the Indictment is. It is for preaching to the People, and drawing a tumultuous Company after them, and Mr. Penn was speaking; if they should not be disturbed, you see they will go on; there are three or four Witnesses that have proved this, that he did preach there; that Mr. Mead did allow of it; after this, you have heard by substantial Witnesses what is said against them: Now we are upon the Matter of Fact, which you are to keep to, and observe, as what hath been fully sworn, at your Peril. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES OBSER. The Prisoners were put out of the Court into the Bale-dock, and the Charge given to the Jury in their Absence, at which W.P. with a very raised Voice, it being a considerable distance from the Bench, spake. PEN. I appeal to the Jury, who are Judges, and this great Assembly, the Proceedings of the Court are not most Arbitrary, and void of all Law, in offering to give the Jury their Charge in the Absence of the Prisoners; I say, it is directly opposite to, and destructive of, the undoubted Right of every English Prisoner, as Cook in the 2 Instit. 29. on the Chap. of Magna Charta, speaks. OBSER. The Recorder being thus unexpectedly lash’d for his extrajudicial Procedure, said, with an inraged Smile. REC. Why, ye are present, you do hear, do you not? PEN: No thanks to the Court, that commanded me into the Bale-dock; and you of the Jury take notice, that I have not been heard, neither can you legally depart the Court, before I have been fully heard, having at least ten or twelve material Points to offer, in order to invalid their Indictment. REC. Pull that Fellow down, pull him down. MEAD. Are these according to the Rights and Privileges of Englishmen, that we should not be heard, but turned into the Bale-dock, for making our Defence, and the Jury to have their Charge given them in our Absence; I say these are barbarous and unjust Proceedings. REC. Take them away into the Hole: To hear them talk all Night, as they would, that I think doth not become the Honour of the Court, and I think you (i.e. the Jury) your selves would be tired out, and not have Patience to hear them. OBSER. The Jury were commanded up to agree upon their Verdict, the Prisoners remaining in the stinking Hole. After an Hour and half’s time eight came down agreed, but four remained above; the Court sent an Officer for them, and they accordingly came down. The Bench used many unworthy Threats to the four that dissented; and, the Recorder, addressing himself to Bushel, said, Sir, You are the Cause of this Disturbance, and manifestly shew your self an Abettor of Faction; I shall set a Mark upon you, Sir. J. ROBINSON. Mr. Bushel, I have known you near this fourteen Years; you have thrust your self upon this Jury, because you think there is some Service for you. I tell you, you deserve to be indicted more than any Man that hath been brought to the Bar this Day. BUSHEL. No, Sir John, there were threescore before me, and I would willingly have got off, but could not. BLOODW. I said, when I saw Mr. Bushel, what I see is come to pass, for I knew he would never yield. Mr. Bushel, we know what you are. MAY. Sirrah, you are an impudent Fellow, I will put a Mark upon you. OBSER. They used much menacing Language, and behaved themselves very imperiously to the Jury, as Persons not more void of Justice than sober Education: After this barbarous Usage, they sent them to consider of bringing in their Verdict, and after some considerable time they returned to the Court. Silence was call’d for, and the Jury call’d by their Names. CLER. Are you agreed upon your Verdict? JURY. Yes. CLER. Who shall speak for you? JURY. Our Fore-man. CLER. Look upon the Prisoners at the Bar. How say you? Is William Penn Guilty of the Matter whereof he stands indicted in Manner and Form, or Not Guilty? FORE-M. Guilty of Speaking in Gracechurch-Street. COURT. Is that all? FORE-M. That is all I have in Commission. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS REC. You had as good say nothing. MAY. Was it not an unlawful Assembly? You mean he was speaking to a Tumult of People there? FORE-M. My Lord, This is all I had in Commission. OBSER. Here some of the Jury seemed to buckle to the Questions of the Court; upon which, Bushel, Hammond, and some others, opposed themselves, and said, they allowed of no such Word, as an unlawful Assembly in their Verdict; at which the Recorder, Mayor, Robinson and Bloodworth took great occasion to villifie them with most opprobrious Language; and this Verdict not serving their Turns, the Recorder express’d himself thus. REC. The Law of England will not allow you to part till you have given in your Verdict. JURY. We have given in our Verdict, and we can give in no other. REC. Gentlemen, you have not given in your Verdict, and you had as good say nothing; therefore go and consider it once more, that we may make an end of this troublesome Business. JURY. We desire we may have Pen, Ink and Paper. OBSER. The Court adjourn’d for half an Hour; which being expired, the Court returns, and the Jury not long after. The Prisoners were brought to the Bar, and the Jury’s Names called over. CLER. Are you agreed of your Verdict? JUR. Yes. CLER. Who shall speak for you? JUR. Our Fore-man. CLER. What say you, look upon the Prisoners: Is William Penn Guilty in Manner and Form, as he stands indicted, or Not Guilty? FORE-M. Here is our verdict, holding forth a piece of Paper to the Clerk of the Peace, We the Jurors, hereafter named, do find William Penn to be Guilty of Speaking or Preaching to an Assembly, met together in Gracechurch-Street, the 14th of August last, 1670. And that William Mead is Not guilty of the said Indictment. Fore-m, Thomas Veer, Edward Bushel, John Hammond, Henry Henley, Henry Michel, John Brightman, Charles Milson, Gregory Walklet, John Baily, William Lever, James Damask, Wm. Plumsted. OBSER. This both Mayor and Recorder resented as so high a rate, that they exceeded the Bounds of all Reason and Civility. MAY. What will you be led by such a silly Fellow as Bushel? an impudent canting Fellow? I warrant you, you shall come no more upon Juries in haste: You are a Fore-man indeed, addressing himself to the Fore-man, I thought you had understood your Place better. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES PEN. My Jury, who are my Judges, ought not to be thus menaced; their Verdict should be free, and not compelled; the Bench ought to wait upon them, but not forestall them. I do desire that Justice may be done me, and that the Arbitrary Resolves of the Bench may not be made the Measure of my Jury’s Verdict. REC. Stop that prating Fellow’s Mouth, or put him out of the Court. MAY. You have heard that he preach’d, that he gathered a Company of tumultuous People, and that they do not only disobey the Martial Power, but Civil also. PEN. It is a great Mistake; we did not make the Tumult, but they that interrupted us: The Jury cannot be so ignorant, as to think, that we met there, with a Design to disturb the Civil Peace, since (1st.) we were by Force of Arms kept out of our lawful House, and met as near it in the Street, as their soldiers would give us leave; and (2dly.) because it was no new thing (nor with the Circumstances expres’d in the Indictment) but what was usual and customary with us; ’t is very well known that we are a peaceable People, and cannot offer Violence to any Man. OBSER. The Court being ready to break up, and willing to huddle the Prisoners to their Goal, and the Jury to their Chamber, Penn spoke as follows: PEN. The Agreement of Twelve Men is a Verdict in Law, and such a one being given by the Jury, I require the Clerk of the Peace to record it, as he will answer it at his Peril. And if the Jury bring in another Verdict contradictory to this, I affirm they are perjur’d Men in Law. And looking upon the Jury, said, You are Englishmen, mind your Privilege, give not away your Right. BUSH, etc. Nor will we ever do it. OBSER. One of the Jury-men pleaded Indisposition of Body, and therefore desired to be dismist. MAY. You are as strong as any of them; starve with them; and hold your Principles. REC. Gentlemen, You must be contented with your hard Fate, let your Patience overcome it; for the Court is resolved to have a Verdict, and that before you can be dismist. JURY. We are agreed, we are agreed, we are agreed. OBSER. The Court swore several Persons, to keep the Jury all Night without Meat, Drink, Fire, or any other Accomodation; they had not so much as a Chamberpot, tho’ desired. CRY. O Yes, etc. OBSER. The Court adjourns till Seven of the Clock next Morning (being the 4th Instant, vulgarly call’d Sunday) at which time the Prisoners were brought to the Bar: The Court sat, and the Jury called to bring in their Verdict. CRY. O Yes, etc. —- Silence in the Court, upon pain of Imprisonment. The Jury’s Names called over. CLER. Are you agreed upon your Verdict? JUR. Yes. CLER. Who shall speak for you? JUR. Our Fore-man. CLER. What say you? Look upon the Prisoners at the Bar. Is William Penn Guilty of the Matter whereof he stands indicted, in Manner and Form as aforesaid, or Not guilty? FORE-M. William Penn is guilty of Speaking in Gracechurch-Street. MAY. To an unlawful Assembly? BUSH. No, my Lord, we give no other Verdict than what we gave last Night; we have no other Verdict to give. MAY. You are a factious Fellow, I ’11 take a Course with you. BLOOD. I knew Mr. Bushel would not yield. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS BUSH. Sir Thomas I have done according to my Conscience. MAY. That Conscience of yours would cut my Throat. BUSH. No, my Lord, it never shall. MAY. But I will cut yours so soon as I can. REC. He has inspired the Jury; he has the Spirit of Divination, methinks I feel him. I will have a positive Verdict, or you shall starve for it. PEN. I desire to ask the Recorder one Question, Do you allow of the Verdict given of William Mead? REC. It cannot be a Verdict, because you were indicted for a Conspiracy, and one being found Not guilty, and not the other, it could not be a Verdict. PEN. If Not guilty be not a Verdict, then you make of the Jury and Magna Charta but a meer Nose of Wax. MEAD. How! is Not guilty no Verdict? REC. No, ’tis no Verdict. PEN. I affirm, that the Consent of a Jury is a Verdict in Law; and if William Mead be Not guilty, it consequently follows, that I am clear, since you have indicted us of a Conspiracy, and I could not possibly conspire alone. OBSER. There were many Passages, that could not be taken, which past between the Jury and the Court. The Jury went up again, having received a fresh Charge from the Bench, if possible to extort an unjust Verdict. CRY. O Yes, etc. Silence in the Court. COUR. Call over the Jury. Which was done. CLER. What say you? Is William Penn Guilty of the Matter whereof he stands indicted, in Manner and Form aforesaid, or Not Guilty? FORE-MAN. Guilty of speaking in Grace-church-Street. REC. What is this to the Purpose? I say, I will have a Verdict. And speaking to Edw. Bushel, said, You are a factious Fellow; I will set a Mark upon you; and whilst I have anything to do in the City, I will have an eye upon you. MAY. Have you no more Wit than to be led by such a pitiful Fellow? I will cut his Nose. PEN. It is intolerable that my Jury should be thus menaced: Is this according to the Fundamental Laws? Are not they my proper Judges by the great Charter of England? What hope is there of ever having Justice done, when Juries are threatened, and their Verdicts rejected? I am concerned to speak and grieved to see such Arbitrary Proceedings. Did not the Lieutenant of the Tower render one of them worse than a Felon? And do you not plainly seem to condemn such for factious Fellows, who answer not your Ends? Unhappy are those Juries, who are threatened to be fined, and starved, and ruined, if they give not in Verdicts contrary to their Consciences. REC. My Lord, you must take a Course with that same Fellow. MAY. Stop his Mouth; Jaylor, bring Fetters, and stake him to the Ground. PEN. Do your Pleasure, I matter not your Fetters. REC. Till now I never understood the Reason of the Policy and Prudence of the Spaniards, in suffering the Inquisition among them: And certainly it will never be well with us, till something like unto the Spanish Inquisition be in England. OBSER. The Jury being required to go together to find another Verdict, and steadfastly refusing it (saying they could give no other Verdict than what was already given) the Recorder in great Passion was running off the Bench, with these Words in his Mouth, I protest I will sit here no longer to hear these Things; at which the Mayor calling, Stay, stay, he returned, and directed himself unto the Jury, and spoke as followeth: HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES REC. Gentlemen, we shall not be at this trade always with you; you will find the next Sessions of Parliament there will be a Law made, that those that will not conform shall not have the Protection of the Law. Mr. Lee, draw up another Verdict, that they may bring it in special. LEE. I cannot tell how to do it. JUR. We ought not to be return’d, having all agreed, and set our Hands to the Verdict. REC. Your Verdict is nothing, you play upon the Court; I say you shall go together, and bring in another Verdict, or you shall starve; and I will have you charted about the City, as in Edward the Third’s time. FORE-M. We have given in our Verdict, and all agreed to it; and if we give in another, it will be a Force upon us to save our Lives. MAY. Take them up. OFFIC. My Lord, they will not go up. OBSER. The Mayor spoke to the Sheriff, and he came off of his seat, and said. SHER. Come, Gentlemen, you must go up; you see I am commanded to make you go. OBSER. Upon which the Jury went up; and several sworn to keep them without any Accommodation, as aforesaid, till they brought in their Verdict. CRY. O yes, etc. The Court adjourns till to Morrow Morning, at seven of the Clock. OBSER. The Prisoners were remanded to Newgate, where they remained till next Morning, and then were brought unto the Court, which being sat, they proceeded as followeth. CRY. O yes, etc. Silence in the Court, upon pain of Imprisonment. CLER. Set William Penn and William Mead to the Bar. Gentlemen of the Jury, answer to your Names: Tho. Veer, Edw. Bushel, John Hammond, Henry Henly, Henry Michell, John Brightman, Charles Milson, Gregory Walklet, John Baily, William Leavet, James Damask, William Plumstead. Are you all agreed of your Verdict? JUR. Yes. CLER. Who shall speak for you? JUR. Our Fore-man. CLER. Look upon the Prisoners. What say you? Is William Penn Guilty of the Matter whereof he stands indicted, in Manner and Form, etc., or Not Guilty? FORE-MAN. Here is our Verdict in Writing, and our Hands subscribed. OBSER. The Clerk took the paper, but was stopt by the Recorder from reading of it; and he commanded to ask for a positive Verdict. FORE-MAN. That is our Verdict; we have subscribed to it. CLER. How say you? Is William Penn Guilty, &c., or Not Guilty? FORE-MAN. Not guilty. CLER. How say you? Is William Mead Guilty, &c., or Not Guilty? FORE-MAN. Not guilty. CLER. Then hearken to your Verdict; you say that William Penn is Not Guilty in Manner and Form as he stands indicted; you say that William Mead is Not guilty in Manner and Form as he stands indicted, and so you say all? JUR. Yes, we do so. OBSER. The Bench being unsatisfied with the Verdict, commanded that every Person should distinctly answer to their Names, and give in their Verdict, which they unanimously did, in saying, Not Guilty, to the great Satisfaction of the Assembly. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS REC. I am sorry, Gentlemen, you have followed your own Judgments and Opinions, rather than the good and wholsome Advice, which was given you; God keep my Life out of your Hands; but for this the Court Fines you forty Mark a Man; and Imprisonment till paid. At which Penn stept up towards the Bench, and said: PEN. I demand my Liberty, being freed by the Jury. MAY. No, you are in for your Fines. PEN. Fines, for what? MAY. For contempt of the Court. PEN. I ask, if it be according to the Fundamental Laws of England, that any English-Man should be Fined or Amerced, but by the Judgment of his Peers or Jury; since it expressly contradicts the fourteenth and twenty-ninth Chap. of the great Charter of England, which say, No Free-Man ought to be amerced, but by the Oath of good and Lawful Men of the Vicinage. REC. Take him away, Take him away, take him out of the Court. PEN. I can never urge the Fundamental Laws of England, but you cry, Take him away, take him away. But it is no wonder, Since the Spanish Inquisition hath so great a place in the Recorder’s Heart. God Almighty, who is just, will judge you all for these things. ORSER. They haled the Prisoners into the Bale-dock, and from thence sent them to Newgate, for Non-payment of their Fines; and so were their Jury. [End of transcript.]

Appendix: (Several letters of William Penn from Newgate Prison to his father, William Penn the Admiral, taken from another source.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES

5th of 7th month, 1670. Dear Father, HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS Because I cannot come, I write. These are to let thee know that this morning about sever we were remanded to the sessions. The jury, after two nights and two days being locked up, came down and offered their former verdict; but that being refused as not positive, they explained themselves by pronouncing the prisoners Not Guilty. Upon this the bench were amazed, and the whole court so satisfied they made a kind of hymn. But that the Mayor, Recorder, and Robinson might add to their malice, they fined us for not pulling off our hats, and have kept us prisoners for the money — an injurious trifle, which will blow over, as we shall bring it to the Common Pleas, because it was against law, as not sessed by a jury. How great a dissatisfactions their actions have begot may reasonably be conjectured by the bare mention of them. 1st. — That the jury was about six times rejected in their verdict; and besides illegal menaces, were kept two days and two nights without bed, tobacco, provisions, etc. 2nd. — That a session should be held on the first day of the week. 3rd. — That the jury, the only judges by law, should be fined forty marks each for the verdict they brought in, and to be prisoners till they have paid it. However, their verdict for us is accepted, because they dare not deny it. This is the substance. The particular circumstances I shall personally relate, if the Lord will. I am more concerned at thy distemper and the pains that attend it, than at my own mere imprisonment, which works for the best. I am, dear father, Thy obedient son, William Penn.

Newgate, 6th, 7th mo., 1670. Dear Father, I desire thee not to be troubled at my present confinement; I could scarce suffer on a better account, nor by a worse hand, and the will of God be done. It is more grievous and uneasy to me that that should be so heavily exercised, God Almighty knows, than any world confinement. I am cleared by the jury, and they are here in my place, and resolved to lie till they get out by law. Every six hours they demand their freedom, by advice of counsel. They (the court) have so overshot themselves, that the generality of people much detest them. I entreat thee not to purchase my liberty. They will repent them of their proceedings. I am now a prisoners notoriously against law. I desire in fervent prayer the Lord God to strengthen and support thee, and to anchor thy mind in thoughts of the immutable blessed state which is over all perishing concerns. I am, dear father, Thy obedient son, William Penn. Newgate, 7th September, 1670. Dear Father, I am truly grieved to hear of thy present illness. If God in His holy will did see meet that I should be freed, I could heartily embrace it; yet, considering I cannot be free but upon such terms as strengthen their arbitrary and base proceedings, I rather choose to suffer nay hardship, and I am persuaded some clearer way will suddenly be found to obtain my liberty; which is no way so desirable to me as on the account of being with thee. I am not without hope that the Lord will sanctify the endeavours of thy physician unto a cure, and them much of my solicitude will be at an end. My present restraint is so far from being humour, that I would rather perish then release myself by an indirect course, or to satiate their revengeful, avaricious appetites. The advantage of such freedom would fall very short of the trouble of accepting it. Solace thy mind in the thoughts of better things, dear father. Let not this wicked world disturb thy mind, and whatever shall come to pass, I hope in all conditions to approve myself thy obedient son, William Penn. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES THE INTRIGUING DOCTRINE OF

JURY NULLIFICATION

Julius J. Marke Distinguished Research Professor of Law, St. John’s University; Professor of Law Emeritus, New York University

Jury nullification, despite the role it played in the O.J. Simpson trial, has had a long and meaningful tradition. In that context, the Seventeenth Century trial of William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, and Bushell’s Case which arose from it, played a dramatically inspiring role. Prior to Penn’s trial, judges could require juries in criminal trials to render a verdict not only on the facts in issue, but as well, on the applicable law. Questions of law involved in criminal cases, judges then maintained, were not so complicated as to excuse jurors from reaching a verdict. Judges used many methods to force a jury to do as they charged. A jury could be locked up, without water, food, heat, tobacco, or light, until it returned a unanimous verdict or one the judge directed. Judges could also levy a fine against members of the jury if they brought in a contrary or “corrupt” verdict and even impose imprisonment until the fine was paid. Penn was placed on trial in the Old Bailey Court in 1670 for the crime of “tumultuous assembly,” because he preached a sermon in Grace Church Street in violation of the “Conventicle Act” which prohibited any meeting for worship other than those of the Church of England. The Court ordered the jury to find Penn guilty, for if they found the Quakers had met at all, the very meeting by itself was unlawful. The jury, however, found that the meeting had taken place, but refused to find the law had been violated. Penn, at the time, was only 26 years old, and had to conduct his own defense, as accused persons in criminal cases in those days were not allowed counsel to represent them. The trial is a dramatic example of the cavalier methods used by judges at the time. The jury consisted of twelve ordinary middle-class men selected at random from the jury rolls of the City of London. The ten judges who heard the case included the Lord Mayor, the Recorder (a Magistrate), and other representatives of government who were motivated to enforce the “Conventicle Act.” As we read the transcript of the trial (which Penn published in 1670 as the Peoples Ancient and Just Liberties, Asserted in the Trial of William Penn and William Mead ... Against The Most Arbitrary Procedure Of That Court.), Penn’s logic and legal acumen must be admired. He baited the judges so skillfully on the role of the Common law, that they in turn tired to heckle and bully him. Finally, completely frustrated, they ordered that he be locked up in the bale dock. The bale dock was a locked cage, recessed below the floor level, located at the very end of the courtroom. There he could be heard but not seen by the jury. When the jury returned a verdict of “guilty of speaking in Grace Church Street,” the Lord Mayor shouted out, “was it not an unlawful assembly? You mean he was speaking to a tumult of people there?” The jury refused to so find. The Recorder then angrily responded “Gentlemen, you shall not be dismissed till you bring in a verdict which the court will accept. You shall be locked up, without meat, drink, fire and tobacco. You shall not think thus to abuse the court. We will have a verdict by the help of God or you shall starve for it.” Penn objected: “My jury, who are my judges, ought not to be thus menaced. Their verdict should be free-not forced. The agreement of twelve men is a verdict in law ... and if, after this, the jury brings in another verdict, contrary to this, I affirm they are perjured men.” At this point while Penn was still talking, the soldiers started to push the jury back to the jury room and then occurred one of the most inspiring incidents in the annals of English jurisprudence. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS Penn called out: “Ye are Englishmen, mind your privilege, give not away your right.” And the jury replied., “Nor will we ever do it.” The jury was kept for two days and nights, without food, water, and heat, but refused to change its verdict. Finally the court ended the trial abruptly, fining each juror forty marks and committing them to imprisonment until they paid their fines. Bushell, the foreman, and the other jurors obtained a writ of habeas corpus from the Court of Common Pleas. Releasing them from their imprisonment, Chief Justice Sir John Vaughan held “...for if it be demanded what is the fact? The judge cannot answer it: if it be asked, what is the law in this case, the jury cannot answer it.” Although the judgment was later reversed on appeal because the Court of Common Pleas did not have jurisdiction in criminal matters, Bushell’s Case established the right of trial juries to decide cases according to their convictions. Andrew Hamilton, one of the foremost attorneys in the Colonies, used the case with telling effect as a precedent in Peter Zenger’s trial in 1735 in New York, which established freedom of the press. Zenger was accused of publishing a seditious libel in his newspaper defaming the Governor General of the Province of New York. Though the Court ruled that the truth of a seditious libel could not be set up as a defense as a matter of law, Hamilton insisted, based on Bushell’s Case, that it is for the jury to determine whether Zenger’s comments were true. “The right of the jury,” he argued, “to find such a verdict in their conscience do think is agreeable to their evidence, is supported by the authority of Bushell’s Case beyond any doubt....” The jury followed his advice, and despite the judge’s charge to the contrary, acquitted Zenger. Bushell’s Case gave a new meaning to the jury system in that it made the jury an equal to the executive and legislative branches of the government in the enforcement of criminal law. In this context, it is recognized as the power of the jury to nullify the law by reflecting in their verdict the “Conscience of the Community,” and is considered “one of the most potent forces in the criminal law.” As brought out by Professor A.D. Leipold, in his article “Rethinking Jury Nullification,” (82 Va.L.Rev. 253, March 1996) “Nullification occurs when the defendant’s guilt is clear beyond a reasonable doubt, but the jury based on its own sense of justice or fairness, decides to acquit [against the evidence, the judge’s legal instructions and a legislative definition of culpable conduct]. In terms of raw power, nullification has few parallels: rarely can a public entity, make such a critical decision with no obligation to justify its action and with no recourse for the aggrieved party.” Jury nullification has been praised, in that the acquittal reflects a democratic process by which the jury can interpose its own moral or political judgment in defiance of an unpopular expression of governmental action. By the same process however, it has been denounced as an act of anarchy. In addition to the Simpson Case, jury nullification has played a significant role in other recent high profile cases, in which despite the obvious evidence that the defendant committed the crime charged yet the jury disregarded the evidence and acquitted in whole or part. For example, those involving Washington D.C. Mayor Marion Barry (although the Mayor was videotaped smoking cocaine, the jury convicted Barry of only one misdemeanor count of drug possession, acquitted on another and deadlocked on the remaining twelve charges); Dr. Jack Kevorkian (although the evidence was uncontroverted that Kevorkian had assisted in the suicide of the deceased, in violation of Michigan law, still the jury acquitted him); and Oliver North, (a former White House aid, was acquitted of 9 of the 12 charges against him, in that he lied to Congress, obstructed justice by diverting funds in the sale of arms to Iran and money to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, despite the judge’s charge that his claim that he acted on the orders of superiors, was not a defense, still the jury convicted him only on the charges that he acted alone). In his book, “A Crime of Self Defense” (1996), Prof. George Fletcher, thoughtfully adds: “Although jury nullification seems to stand in conflict with the rule of law [still] careful reflection underscores the power of the jury not to defeat the law, but to perfect the law, to realize the law’s inherent values!” QUAKER FAKELORE HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES SET AN EXAMPLE

LIES QUAKERS

ESSENCE IS BLUR. SPECIFICITY, THE OPPOSITE OF ESSENCE, IS OF THE NATURE OF TRUTH.

Quakers “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES

1675

This race war in the New England colonies allowed the creation of a Quaker mythology in regard to the new Peace Testimony that was then drifting across the pond from the English Civil War. The mythology was that the Peace Testimony was understood as applying to all human beings equivalently and that the Quakers of America embraced that testimony in their dealings with the Native American tribes and took no part in the mutual slaughter. They did not. The mythology was that the native Americans had a special place in their hearts for the Quakers, and refrained from harming them. They did not. The presumption at the time was that the new Peace Testimony applied in regard to disagreements among decent, rational white people, and could have no application when the disagreements were with red savages, since the red savages were able to understand nothing but push-and- shove violence.

June 11, Friday (Old Style): The women and children of the promontory known as Mount Hope in the bay of Rhode Island were taken across the bay for sanctuary in the Narragansett country. Braves started appearing more frequently in the neighborhood of the smaller outlying hamlets. There was a report that the Wampanoag near Swansea (Swanzy) were under arms.

“KING PHILLIP’S WAR” The English, who were of course under arms, were of course greatly alarmed that any other than themselves would be under arms. Even Quaker adherents of the Peace Testimony were preparing for the coming race war: In 1675, King Philip’s War erupted, between native Americans and the English of the United Colonies of Massachusetts and Plymouth. A 14-month war of exceptional loss of life, much of it fought on Rhode Island soil.... It is conventional wisdom that the Quaker government participated in the war only with great reluctance and minimal measures. But contradictory evidence modifies this view. While HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS it is clear that large-scale troop mobilisations did not occur ... the Quaker government directed military activities of both an offensive and defensive nature.... At the beginning of the war, in June 1675, the Quaker governor was John Easton, supported by five Quaker assistants and at least four Quaker deputies. All of the men were early and substantial leaders within the Rhode Island meeting. The Newport Monthly Meetings, for example were held at Governor William Coddington’s house, where indeed George Fox attended Yearly Meeting in 1672. The legislative records, noting the “dangerous hurries with the Indians,”3 show that the government engaged in mobilising councils of war in the towns, ordering ammunition, mounting “great guns” and transporting Plymouth soldiers.4 Quakers were specifically commissioned to oversee watches in Rhode Island, to evaluate whether to fund a garrison in Providence, to procure and manage the deployment of four boats, each with five or six men, and to patrol the waters of Narragansett Bay.5 The Assembly appointed a major to command the military forces of the colony, thereby centralizing the war power. Governor Coddington signed the major’s commission “to use your utmost endeavor to kill, expulse, expell, take and destroy all and every the enemies of this his Majesty’s Collony.”6 QUAKER FAKELORE

December 19, Sunday (Old Style): Forces of the United Colonies assaulted a sanctuary which the Narragansett tribespeople had set up in order to avoid turning over their wives and children to the whites as hostages, in the “Great Swamp,” a swamp in what is now South Kingstown, Rhode Island. In an attempt to assimilate this battle to the battle which ended the Pequot War, which had occurred in a swamp near Fairfield on July 13, 1637, both of these battles would come to be referred to as “The Great Swamp Fight.” This particular slaughter would excite a rather crude piece of doggerel: ’Tis fear’d a thousand Natives young and old,

3. RECORDS OF THE COLONY OF RHODE ISLAND...Volume 2, page 531 4. Friend Walter Clarke’s letter to the magistrates at Providence, 19th day of 9th month, 1675 5. RECORDS OF THE COLONY OF RHODE ISLAND...Volume 2, pages 531-537, passim 6. RECORDS OF THE COLONY OF RHODE ISLAND...Volume 2, page 538. The fact of the matter seems to be that the Quakers of the region considered their Peace Testimony to apply only to conflicts among white people. Popular histories of this race war would come to declare, however, that the Quakers of the region had remained at peace with their Indian neighbors during this conflict, and had been unmolested in their homes due to their recognized gentleness and piety. FAKELORE HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES Went to a place in their opinion cold. “KING PHILLIP’S WAR” HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS The bloody-minded Reverend Cotton Mather would remember this Great Swamp Fight as the tailgate party at which the Narragansett tribe had been “Berbikew’d,” his spelling. (Get a clue: he was a Puritan and the land had been purified. –What could possibly be offensive about ethnic cleansing?)

It had been at 5 AM that the white soldiers had formed up after their night in the cold snow without blankets, and set out toward this Narragansett stronghold. They had arrived at the edge of the Great Swamp, an area around South Kingstown, at about 1 PM. The Massachusetts troops in the lead were fired upon by a small band of native Americans and pursued without waiting for orders. As the natives retreated they came along across the frozen swamp to the entrance of the fort, which was on an island of sorts standing above the swamp, and consisted of a triple palisade of logs twelve feet high. There were small blockhouses at intervals above this palisade. Inside, the main village sheltered about 3,000 men, women, and children. The Massachusetts troops had been enticed to arrive at precisely the strongest section of the palisade where, however, there was a gap for which no gate had yet been built. Across this gap the natives had placed a tree trunk breast height, as a barrier to check any charge, and just above the gap was a blockhouse. Without waiting for the Plymouth and Connecticut companies, the Massachusetts soldiers charged the opening and swarmed over the barrier. Five company commanders were killed in the charge but the troops managed to remain for a period inside the fort before falling back into the swamp. The Massachusetts men, now joined by Plymouth, gathered themselves for a 2d charge. Meanwhile, Major Treat led his Connecticut troops round to the back of the fort where the palisade had not been finished. Here and there the posts were spaced apart and protected only by a tangled mass of limbs and brush. The men charged up a bank under heavy fire and forced their way past the palisade. As they gained a foothold inside, the second charge at the gap also forced an entrance and the battle raged through the Indian village. It was a fight without quarter on either side, and was still raging at sunset when Winslow ordered the wooden lodges put to the torch. The flames, whipped by the winds of the driving HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES snowstorm, spread quickly. Winslow decided that the army had to fall back to the shelter of Smith’s Trading Post in Coccumscossoc (Wickford), where some resupply ships might have arrived. The English gathered their wounded, the worst being placed on horseback, and fell back toward Wickford. It would not be until 2 AM that the leading units would stumble into the town. Some, losing their way, would not get shelter until 7 AM. This three-hour battle was the end of the Narragansett Campaign. The English suffering 20 killed and 200 wounded (80 of whom who later die from their wounds, there being 40 English corpses interred in one common trench in Wickford) and the Narragansett likewise suffered high casualties although about a thousand did escape.

At least one armed white man who was killed while attempting to kill others was a Quaker and an officer: “The usual interpretation of the actions and inactions of the Rhode Island government has been that its members were inhibited by the pacifist scruples of the Quakers among them. Historians have not cited, nor have I found, evidence upon which to base this belief.... Such reading back of later Quaker understandings of the peace testimony obscures not only other wartime motives but the nature of the peace testimony as it was understood in that particular time and place. Third, in many respects the government activities do not appear to have been constrained. ... There were Quakers who bore arms during the war. Captain Weston Clarke, who was sent to relieve Warwick, Lieutenant Robert Westcott, who was killed in the Great Swamp Fight, and Abraham Mann of Providence, who was wounded are three examples.” — Meredith Baldwin Weddle, WALKING IN THE WAY OF PEACE: QUAKER PACIFISM IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. England: Oxford UP, 2001, pages 172-173, page 204 THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

(Presumably Friend Robert Westcott, like the Reverend Roger Williams, had taken pains to consult with God and had been listening to the “mind and voice of the most high amongst us,” and had assured himself that Quakers who were “contrary” to war were simply mistaken as to God’s will! —You must lie in your blood, you “barbarous men of Bloud”!)

(Presumably, since Friend Abraham Mann of Providence who was wounded during the Great Swamp Fight was a white man, he was then tenderly cared for by the Quaker caretakers on Aquidneck Island, who tenderly cared for those who had been wounded in the fight, if they were white men!)

While the Narragansett were not completely crushed there can be no question that the Great Swamp Fight was the turning point in the war. If the tribe had been able to join the Wampanoag at full strength in the spring the war would have lasted much longer. The Narragansett would have a few more victories in 1676, would burn Rehoboth and Providence, and in March would ambush Captain Michael Pierce, but for all practical purposes they were out of the war.

In the course of this single race battle with the English, the Narragansett would lose almost 20% of its entire population, and massacre and starvation would soon be killing off most of the remainder. By 1682 fewer than 500 would remain of the original estimated 10,000 souls who had existed as of 1610. After 1682 this remnant would be allowed by the English to settle with the Eastern Niantic on a reservation at Charlestown, Rhode Island. The Narragansett tribal registry currently list over 2,400 members, most of whom reside in Rhode Island.7 HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS Most contemporary accounts of this second of the “great swamp fights” have been based upon a couple of letters by the white army’s chaplain, the Reverend Joseph Dudley, and one by Captain James Oliver, commander of the 3d Company of the Massachusetts regiment:

May it please your Honnr Mr Smiths 15, 10, 75

I am comanded by the Generall to give your Honnor account of our proceeding since our last frm Pautuxet in the Sabath evening we advanced the whole body from Mr Carpenters with Intent to surprise Ponham & his Party at about 10 or 12 Miles Distance having information by oue Warwick scouts of his seat but the darkness of ye Night Diffucutly of our Passage & unskillfulness of Pilots we passed the whole night & found ourselves at such Distance yet from ym yt we Diverted & Marched to Mr Smiths, found our sloops from Seaconck arrived since which by ye help of Indian Peter by whom your Honnor had the Information formerly of ye number & resolution of ye Naragansetts, we have burned two of their towns viz; Ahmus who is this summer come down amongst them & ye old Queens quarters consisting of about 150 Many of them large wigwams & seized or slayn 50 Persons in all our prisoners being about 40 Concerning whom the generall prayes your advice concerning their transportation and Disposall all which was performed without any loss save a slight wound by an Arrow in Lieut. Wayman’s face, the whole body of them we find removed into their great swamp at Canonicus his quarters where we hope with the addition of Connecticut, when arrived we hope to coop them up, this day we Intend the removall or spoyle of yr Corn & hope to Morrow a March toward them, our soldiers being very chearful are forward noywithstanding great Difficulty by weather & otherwise, abovsd Peter whom we have found very faithful will Make us believe yt yr are 3000 fighting Men many unarmed Many well fitted with lances we hope by cutting off their forage to force them to a fayre battle In ye Mean time I have only to present the Genralls humble service to your & to beg you Intense prayers for this so great Concern and remayn your

Honnors Humble Servant Jos: Dudley Goodale nor Moor arrived we fear want of shot My humble service to Madam Leveret Brother and Sister Hubbard & Dudley Amongst our Prisonrs & Slayn we find 10 or 12 Wampanoags

7. In Rhode Island especially, after the population disaster of “King Phillip’s War”, many native women would form new households with black men. Rhode Island would be boasting the largest black population in New England and a significant proportion of these blacks would be free, so in many cases this was their best available option. These unions would result in a new category of person, the “mustee,” who was considered to be a native American by himself or herself but not by the “white people” who were de facto making all such distinctions. You may therefore run into some hot arguments if you cite these population statistics, from whites who will attempt to insist to you that “it’s all just a bunch of n-----s making pretenses,” quote unquote. (You’ll have to live in Rhode Island for awhile, and argue cases of land title and cases of casino gambling, to get the full flavor of this.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES

Mr Smith’s, 21, 10, 1675

May it please your honour

The comming of the Connecticut force to Petaquamscott, and surprisal of six and slaughter of five on Friday night, Saturday we marched towards Petaquamscott, though in snow, and in conjunction about midnight or later, we advanced: Capt. Mosley led the van, after him Massachusetts, and Plimouth and Connecticut in the rear; a tedious march in the snow, without intermission, brought us about two of the clock afternoon, to the entrance of the swamp, by the help of Indian Peter, who dealt faithfully with us; our men, with great courage, entered the swamp about twenty rods; within the cedar swamp we found some hundreds of wigwams, forted in with a breastwork and flankered, and many small blockhouses up and down, round about; they entertained us with a fierce fight, and many thousand shot, for about an hour, when our men valiantly scaled the fort, beat them thence, and from the blockhouses. In which action we lost Capt. Johnson, Capt. Danforth, and Capt. Gardiner, and their lieutenants disabled, Capt. Marshall also slain; Capt Seely, Capt. Mason, disabled, and many other officers, insomuch that, by a fresh assault and recruit powder from their store, the Indians fell on again, recarried and beat us out of, the fort, but by the great resolution and courage of the General and Major, we reinforced, and very hardly entered the fort again, and fired the wigwams, with many living and dead persons in them, great piles of meat and heaps of corn, the ground not permitting burial of their store, were consumed; the number of their dead, we generally suppose the enemy lost at least two hundred men; Capt. Mosely counted in one corner of the fort sixty four men; Capt. Goram reckoned 150 at least; But, O! Sir, mine heart bleeds to give your honor an account of our lost men, but especially our resolute Captains, as by account inclosed, and yet not so many, but we admire there remained any to return, a captive women, well known to Mr. Smith, informing that there were three thousand five hundred men engaging us and about a mile distant a thousand in reserve, to whom if God had so pleased, we had but been a morsel, after so much disablement: she informeth, that one of their sagamores was slain and their powder spent, causing their retreat, and that they are in a distressed condition for food and houses, that one Joshua Tift, an Englishman, is their encourager and conducter. Philip was seen by one, credilbly informing us, under a strong guard. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS

After our wounds were dressed, we drew up for a march, not able to abide the field in the storm, and weary, about two of the clock, obtained our quarters, with our dead and wounded, only the General, Ministers, and some other persons of the guard, going to head a small swamp, lost our way, and returned again to the evening quarters, a wonder we were not prey to them, and, after at least thirty miles marching up and down, in the morning, recovered our quarters, and had it not been for the arrival of Goodale next morning, the whole camp had perished; The whole army, especially Connecticut, is much disabled and unwilling to march, with tedious storms, and no lodgings, and frozen and swollen limbs, Major Treat importunate to return to at least Stonington; Our dead and wounded are about two hundred, disabled as many; the want of officers, the consideration whereof the Genreal commends to your honer, forbids any action at present, and we fear whether Connecticut will comply, at last, to any action. We are endeavoring, by good keeping and billetting oue men at several quarters, and, if possible removel of our wounded to Rhode Isalnd, to recover the spirit of our soldiers, and shall be diligent to find and understand the removals on other action of the enemy, if God please to give us advantage against them.

As we compleat the account of dead, now in doing, The Council is of the mind, without recruit of men we shall not be able to engage the main body.

I give your honor hearty thanks for your kind lines, of which I am not worthy I am Sir, your honors humble servant Joseph Dudley Since the writing of these lines, the General and Council have jointly concluded to abide on the place, notwithstanding the desire of Connecticut, only entreat that a supply of 200 may be sent us, with supply of commanders; and, whereas we are forced to garrison our quarters with at least one hundred, three hundred men, upon joint account of colonies, will serve, and no less, to effect the design. This is by order of the council. Blunderbusses, and hand grenadoes, and armour, if it may, and at least two armourers to mend arms. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES

Narragansett 26th 11th month 1675

After a tedious march in a bitter cold that followed the Dec. 12th, we hoped our pilot would have led us to Ponham by break of day, but so it came to pass we were misled and so missed a good opportunity. Dec. 13th we came to Mr Smith’s, and that day took 35 prisoners. Dec 14th, our General went out with a horse and foot, I with my company was kept to garrison. I sent out 30 of my men to scout abroad, who killed two Indians and brought in 4 prisoners, one of which was beheaded. Our amy came home at night, killed 7 and brought in 9 more, young and old. Dec 15th, came in John, a rogue, with pretense of peace, and was dismissed with this errand, that we might speak with Sachems. That evening, ho not being gone a quarter of an hour, his company that lay hid behind a hill killed two Salem men within a mile from our quarters, and wounded a third that he is dead. And at a house three miles off where I had 10 men, they killed 2 of them. Instantly, Capt. Mosely, myself and Capt Gardner were sent to fetch in Major Appleton’s company that kept 3 miles and a half off, and coming, they lay behind a stone wall and fired on us in sight of the garrison. We killed the captain that killed one of the Salem men, and had his cap on. That night they burned Jerry Bull’s house, and killed 17. Dec. 16th came that news. Dec 17th came news that Connecticut forces were at Petasquamscot, and had killed 4 Indians and took 6 prisoners. That day we sold Capt. Davenport 47 Indians, young and old for 80l. in money. Dec 18th we marched to Petaquamscot with all our forces, only a garrison left; that night very stormy; we lay, one thousand, in the open field that long night. In the morning, Dec. 19th, Lord’s day, at 5 o’clock we marched. Between 12 and 1 we came up with the enemy, and had a sore fight three hours. We lost, that are now dead, about 68, and had 150 wounded, many of which recovered. That long snowy cold night we had about 18 miles to our quarters, with about 210 dead and wounded. We left 8 dead in the fort. We had but 12 dead when we came to the swamp, besides the 8 we left. Many died by the way, and as soon as they we brought in, so that Dec. 20th we buried in a grave 34, next day 4, next day 2, and none since. Eight died at Rhode Island, 1 at Petaquamscot, 2 lost in the woods and killed Dec. 20, as we heard since; some say two more died. By the best intelligence, we killed 300 fighting men; prisoners we took, say 350, and above 300 women and children. We burnt above 500 houses, left but 9, burnt all their corn, that was in baskets, great store. One signal mercy that night, not to be forgotten, viz. That when we drew off, with so many dead and wounded, they did not pursue us, which the young men would have done, but the sachems would not consent; they had but ten pounds of powder let. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS

Our General, with about 40, lost our way, and wandered till 7 o’clock in the morning, before we came to our quarters. We thought we were within 2 miles of the enemy again, but God kept us; to him be the glory. We have killed now and then 1 since, and burnt 200 wigwams more; we killed 9 last Tuesday. We fetch in their corn daily and that undoes them. This is, as nearly as I can, a true relation. I read the narrative to my officers in my tent, who all assent to the truth of it. Mohegans and Pequods proved very false, fired into the air, and sent word before they came they would so, but got much plunder, guns and kettles. A great part of what is written was attested by Joshua Teffe, who married an Indian woman, a Wampanoag. He shot 20 times at us in the swamp, was taken at Providence Jan’y 14, brought to us the 16th, executed the 18th. A sad wretch, he never heard a sermon but once these 14 years. His father, going to recall him lost his head and lies unburied.

A list of Major Saml Apleton souldjers yt were slayne & wounded the 19th Decemb. ’75, at the Indians fort at Naragansett

In the Company of killed wounded Major Appleton 4 18 Capt. Mosely 6 9 Capt. Oliver 5 8 Capt. Davenport 4 11 Capt. Johnson 4 8 Capt. Gardiner 7 10 Capt. Prentice 1 3

31 67

Of the officers, Capts. Davenport, Johnson, and Gardiner were killed, and Lieutenants Upham, Savage, Swain, and Ting were wounded.

Of the Connecticut troops 71 were killed. Capt. Gallup- 10 Capt. Marshall- 14 Capt. Seeley- 20 Capt. Mason- 9 Capt. Watts- 17

SAMUEL MOSELY Edward DeWolf was one of the volunteers who surrounded the Swampy Fort, to whom the State of Connecticut granted the township of Narragansett, now Voluntown, as a reward for their services (however, presumably he continued to reside in Lyme). QUAKER FAKELORE HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES

1676

February 12, Saturday (1675, Old Style): In the wilderness near what would become Littleton, God was testing Mistress Mary Rowlandson: CAPTIVITY AND RESTAURATION

Refer to “3” on the map below: HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS

Alfred S. Hudson avers on pages 410-3 of his history of Concord that:

On the 12th, the Indians made a raid on Concord village, now a part of Littleton, and killed two men and captured a girl. The place of the tragedy was on the south side of Quagana Hill, and the persons slain and captured were children of Rafe and Thanklord Shepard who went from Malden near a place since called Bell Rock to Concord village, where they bought of Lieut. Joseph Wheeler of Concord 610 acres in the form of a triangle between the Indian reservation of Nashoba and that part of Chelmsford which adjoins Westford. Nagog pond forming the base of the triangle, the apex being two miles one-quarter and sixty rods north of the southwest end of Nagog pond. The names of the persons slain and captured were Isaac, Jacob, and Mary. Isaac was born June 20, 1639, and married Mary Smedley, 1667. Jacob was born in 1653, and Mary the youngest of the family was born in 1660 or 1662. When the Indians swooped down upon the Shepard homestead the ground was covered with snow to such a depth that snow shoes were used. The event happened on Saturday, and Isaac and Jacob were threshing in the barn. Being aware of the perilous times, they had set their sister on the summit of a hill to watch for Indians; but the savages eluded her vigilance and before she was aware of their presence she was captured and her brothers were slain. Tradition does not inform us just where the girl was taken to; some think it was in the neighborhood of Lancaster, others that it was as far off as Brookfield, but wherever it was she soon escaped and returned home. Hubbard in his narrative of the Indian wars says of Mary Shepard that “she strangely escaped away upon a horse that the Indians had taken from Lancaster a little while before.” Tradition asserts that she escaped during the night following the day of her capture and arrived home the next morning. Rev. Edmund Foster a former minister of Littleton in a “Century Sermon” preached in the year 1815, stated concerning the event that tradition says the girl was carried by the savages to Nashawa, now called Lancaster, or to some place in the neighborhood of it. Samuel gardner Drake in his notes on the “Old Indian Chronicle” says that the leader of the band who slew the Shepard brothers is supposed to have been Netus, the same who attacked the Eames family, and who was sometimes called the Nipmuck Captain. Netus was slain the 22nd of March following, by a company of men from Sudbury, who with some soldiers from Marlboro found him asleep with a company of Indians around their campfire. Foster says that in the dead of night as related by tradition, Mary Shepard took a saddle from under the head of her Indian keeper when sunk in sleep increased by the fumes of ardent spirit, put the saddle on a horse, mounted him, swam him across the Nashawa river, and so escaped the hands of her captors and arrived safe to her relatives and friends.

NAGOG POND HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES

The question then arises, how much of this Sereno musing is at all plausible, and what were the physical evidences which existed at the time, that any such preposterous story later related by this Mary Shepard was the truth? Do we actually have any evidence, for instance, that there were native Americans in the vicinity of the Shepard farm on the day in question? Do we actually have any evidence that two Shepard brothers were murdered by someone — or might this be a doubled story having to do with a single murder? What happened to the alleged horse and saddle? Were there multiple snowshoe tracks, simply unmentioned, in the snow on the following day?

Quite frankly, the story as told sounds to me like one of those stories which are so good that they must be true, that are built upon by surmise after surmise, and elaborated endlessly by generation after generation of patriotic historian. The simple fact of the matter is that, during a general race war, every sneaking crummy little garden-variety family murder will get itself blamed on the race enemy. How do we know that there were native Americans anywhere in the vicinity, who sneaked in and perpetrated just this one outrage without leaving any other evidence of their raid? How do we know that there was not actually a rather more commonplace provenance for the dead body or bodies in question? FAKE NEWS

August 12, Saturday (Old Style):8 The word was out early that morning that King Phillip, with his wife Wootonekanuske and child having been taken captive, and with all his efforts to obtain help from other native tribes having proven to be totally fruitless, had given up and gone home to Pokanoket to await his fate:

The next news we hear of Philip was that he had gotten back to Mount Hope, now like to become Mount Misery to him and his vagabond crew.

“As the star of the Indian descended, that of the Puritans rose ever higher.” — Tourtellot, Arthur Bernon, THE CHARLES, NY: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941, page 63 8. On this date William Harris wrote again to Sir Joseph Williamson, a letter which is a useful source of information. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS

After a year’s absence Philip, reduced to a miserable condition, returned to his native place, near which he was killed, Aug. 12, 1676. One of his own men, whom he had offended, and who had deserted to the English, shot him through the heart. His death put an end to this most horrid and distressing war. About 3000 warriors were combined for the destruction of New England, and the war terminated with their entire defeat, and almost total extinction. About 600 of the English inhabitants, the greatest part of whom were the flower and strength of the country, either fell in battle or were murdered by the enemy. Twelve or thirteen towns were destroyed [according to Trumbell, vol. i, page 350, and Holmes’s Annals of America, i., page 384] and about 600 houses burned.9 “KING PHILLIP’S WAR”

9. Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;.... Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Company; Concord MA: John Stacy (On or about November 11, 1837 Thoreau would indicate a familiarity with the contents of at least pages 2-3 and 6-9 of this historical study.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES The warriors under Captain Benjamin Church,10 white and red, crept up during the previous night and in the dawn they assaulted Metacom’s hilltop ceremonial center at Mount Hope on Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay.

Surprise was achieved. An English-allied native informant named Alderman hunted down and shot the fleeing leader in the nearby swamps where in better times he had been keeping his royal herds of pigs.

The first shot through the upper chest put Metacom on his face in the mud and water on top of his gun. Alderman apparently then poured more powder down the barrel of his gun, rammed down another ball, charged his pan –a process requiring a certain amount of time– and then shot Metacom again, this time delivering the coup de grace directly through the heart. Some five or six persons who were with Metacom also were killed while attempting to escape. The white army gave “three loud huzzas.” As the Reverend Increase Mather would later characterize the accomplishment,11 the grand result had been brought about by a combination of the white people’s righteous prayers to their God, and the red people’s wicked remarks in disregard of God’s wrath: the white warriors, he claimed, had prayed the bullet into Metacom’s heart, whereas there was an unnamed “chief” present who had been a sneerer at the Christian religion, who “withal, added a most hideous blasphemy, immediately upon which a bullet took him in the head, and dashed out his brains,

10. Benjamin Church would later be paid the going rate for Metacom’s head, 30 shillings, “scant reward, and poor encouragement,” when it was mounted atop a pole in Plymouth common. 11. Reverend Increase Mather. A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE WARR WITH THE INDIANS IN NEW-ENGLAND (1676). HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS sending his cursed soul in a moment among the devils, and blasphemers, in hell forever.”12 SWAMP

FAKE NEWS The corpse of Metacom was “pulled out of the mire to the upland,” some tugging it by the stockings and others by the breechclout, the body being otherwise unclothed “and a doleful, great, naked, dirty beast he looked like,” was quartered and hanged in four separate trees and the head and his trademark crippled hand were carried away.13 THE MARKET FOR HUMAN BODY PARTS

No mention was made at the time, or later, about any pipe, any war club, or any wampum belt associated with Metacom that had been sequestered either by Alderman or by Church as souvenirs of the event.

12. Since the Reverend Mather’s PREVALENCY OF PRAYER was well known, and since this is from page 7 in the front of the book, we may suppose that the initial audience for WALDEN well understood that Thoreau was taking an actual slap at the memory of the Reverend on page 182, where he made his preposterous remark that “this vice is one of which the Indians were never guilty.”

WALDEN: Some have been puzzled to tell how the shore became so regularly paved. My townsmen have all heard the tradition, the oldest people tell me that they heard it in their youth, that anciently the Indians were holding a pow-wow upon a hill here, which rose as high into the heavens as the pond now sinks deep into the earth, and they used much profanity, as the story goes, though this vice is one of which the Indians were never guilty, and while they were thus engaged the hill shook and suddenly sank, and only one old squaw, named Walden, escaped, and from her the pond was named. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES

Samuel Sewall lettered neatly alongside this date in his almanac: Philippus exit. “KING PHILLIP’S WAR”

13. Note: The head would be mounted atop a pole in Plymouth and would remain there for a quarter of a century. The hand, recognizable as King Phillip’s because crippled (evidently a pistol had split while being fired), would be preserved by Alderman in a bucket of rum and after being taken to Boston for inspection there would be displayed for pennies in taverns for many years. The horrible death and mutilation of the person who supposedly had caused these hostilities, however, would do little to bring these hostilities to an end. In western New England, and in Maine, this race war, which in actuality had always been an unplanned leaderless struggle between mutually antagonistic and intolerant groups, would continue unabated. The Abenaki of Maine (Penobscot) would be attacking the settlements of the English along the coastline well into 1677. The Iroquois and the Algonquian would be attacking in the inland regions for the next three generations, right up into the period of the French and Indian Wars. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS Here is how the scene would be depicted, from 1829 to 1887, on the American stage:

META. Embrace me, Nahmeokee — ’twas like the first you gave me in the days of our strength and joy — they are gone. [Places his ear to the ground] Hark! In the distant wood I faintly hear the cautious tread of men! They are upon us, Nahmeokee — the home of the happy is made ready for thee. [Stabs her, she dies] She felt no white man’s bondage — free as the air she lived — pure as the snow she died! In smiles she died! Let me taste it, ere her lips are cold as the ice. [Loud shouts. Roll of drums. Kaweshine leads Church and Soldiers on bridge, R.] CHURCH. He is found! Philip is our prisoner. META. No! He lives — last of his race — but still your enemy — lives to defy you still. Though numbers overpower me and treachery surround me, though friends desert me, I defy you still! Come to me — come singly to me! And this true knife that has tasted the foul blood of your nation and now is red with the purest of mine, will feel a grasp as strong as when it flashed in the blaze of your burning dwellings, or was lifted terribly over the fallen in battle. CHURCH. Fire upon him! META. Do so, I am weary of the world for ye are dwellers in it; I would not turn upon my heel to save my life. CHURCH. Your duty, soldiers. [They fire. Metamora falls. Enter Walter, Oceana, Wolfe, Sir Arthur, Errington, Goodenough, Tramp and Peasants. Roll of drums and trumpet till all on.] META. My curses on you, white men! May the Great Spirit curse you when he speaks in his war voice from the clouds! Murderers! The last of the Wampanoags’ curse be on you! May your graves and the graves of your children be in the path the red man shall trace! And may the wolf and panther howl o’er your fleshless bones, fit banquet for the destroyers! Spirits of the grave, I come! But the curse of Metamora stays with the white man! I die! My wife! My queen! My Nahmeokee! [Falls and dies; a tableau is formed. Drums and trumpet sound a retreat till curtain. Slow curtain] HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES SET AN EXAMPLE

LIES QUAKERS

18TH CENTURY

1737

There were no land treaties between Friend William Penn and the Indians, because by the time Penn arrived in the New World, all such land treaties had already long since been transacted. Any interactions between Penn and Tamanend amounted to tailgate parties and house visits, not treaties, and therefore there are no treaty documents on record. Voltaire would make some remarks to the effect that the treaties with Penn were the only treaties with red men that the white man ever honored, but his remarks were sarcasm, implying that the only treaties the white man ever honored were treaties that were merely imaginary. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES August 25, Thursday (Old Style): The treaty of November 1682 of Friend William (Onas) Penn with sachem Tamanend of which the cartoon book of pietistic history, GREAT MOMENTS IN HISTORY: A GRAPHIC SURVEY 14 OF 150 DECISIVE EVENTS IN THE WORLD’S HISTORY, alleges in a piece of Fake News that “The peace treaty, at which no documents were signed and no oaths taken, remained one of unbroken faith, [William] Penn’s simple virtues and institutions earning for him the intense affection of the Quakers and Indians alike,”15 actually was breached by Penn’s scion Thomas the opportunist, by means of a land swindle in which the white authorities alleged lost documents and confiscated some 1,200 square miles of tribal territory, relying for this land grab upon the threat of the use of savage force by their Iroquois allies. The dispossessed Lennilenape would be forced to ally with the French against Pennsylvania in the “French and Indian” wars. Our history books now discuss this historic fraud under the rubric “The Walking Purchase,” because of the offensive and obviously cheating manner in which the 1,200 square miles of their territory had been measured off by persons acting under the direction of Thomas Penn.

14. Nisenson, Samuel and Alfred Parker. GREAT MOMENTS IN HISTORY: A GRAPHIC SURVEY OF 150 DECISIVE EVENTS IN THE WORLD’S HISTORY. Grosset & Dunlap, 1932, page 73. 15. The Lennilenapes represented the confederation of tribes referred to ordinarily by European-Americans as “the Delaware Indians,” a collection of Algonquian-speaking lineages whose survivors now live mostly in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS (What happened was that Thomas Penn, the son of the founder of the Pennsylvania colony, caused to be “discovered” an alleged treaty allegedly signed by 3 Delaware chiefs which ceded to Penn’s deceased father all of the Delaware land around the forks of the Delaware River, west of Neshaminy Creek in Pennsylvania “as far as a man can go in a day and a half.” (The treaty document has subsequently disappeared and cannot now be examined.) After gaining agreement from several Delaware chiefs as to how this treaty should be honored, and the distance determined, the colonist cheated by selecting their three best athletes and offering money and land to the one who could travel the greatest distance. The three athletes trained for nine days and colonists cleared trees and brush from the path that they were to follow. The native American negotiators had presumed a walking pace and people in normal physical condition, and were dismayed to see athletes who were running instead of walking. Two of the three white runners died from dehydration and heat exhaustion, but the third covered 65 miles in a day and a half and thus secured for the white people about 1,200 square miles of intensively used Indian lands.) QUAKER FAKELORE HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES SET AN EXAMPLE

LIES QUAKERS

1760

If you tour the John Brown house in Providence, Rhode Island you will be informed that Mrs. Sarah Smith Brown had been a Quaker. It says so in their docent materials.

November 27, Thursday: John Brown got married with Sarah Smith (1738-1825). Now at the John Brown mansion in Providence, Rhode Island, the docents allege that Mrs. Brown was a Quaker, but if they are speaking of this Sarah Smith whom John Brown married in 1760, Sarah was the daughter of Daniel and Dorcas (Harris) Smith. Was that family Quaker rather than Baptist? Well, did Quakers engage in the distilling of alcohol? –There is no record that might indicate such, nor is there any record that any young woman was disowned by the Friends for “marrying out,” as inevitably would have followed. (This marriage is recorded in Volume I, page 170 and in Volume II, page 5 of the Providence city records: they were “m. by Elder Samuel Winsor.”)

QUAKER FAKELORE However, when a Los Angeles newsman who forthrightly admits that he is no historian, Charles Rappleye, came to town a few years back in the search for a story to tell in order to make himself some coins, he made the mistake of crediting the preposterous account offered to him by these docents. So now, this is what he has written on pages 26 and 27 of his SONS OF PROVIDENCE: THE BROWN BROTHERS, THE SLAVE TRADE, AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, a trade press book put out without any fact checking in 2006: When John was wed, in 1760, at the age of twenty-four, he reached outside his family congregation and chose a Quaker, Sarah Smith, the daughter of a successful merchant and distiller. Their wedding was a gala celebration attended by most of the town’s elite; the Browns borrowed coaches and carriages to ferry their guests from the nuptials to the reception. The next day, John moved his new bride into a new home, one of the first brick buildings to be erected on Towne Street. He furnished it with new chairs and looking glasses imported from Philadelphia, along with burnished walnut desks and bookcases made by John Goddard at Newport, regarded ever since as exemplars of colonial HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES craftsmanship.

FAKE NEWS (Several times now, in casual conversations in Providence, I have had people recommend this book to me. I have been unfailingly polite in such situations, and by polite I mean unfailingly nonresponsive. However, allow me to state here now, once, and this is for the record: if you have read this book and think it worthy then you are either too stupid or too totally uninformed to be allowed to remain alive. — In a just world you would already have been eaten by alligators.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS

1765

Friend Jemima Wilkinson died and came back to life as the “Public Universal” Friend, able to walk on water.

Amey Elizabeth Whipple Wilkinson, the mother of the Wilkinson family of Cumberland, Rhode Island, died. Refer to MEMOIRS OF THE WILKINSON FAMILY IN AMERICA. WILKINSON FAMILY MANY STRANGE TALES have emerged from the southeastern section of Ledyard, Connecticut, where descendants of the Rogerine Quakers settled in the eighteenth century, and where religious zealotry and Sabbathday clamor were for a long period an established, if troubling, way of life. While it is not entirely clear whether she had any direct connection with the small band of “quaking” fanatics organized by John Rogers of New London in 1674, Jemima Wilkinson was surely a product of the region’s fervent religious THE ROGERENES climate, her legend a monument to its very fundamentalism. Born in 1752 into a large Quaker family, Jemima grew up on her fathers marginal farm in Cumberland, Rhode Island. Although she had little formal education, she is reputed to have been an enthusiastic reader from a very early age. Her favorite childhood books were weighty volumes on Quaker theology and history, and, of course, the Bible. In fact, they say she was so well versed in the Good Book that she was able to spout long passages of scripture almost verbatim, and even her ordinary speech was so laced with biblical phrases that it came out modified King James. Sometime between her early teens, when her mother died, and her mid-twenties, Jemima made her way to Connecticut —no one knows why or under what circumstances— and came to live in the town of Ledyard. Little is known about this phase of her life, except that she seems to have been regarded by her neighbors as more than a bit eccentric (maybe it was the biblical lingo), a young woman with a mind of her own who was inclined to do her duty as she saw fit, and devil take the hindmost. Jemima Wilkinson was apparently well on the road to anonymity, when at the age of twenty-four, sorely troubled, they say, by the area’s bitter religious strife, she took a positive step that would change her life: she took sick and “died.” Following her untimely “demise,” Jemima was dutifully laid out for burial and relatives, friends and neighbors gathered around the coffin to pay such last respects as they could muster. The hand-wringing and tears of the mourners were said to have been copious — and, according to some who were present at the services, richly insincere. Then, so the story goes, just before the pine box containing Jemima’s body was to be lowered into the ground, a friend lifted the lid so that the funeral guests could gaze one final time upon the face of one whom most were secretly pleased to see pass on to another world. No one could have predicted what would happen as the cover opened. Instead of a pallid face in sweet repose, what should appear to the wondering eyes of the huddled crowd but the slender figure HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES of an obviously vital Jemima Wilkinson rising from the coffin, a blush upon her cheeks and exultation in her voice. If she was going to be buried today, Jemima vowed, she alone would preach the interment sermon. But, she intoned, she wasn’t about to be buried, this day or any other day soon. As the startled mourners drew back in awe, the now animated lady stood bolt upright in her casket and launched into a colorful explanation of her astonishing return from the dead. “Yes,” she said, “I have passed through the gates of a better world, and I have seen The Light. But they asked me to return to you, my brothers and sisters, a second Redeemer, to show you the way to salvation.” In impassioned tones she described the heaven she had visited, the mission she was about to undertake, the souls she would save. The day of her resurrection, Jemima assured her stunned audience, would mark the beginning of a moral regeneration for the whole world. Finally, she begged her listeners not to be afraid, for they had, indeed, witnessed the death of Jemima Wilkinson. “The Jemima Wilkinson ye knew is truly dead and buried,” she cried. “My rebirth has endowed me with a new name. Henceforth, brothers and sisters, I shall be known as the ‘Publick Universal Friend,’ for such will I be to all in this sinful world.” Whether Jemima had gone through what today would be called a “near-death experience,” undergone a true mystical vision or induced in herself a kind of catatonic trance, few who heard her resurrection speech were unimpressed with its sincerity and persuasiveness. QUAKER FAKE NEWS Well, you can imagine that it didn’t take long for word of Jemima Wilkinson’s unexpected return from the dead to spread through southeastern Connecticut — and beyond. Farmers and their families rode into Ledyard village by the wagonfull to see for themselves the living, breathing proof of the miracle in their midst. And she gave everyone who came within earshot plenty of the gospel according to Jemima. Tinkers and tradesmen, peddlers and woodsmen, soldiers and drovers began to swell the congregations which gathered to hear her preach. For weeks, she was the leading attraction in southeastern Connecticut, and she might have gone on forever if the whispering campaign hadn’t started. “She always was a little queer,” they began to say. “Damned work of the Devil,” others muttered. “An obvious trick to make fools of us all” still others claimed. The debunking of Jemima Wilkinson grew more insistent as the weeks passed. Finally, the born-again evangelist decided that the time was ripe for seeking greener pastures. Having convinced a small group of loyal followers to pack up their worldly possessions and set out with her into the sunset, the “Publick Universal Friend” and the “Jemimaites,” as they were first called, decamped for westward places yet unknown, their hopes high, their zeal undiminished. The historic annals report that the Jemimaites settled for a brief period, probably in the early 1780s, in New Milford, where, according to a contemporary account, a number of persons in the northeastern part of the parish were attracted to their fellowship. Although they built a house of worship, they soon sold the church and their private properties and removed with HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS their leader to the wilderness of Tioga County, in northeastern Pennsylvania. Perhaps the reason for this final move out of New England had something to do with the continuing hostility shown by the conservative Puritans toward Jemima and her followers. Tradition reveals that in New England, at least, the charismatic leader’s name was synonymous with fraud and delusion. While the Pennsylvania settlement lasted only a few years, it seems to have been successful in attracting additional believers to the “Jemimakin” (as it was then called) circle. But once again the need to spread Jemima’s word struck the activist sect, and once more the little colony pulled up stakes, moving en masse to a new vineyard. This time, Jemima decreed that the promised land lay nearly a hundred miles to the northwest, through country which was virtually a trackless wilderness. In order to show their respect for their leader and also to reduce the wear and tear on her person from what promised to be a difficult journey — the Jemimakins constructed for her traveling comfort a magnificent sedan chair complete with well-padded seats, a garish paint job and the initials “P.U.F.” emblazoned on each side. Jemima was loaded aboard and, carried by her adoring proselytes, she led her followers through the woods, all the way to the northern shore of Lake Keuka in Yates County, New York. “We will set down our roots here,” declared the Publick Universal Friend, “and we shall call this place ‘The City of Jerusalem.’” And so it was that in the year 1787 the wandering Jemimakins found what would prove to be their final harbor. Given the circumstances surrounding the extraordinary “birth” and dynamic life of Jemima Wilkinson, Publick Universal Friend, it is not surprising that a lively legend tradition followed in the wake of her 43-year preaching career — and flourished long after it ended. While never as widely known or as varied as the anecdotes about Lorenzo Dow, her male counterpart and contemporary, nevertheless, the Jemima legends were told and retold for generations in the regions through which she passed, from her native Rhode Island to her final home in New York State. In the manner of true folk narrative, the settings for the various stories changed according to the individual storyteller. They were always localized, since identifying a place known to the audience added an important note of “factual truth” to the legend-teller’s tale. Probably the anecdote most frequently associated with Jemima Wilkinson was the one about walking on water. Told in every region where her ministry was remembered, the story has been associated with many locations where it was supposed to have taken place, including several rivers and ponds in Rhode Island, the Housatonic River near New Milford, the Schuylkill River above Philadelphia and Keuka Lake in New York State. And while the legend typically varied in other details as it spread in oral tradition, the most common version was remarkably stable. It went something like this: Challenged by many skeptics and some unabashed non-believers to prove that she had the divine power she claimed for herself, Jemima Wilkinson agreed to duplicate in public Christ’s feat of walking on water. A time and place for the performance were agreed upon and advertised as widely as possible, for Jemima knew that the effectiveness of miracle-working was directly proportional to the number of people worked. Once a satisfactory crowd had gathered at the HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES appointed hour, near the designated body of water, Jemima materialized, dressed in her customary long, flowing robes, and launched into a vigorous sermon on faith, frequently punctuated by the question, “Do ye have faith?” But at the end of her long exhortation, the question and response having been built to a near-frenzy, Jemima would suddenly stop. With her shining eyes fixed directly on the audience, she then posed the critical question: “Do ye have faith? Do ye believe that I can do this thing?” “We do. We believe,” screamed the crowd. “Ah, it is good,” Jemima declared. “If ye have faith, ye need no other evidence.” With that, she gathered her robes about her, turned with a flourish — and departed. QUAKER FAKE NEWS Another legend frequently (but not exclusively) associated with the Publick Universal Friend involved her alleged ability to raise the dead. Like the walking-on-water story, this one recounted an event staged to impress critics, suggesting that in patriarchal, Puritan New England, anyway, miracle workers, especially if they happened to be women, were constantly called upon to give proof of their divine powers. Further confirmation of this may be gained from the fact that the same raising-the- dead story was sometimes connected with Mother Ann Lee, the Shaker prophetess. Nevertheless, since the legend does bear some relation to the story of Jemima Wilkinson’s own “rebirth” in Ledyard, it was perhaps natural for the folk to make her the usual central figure in the anecdote. A common version went this way: In order to demonstrate her ability to raise the dead, Jemima Wilkinson persuaded one of her faithful followers to pretend to be dead. The “deceased” was wrapped in a winding shroud, placed in a coffin and taken to a cemetery, ready for burial. Again, since the demonstration had been widely advertised, a good crowd had assembled to bear witness to the miracle. Just as Jemima was about to reach the dramatic climax of her performance, an army officer stepped out of the crowd, interrupted her sermon and asked if he could put his sword through the corpse prior to resurrection — just to make sure the subject was dead. As he pulled the sword from its scabbard, the “corpse” jumped out of the coffin and beat a hasty retreat, his winding sheet flowing out behind him like a flag of surrender. QUAKER FAKELORE

One final legend told about Jemima is probably typical of a whole cycle of off-color yarns about her which once circulated in folk tradition. Since most of them were a bit too racy for print, they have been lost in time. But surviving stories like the following lend further credence to the belief that the New England suspicion of the Publick Universal Friend was related as much to her sex as to her alleged miraculous powers: One day Jemima Wilkinson was called upon to pay a visit to Judge William Potter, a prominent citizen of Kingston, Rhode Island, who was feeling poorly and in need of spiritual comfort. The Judge’s wife, who had been away when Jemima arrived at the house, came home unexpectedly and found the Universal Friend in her husband’s bedchamber, in rather intimate proximity to the ailing jurist. When Jemima attempted to explain the nature of her ministry, Mrs. Potter cut her off abruptly. “Minister to your lambs all you want,” the angry woman was supposed to have said, HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS “but in the future, please leave my old ram alone!” In the final thirty-two years of her life, Jemima Wilkinson apparently ministered very successfully to her “lambs” in the City of Jerusalem, New York. As a matter of fact, her reputation in Yates County as a “sincere, kindly, benevolent woman” (so different from her New England image) was such that the town she founded beside Lake Keuka grew and flourished. In later years, long after Jemima’s passing, when the first post office was pending for the City of Jerusalem, the federal government asked the residents if they would be willing to rename their settlement: something shorter, perhaps, with a less biblical ring to it, but appropriate, of course. Since everyone in town had originally followed Jemima Wilkinson from Pennsylvania or Yankee Connecticut, they agreed to call their town “Penn Yan.” Thus Penn Yan, New York, was born and officially registered in Washington, D.C. It is said that the redoubtable Jemima Wilkinson retained her hold on the hearts and spirits of her followers until the day of her second —and permanent— death in 1819. And while no vestige of the religious order of Jemimakins remains today in the lovely wine country around Lake Keuka, the town of Penn Yan remains to this day a permanent monument to a remarkable and resolute woman, who rose from the dead in Ledyard, Connecticut, captured the imagination of thousands in her time and conquered both a natural and spiritual wilderness. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES SET AN EXAMPLE

LIES QUAKERS

1773

Stephen Hopkins signed a declaration of war, and owned slaves, and yet pretended to be a Friend. When his meeting disowned him, they kept this disownment a secret from the non-Quaker public. In later years they would pretend quite falsely that Hopkins had owned only one slave, a female whom it would have been unkind to set free.

March: Friend Stephen Hopkins, a former governor of Rhode Island, instead of manumitting his slave Toney, was still pleading special circumstances after 6 months of being dealt with. On account of this impasse, in this month the Smithfield monthly meeting of the Religious Society of Friends decided that they needed at this point to take action. If he continued to resist, then the clerk, Friend Moses Farnum, and an associate, were to draw up a “Paper of Denial” that would notify Rhode Islanders that the governor was no longer in unity with his Quaker associates.

QUAKER DISOWNMENT This all seems strange to us now. What was going on back then? The Smithfield, Rhode Island Quakers had not disowned Hopkins when time after time he had compromised their Testimony Against Swearing by taking an oath of office as Governor. The Smithfield Friends had not disowned Hopkins when he had compromised the Quaker Peace Testimony by directing the Rhode Island war effort in the Great War for the Empire, nor for seeking a defensive union of the English North American colonies. At this late date allofasudden they are acting against him but they are taking their own sweet time about it, taking him under dealing in September HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES 1772 and taking half a year to reach a decision to disown him — and they wouldn’t get around to making it public knowledge that he was being disowned for another 5 months, in October 1773!

Now, Quakers are notoriously slow to be sure, but this is ridiculous — what was going on? Perhaps we may take some sort of clue from the fact that a published work of Quaker history (real trees killed to make real paper) has alleged that he was being disciplined “for refusing to free a slave woman who had small children. Hopkins insisted on retaining ownership until her children no longer needed her care.”16 Can you smell Fake Facts? Who was this slave woman and who were her small children? —They appear exactly nowhere in our historical record. Hopkins’s black manservant, whom he would not free, was named Toney Hopkins. When Stephen Hopkins would die more than a decade later on July 13th, 1785, this Toney would not yet be in possession of his manumission document! QUAKER FAKELORE

16. Charles Rappleye, in his recent SONS OF PROVIDENCE: THE BROWN BROTHERS, THE SLAVE TRADE, AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION (NY: Simon & Schuster, 2006, page 142), quotes the phrase “still refuses to set her at liberty tho often requested.” I wonder if he has actually looked at these holographic minutes at the Rhode Island Historical Society on Hope Street in Providence, Rhode Island, for I am unable myself in them to make out this word he has alleged, “her.” I find there to be nothing whatever in the record to suggest that the slave in question was female. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS SET AN EXAMPLE

QUAKERS LIES

1776

When solitary confinement was practiced in the penal institutions of Pennsylvania, there was no story ever in circulation to the effect that Quakers had been key players in the creation of these penal institutions, or that this iniquitous practice had been urged by Quakers. Such false stories arose only in a much later timeframe, and have no historical provenance. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS In this year the new jail on Walnut Street in Philadelphia, built to relieve the overcrowding and scandalous conditions at that city’s Old Stone Jail, was beginning to close its doors for business.

Members of the Religious Society of Friends, and others, organized the Philadelphia Society for Relieving Distressed Prisoners. After the Revolution, this Quaker group would manage this Walnut Street Prison as a place where malefactors might meditate and repent. They termed this facility a “penitentiary.” Instead of throwing all malefactors together regardless of the varieties of offense of which they had been found guilty, and regardless of their mental condition, and sometimes even without segregation of the sexes or age groups, as was at that point in time the rule in American incarceration, in that novel institution each inmate was to be given his or her private cell with a little garden, and would be expected to work. The idea was that solitude would help the prisoners repent of their misdeeds. That such total isolation would prove to be was as cruel as or even more cruel than some of the more usual punishments was not as yet apparent to these well-meaning reformers of the PSRDP persuasion.

It would be, perhaps, on the basis of this Walnut Street Prison of the late 18th Century, with all its good intentions and all its problematic theory, that, in 1991, Kurt Vonnegut would ascribe the invention of the HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES penitentiary system to American Quakers. —If we did this thing, as for instance in the now obsoleted Eastern State Penitentiary atop Cherry Hill near downtown Philadelphia, then, as Vonnegut suggests, We might pray to be rescued from our inventiveness, just as the dinosaurs may have prayed to be rescued from their massiveness. So, did Quakers in fact, as Vonnegut asserts, invent the penitentiary system? Is this sort of experiment in the mental torture of solitary confinement indeed to be laid directly and solely at our door? Or is the Vonnegut allegation mere fakelore? QUAKER FAKELORE HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS SET AN EXAMPLE

QUAKERS LIES October: At the women’s meeting for business of the Religious Society of Friends at the upper meetinghouse in Smithfield, “Lydia Wilkinson continued to enform [sic] Patience and Jemimah Wilkinson of their being disowned from Friends and report to this Meeting.”

There was, meanwhile, an outbreak of typhoid fever in Rhode Island, that evidently came with the Columbus, a ship of war carrying prisoners. As a girl, Friend Jemimah Wilkinson had experienced evangelical sermons by the Reverend George Whitefield and had been inspired by the female leader Ann Lee (“Mother Ann”) of the Shakers. At about the age of 18, she had become involved with the New Light Baptists or “Rogerenes” of Ledyard, Connecticut. At this point, while suffering under the spiritual distress of being disowned by here monthly meeting of the Society and contemplating the long road of atonement and spiritual rectification that would be necessary before such a disownment could be erased, probably while in Ledyard, as a victim of the typhoid fever epidemic she fell into a prolonged coma — and upon reviving, she would proclaim that her soul had gone to Heaven and had been replaced in her body by “Spirit of Life.” God had sent this apparition to inhabit her body in order to warn earthly creatures of His impending wrath. Discontinuing the use of the name “Jemimah Wilkinson” and denominating herself instead “Publik Universal Friend,” she would preach, attired in something suggestive of men’s rather than of women’s clothing, through Connecticut and Rhode Island. The preserved image we have of her portrays her while attired in a rather standard clerical gown and collar over her men’s clothing:

For a time her friend Moses Brown had been taken by her pretensions, but at the point of her disownment, he was able to stand aside. Here is the account of this by the Los Angeles newsman and storyteller Charles Rappleye on page 187 of his recent SONS OF PROVIDENCE: THE BROWN BROTHERS, THE SLAVE TRADE, AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION (NY: Simon & Schuster, 2006) — an account in which he has exaggerated some of the details (such as the precise number of hours that she was uncommunicative, and the conceit that she had been “pronounced dead”) and gotten other details bass-ackward (for instance suggesting that she had been opposed to war when in fact she and her family were at odds with the Quaker Peace Testimony, sending a number of the Wilkinson sons to Washington’s army): Moses’ quest for meaning drew him to another homegrown mystic during the early days of the war, a tall, striking woman named Jemima Wilkinson. As deep and stoic as was Job Scott, Wilkinson was extravagant. She called herself “the Public Universal Friend,” and mesmerized audiences for hours by proclaiming moral convictions she said were acquired by revelation, or simply by delivering from memory lengthy quotations from the Bible. Some of her contemporaries considered her a charlatan, but she had genuine charisma, and won a following among powerful people in Rhode Island, including several prominent judges. Moses knew Wilkinson from her youth. Her father, a Quaker farmer, was a cousin to Israel Wilkinson, the ironworker long associated with the Browns, and also to Stephen and Esek Hopkins, connections that ensured her entrée to the elite HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS families of Rhode Island. Jemima was intrigued early on by a variety of religious doctrines, including those of the New Light Baptists and the Quakers, but her transformation took place in 1776, when she contracted a case of typhus. Beset with fever and delirium, she was pronounced dead, but she arose after thirty- six hours, and proclaimed her own resurrection. In the following months, Jemima Wilkinson renounced her former worldly identity and began holding ad hoc prayer meetings in country glades or borrowed meetinghouses. She preached a sort of radical strain of Quakerism, damning war, slavery, and matrimony in sermons that often ran over two hours. Her traveling services evolved into a sort of religious circus, featuring appearances by devotees who dubbed themselves Prophet Daniel and Prophet Elijah and who mimicked Wilkinson by professing visions and delivering messages from on high. Moses was intrigued by Wilkinson and attended several of her meetings. He was impressed with her knowledge of the Bible, but more than that, Moses was drawn to her story of divine inspiration. From the time of his own revelation, while walking home from Anna’s grave, Moses looked for similar signs of God’s active hand. Another adherent was Moses’ uncle Elisha Brown, who attended several of her meetings and, convinced “that she was a messenger from God,” invited her to his home, where they spent several evenings discussing her message and the controversy she caused among Rhode Island Quakers. Fortunately for Moses, however, he could not accept her as a prophet, and when the New England Meeting formally ostracized Wilkinson and barred attendance at her meetings, Moses was able to watch the proceedings with a sense of bemused detachment.

Jemimah would establish congregations at New Milford, Connecticut, and at Greenwich, Rhode Island. She did nothing to restrain enthusiastic followers who acclaimed her as the Messiah, and occasionally a stone would be thrown at her. A memorandum of the introduction of that fatal Fever, called in the year 1776 the Columbus fever, since called the Typhus.... The ship called Columbus which sailed out of Providence in the state of Rhode Island, being a ship of war, on her return brought with her prisoners this awful and alarming disease of which many of the inhabitants in Providence died. On the fourth of the tenth month it reached the house of Jemima Wilkinson, ten miles from Providence.... A certain young woman, known by the name of Jemima Wilkinson, was seized with this mortal disease. And on the 2nd day of her illness was rendered almost incapable of helping herself. And the fever continued to increase until fifth day of the week, about midnight she appeared to meet the shock of Death; which (released) the Soul. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES What was it she preached? –Generally, she favored celibacy and plainness of dress, and opposed slavery. As an intellectual record it’s not all that impressive. She totally bought into the Puritan vision of the inherent depravity of humankind. Various Quakers, especially those favorable to the American cause in the Revolution, would follow her in approximately a similar manner to the manner in which the Shakers followed Mother Ann Lee. The Religious Society of Friends would be disowning a number of these Friends as they made themselves guilty by association. Although her brother Stephen Wilkinson and sisters Mercy Wilkinson, Betsey (?) Wilkinson, and Deborah Wilkinson followed Universal Friend in her relocation to upstate New York, her father Jeremiah Wilkinson, who had admittedly at times served as her escort but had never been a convert, and her brother Jeremiah Wilkinson, eventually would resume association with the Smithfield Friends. WILKINSON FAMILY AMERICAN REVOLUTION Jemima Wilkinson was born in Cumberland, Nov. 19, 1752, and is, without doubt, the most singular as well as celebrated female character Rhode Island has ever produced. When she was about eighteen years of age, she became very much impressed with matters of a religious nature. A great religious excitement prevailed about this time in the county of Providence, and soon spread itself all over the State, through the efforts and preaching of George Whitefield. Jemima became very much interested and a great change came over her life. From a gay, spirited girl she became a sort of recluse, and spent her time in the study of the scriptures and deep meditation. In 1775 she was stricken with a severe fever, and during her illness she pretended to have a vision from on high, and received a call, as she was pleased to term it, to go out and preach to the sin-burdened world. She arose suddenly one night, demanded her clothes, and appeared to be in a trance. The next Sabbath she preached her first sermon under the old oak tree we have mentioned in another part of this work. Her words made a decided sensation upon her hearers. She styled herself the “People’s Universal Friend,” and ever afterward was known by that appellation. She travelled through the country preaching her peculiar doctrine and soon surrounded herself with many devoted followers. For some six years she made her home at Judge Potter’s, in Kingstown. The Judge was a wealthy land-holder and became one of her most devoted admirers. When others began to desert her and cry her down as an imposter and a selfish, scheming woman, the Judge became all the more infatuated, and no means were spared to sustain her cause and protect her from the calumnies of her enemies. Wherever she went, the Judge was her companion, and when she finally resolved to leave her native State and settle in the wilds of western New York, Mr. Potter was among the most prominent advocates of this movement. He at last became embarrassed financially, and his fine estate was sold, and in his old age he was compelled to live in straitened circumstances, a victim of infatuated devotion to this artful adventuress. She claimed for herself supernatural powers, and great crowds often congregated to witness some of her wonderful performances. She several times attempted to raise the dead, and her failures were attributed to want of faith in those who had assembled to witness the verification of her pretended supernatural powers. She removed with a few followers to Yales County, N.Y., and settled at a place which they called New Jerusalem. Here she spent the remainder of her eventful life, and died July 1, 1819. After her death her followers remained for several years and kept up their peculiar organization. QUAKER FAKELORE HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS The history of this woman has been written by several different parties, and the fallacy of her pretended inspiration received the verdict it so justly merited. And yet, that she was a woman possessed of more than ordinary abilities and some admirable traits of character it would be more than folly to deny. She lived in an age when ignorance and superstition in matters of religion were more prevalent than now, and it is not strange that she drew to her faith many good and honest people. Experience teaches that there is no creed without its believers and no delusion without its dupes. The saying that “murder will out” is accepted as truth, and the excitement attending the supposed celestial powers of this artful woman was shrewdly turned to account, and avarice preyed upon credulity. A great revolution is silently making its way through the world by the developing influences of education, the freedom of thought and the press, and will end in promoting the highest interests of the race, and remove forever the last vestige of religious superstition and fanaticism. WILKINSON FAMILY The Old Baptist Church at Abbott’s was situated on the east side of the Lanesville road, upon the site now [1878] occupied by D.A. Thompson’s house. It was built about the year 1700. It was a wooden structure, two stories high, with a large gallery. Its size was 30 x 60 feet, and it was torn down in 1825. Under an oak-tree that stood in front of this church, the celebrated Jemima Wilkinson made her first speech, and was listened to with attention. The Baptist Catholic Society was chartered January, 1797. It held its meetings during warm weather in the shade of the old oak-tree at Lonsdale. These meetings were discontinued about 1860. The old oak-tree in Lonsdale is an historical relic of the past. It is held in great veneration by the citizens of the place, and an iron railing has been placed around it. The tree is supposed to be three hundred years old, but is now [1878] rapidly going to decay. It is said, by good authorities, that these trees are one hundred years maturing, they flourish another hundred, and decay in the third and last hundred years.

(Friend Jemimah Wilkinson was not the only American woman to begin cross-dressing in this year. In Middleborough, Massachusetts, the mind of a 16- year-old indentured servant, Deborah Sampson, was becoming “agitated with the enquiry — why a nation, separated from us by an ocean ... [should] enforce on us plans of subjugation.” Sampson would resolve to make herself into “one of the severest avengers of the wrong” and through flattening her breasts with a bandage would enlist in the Revolutionary army as a common soldier. She was at this point also involved with the New Light Baptists, although she would get in trouble with them and be expelled, and although she would be detected in the army and discharged. She would then transform herself more completely and competently, into the Revolutionary soldier Robert Shurtleff, for 17 months an enlisted man in the 4th Massachusetts Regiment of the Continental Army. She would suffer war wounds in an encounter with a Tory militia while on a scouting expedition in the New York countryside but, at a later point, would fall ill with a fever and be discovered again to be of the female persuasion. With “chastity inviolate” – but of course they checked this out– she would receive a revolutionary veteran’s pension. Her grave in Rockridge Cemetery is marked as that of “a revolutionary soldier.” She married, so after her death her husband received the monetary equivalent of a revolutionary veteran’s widow’s pension.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES SET AN EXAMPLE

LIES QUAKERS

1780

April 1, Saturday: “Universal Friend” Jemimah Wilkinson had prophesied the end of the world for this day, or, at least, had allowed some of her disciples so to speculate: QUAKER FAKELORE

HERE COME DA JUDGE! Le sacrifice d’Abraham, an oratorio by Giuseppe Cambini, was performed for the initial time, at a concert spirituel, Paris.

William Billings found himself sufficiently comfortable financially, to purchase a house in Boston. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES

1783

Abner Brownell (1756-1851), setting out to “diss” the sect that was collecting around the delusional Rhode Island “Universal Friend” Jemimah Wilkinson, had Timothy Green print for him in New London, Connecticut a 44-page booklet which he entitled ENTHUSIASTICAL ERRORS, TRANFPIRED AND DETECTED, BY ABNER BROWNELL, IN A LETTER TO HIS FATHER, BENJAMIN BROWNELL. QUAKER FAKELORE

(as on the following screens) HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES The story he tells is that of an exhorter to goodness rather than of a proclaimer of new doctrine: HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS Although Jemimah Wilkinson has been characterized as a cross-dresser, we can see that if she was such, she was such not by the standards of our time (trousers, jacket and tie, etc.) but by the standards of that time (bareheaded indoors, mannish hat outdoors, hairdo not notably of a feminine style). HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES It would seem that she had prophesied the end of the world, or, at least, allowed some of her disciples so to speculate, the end being on or about April Fool’s Day of 1780, or perhaps the “Dark Day” of May 19, 1780:

(The disreputable information which this former follower had to offer about his former leader consisted merely in the fact that when he had tried to have something of his printed, without first clearing it with “Beft-Friend” Jemimah Wilkinson, for a period the copy of his writing from which the printer had been setting type had been taken from the printer’s office, evidently so that Universal Friend might satisfy herself that the writing was not directed against her.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS

1787

When the first historical record appeared of an interracial encounter involving Quakers in upstate New York, it was a belated and partial and very problematic record bearing no relationship whatever to what has grown up in Easton monthly meeting as the “Fierce Feathers” or “White Feather” narrative.

January 9, Tuesday: A death recorded in Church records that has been appended to the town records but did not appear in those official registers of the Town of Concord, Massachusetts: “Mr. Thomas Hosmer, aged 84, January 9, 1787” CONCORD TOWN RECORDS

In the minutes of the Meetings for Sufferings of New York Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends we find a belated record of something that allegedly had occurred about a decade earlier: A party of Indians with two Frenchmen surrounded the house; one of the Indians looking in, withdrew and beckoned with his hand upon which a friend was asked by signs whether there were soldiers there, the Indian shook hands with him and the rest came into the house, they were marked, painted and equipt for War, and it being about the conclusion of the Meeting, they shook hands with Friends, and one Friend having the French tongue could confer with them with the assistance of the two Frenchmen. When they understood Friends were at a Religious Meeting, they went to one of their houses got victuals of which a prisoner with them partook, and they departed.

What is very clear is that these Quakers in upstate New York who had at some point during the previous decade constructed the above narrative and were at this belated point inserting it into the Quaker records had nothing like race relations on their minds. The entry had obviously originated merely as an effort to save their farms from being seized by the local “Committee of Correspondence,” a group of revolutionaries who were a very real danger to them. This was a period during which, as Friend Rufus Hall put the matter in his autobiography Journal of the Life, Religious Exercises, and Travels in the Work of the Ministry, “Friends were fined for their non-conformity to the warriors’ requirings, and had their goods and stock distrained from them greatly to their damage” (by “warriors” in the above extract, Friend Rufus was not referring to American tribal natives, but primarily was referring to white revolutionary terrorists and activities of their “Committees of Correspondence,” people whom we now accept as “American patriots”). They needed their surrounding community to understand that although they were followers of the Peace Testimony and therefore could take no part in this Revolutionary War, they were neither siding with the British army that was then operating in the vicinity nor with its roving bands of Indian allies. They were not King George’s men. What had actually happened was that one of these roving bands of Indian allies of the British army had entered the kitchen of a local Quaker home, with scalps dangling from their belts, bringing with them a white Revolutionary soldier they had taken captive and whom they were holding for ransom. When they demanded food the Quakers fed them, but the entries in the Quaker records seem to have been crafted to explain how the Quakers had provided HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES this food only under threat, and that the primary intent of the Quakers in providing this sustenance had been to feed this white Revolutionary soldier who was being held captive for ransom, rather than to feed these enemies who happened to be Algonquian-speaking natives, who were fighting on behalf of King George. Therefore the local Revolutionary “Committee of Correspondence” should not seize their Quaker farms under the pretense that they were enemies of the Revolution. QUAKER FAKELORE

This would come to have to do, of course, with a fave Quaker kiddie story, “The White Feather” or “Fierce Feathers.” You might want to study about this because in some respects this Fakelore has expanded and expanded until it has become quite problematic (even, in some tellings, markedly racist, in trotting out speakers of color whose sole function seems to be to testify anonymously to the wonderfulness of white people — and then disappear back into the foliage). “FIERCE FEATHERS” HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS SET AN EXAMPLE

QUAKERS LIES FIERCE FEATHERS17

‘We who were once slayers of one another do not now fight against our enemies.’—JUSTIN MARTYR. A.D. 140. ‘Victory that is gotten by the sword is a victory slaves get one over the other; but victory contained by love is a victory for a king.’— GERRARD WINSTANLEY. 1649. ‘Here you will come to love God above all, and your neighbours as yourselves. Nothing hurts, nothing harms, nothing makes afraid on this holy mountain.’—G. FOX. ‘My friends that are gone or are going over to plant and make outward plantations in America, keep your own plantations in your hearts with the spirit and power of God, that your own vines and lilies be not hurt.’—G. FOX. ‘Take heed of many words, what reaches to the life settles in the life. That which cometh from the life and is received from God, reaches to the life and settles others in the life.’—G. FOX. ‘An old Indian named Papunehang appreciated the spirit and atmosphere of a Friends’ meeting, even if he did not comprehend the words, telling 17. Friend Lucy Violet Hodgkin (later Holdsworth), acting on behalf of the “1905 Committee of Yorkshire Quarterly Meeting,” prepared a children’s book entitled A BOOK OF QUAKER SAINTS (illustrated by Frederick Cayley-Robinson.) Since she was preparing these materials for the tender ears of young children, she was of course in accordance with all our conventions free to tell whatever lies she considered to be most appropriate. It was on this effort that she coined the title “Fierce Feathers.” QUAKER FAKELORE

(Not only does she pass along all the lies adding her own extra layer, but also, confesses that she was further elaborating on the existing materials. In order to add a reassuring interface to this, in order for her shit not to stink to high heaven, she added a whole bunch of footnotes and addenda about her sources. I must suggest, don’t bother to look up the sources she cites as that would be a waste of your time: either the materials she cites as sources do not exist, or if they exist do not corroborate what she offers, or if they do offer such corroboration lack credibility of their own. This citation stuff was, obviously, nothing but a trust-me smoke screen.)

“A historian is very limited in what can be deduced from the extant primary sources on the event [referring to what would become renowned as the “White Feather” tale]. Hardly any even exist, and they are all from the Quaker perspective. Furthermore, they are perhaps best cast as the first examples of storytelling in the Fierce Feathers tradition than as primary documents of any sort.” – A 1998 remark that Associate Professor of History Christopher Klemek has since attempted to conceal.

המוסיף על הצריך גורם לחיסרון - סנהדרין כט, א

— Babylonian TALMUD (Talmud Bavli) created in the 3d to 6th Centuries CE in what is now Iraq warns (Sanhedrin 29) “adding to the truth subtracts from it.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS the interpreter afterwards, “I love to feel where words come from.”’— A.M. GUMMERE (from John Woolman’s Journal). Note.—The References throughout are to the Cambridge Edition of George Fox’s JOURNAL, except where otherwise stated. The spelling has been modernised and the extracts occasionally abridged. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES XXIX. FIERCE FEATHERS FAKELORE

The sunlight lay in patches on the steep roof of the Meeting-house of Easton Township, in the County of Saratoga, in the State of New York. It was a bright summer morning in the year 1775. The children of Easton Township liked their wooden house, although it was made only of roughhewn logs, nailed hastily together in order to provide some sort of shelter for the worshipping Friends. They would not, if they could, have exchanged it for one of the more stately Meeting-houses at home in England, on the other side of the Atlantic. There, the windows were generally high up in the walls. English children could see nothing through the panes but a peep of sky, or the topmost branches of a tall tree. When they grew tired of looking in the branches of the tree for an invisible nest that was not there, there was nothing more to be hoped for, out of those windows. The children’s eyes came back inside the room again, as they watched the slow shadows creep along the white- washed walls, or tried to count the flies upon the ceiling. But out here in America there was no need for that. The new Meeting-house of Easton had nearly as many possibilities as the new world outside. To begin with, its logs did not fit quite close together. If a boy or girl happened to be sitting in the corner seat, he or she could often see, through a chink, right out into the woods. For the untamed wilderness still stretched away on all sides round the newly-cleared settlement of Easton. Moreover, there were no glass windows in the log house as yet, only open spaces provided with wooden shutters that could be closed, if necessary, during a summer storm. Another larger, open space at one end of the building would be closed by a door when the next cold weather came. At present the summer air met no hindrance as it blew in softly, laden with the fragrant scents of the flowers and pine-trees, stirring the children’s hair as it lightly passed. Every now and then a drowsy bee would come blundering in by mistake, and after buzzing about for some time among the assembled Friends, he would make his perilous way out again through one of the chinks between the logs. The children, as they sat in Meeting, always hoped that a butterfly might also find its way in, some fine day — before the winter came, and before the window spaces of the new Meeting-house had to be filled with glass, and a door fastened at the end of the room to keep out the cold. Especially on a mid-week Meeting like to-day, they often found it difficult to ‘think Meeting thoughts’ in the silence, or even to attend to what was being said, so busy were they, watching for the entrance of that long desired butterfly. For children thought about very much the same kind of things, and had very much the same kind of difficulties in Meeting, then as now; even though the place was far away, and it is more than a hundred years since that sunny morning in Easton Township, when the sunlight lay in patches on the roof. It was not only the children who found silent worship difficult that still summer morning. There were traces of anxiety on the faces of many Friends and even on the placid countenances of the Elders in their raised seats in the gallery. There, at the head of the Meeting, sat Friend Zebulon Hoxie, the grandfather of most of the children who were present. Below him sat his two sons. Opposite them, their wives and families, and a sprinkling of other Friends. The children had never seen before one of the stranger Friends who sat in the gallery that day, by their grandfather’s side. They had heard that his name was Robert Nisbet, and that he had just arrived, after having walked for two days, thirty miles through the wilderness country to sit with Friends at New Easton at their mid-week Meeting. The children had no idea why he had come, so they fixed their eyes intently on the stranger and stirred gently in their seats with relief when at last he rose to speak. They had liked his kind, open face as soon as they saw it. They liked still better the sound of the rich, clear voice that made it easy for even children to listen. But they liked the words of his text best of all: ‘The Belovéd of the Lord shall dwell in safety by Him. He shall cover them all the day long.’ Robert Nisbet lingered over the first words of his message as if they were dear to him. His voice was full and mellow, and the words seemed HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS as if they were part of the rich tide of summer life that flowed around. He paused a moment, and then went on, ‘And now, how shall the Belovéd of the Lord be thus in safety covered? Even as saith the Psalmist, “He shall cover thee with His feathers and under His wings shalt thou trust.”’ Then, changing his tones a little and speaking more lightly, though gravely still, he continued: ‘You have done well, dear Friends, to stay on valiantly in your homes, when all your neighbours have fled; and therefore are these messages sent to you by me. These promises of covering and of shelter are truly meant for you. Make them your own and you shall not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day.’ Here the boys and girls on the low benches under the gallery looked at one another. Now they knew what had brought the stranger! He had come because he had heard of the danger that threatened the little clearing of settlers in the woods. For though New Easton and East Hoosack lay thirty miles apart they were both links in the long chain of Quaker Settlements that had been formed to separate the territory belonging to the Dutch Traders (who dwelt near the Hudson River) from the English Settlements along the valley of the Connecticut. In former days disputes between the Dutch and English Colonists had been both frequent and fierce, until at length the Government had conceived the brilliant idea of establishing a belt of neutral ground between the disputants, and peopling it with unwarlike Quakers. The plan worked well. The Friends, in their settlements strung out over a long, narrow strip of territory, were on friendly terms with their Dutch and English neighbours on either side. Raids went out of fashion. Peace reigned, and for a time the authorities were well content. A fiercer contest was now brewing, no longer between two handfuls of Colonists but between the inhabitants of two great Continents. For it was just before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War of 1775. The part of the country in which Easton Township was situated was already distressed by visits of scouting parties from both British and American armies, and the American Government, unable to protect the inhabitants, had issued a proclamation directing them to leave the country. This was the reason that all the scattered houses in the neighbourhood were deserted, save only the few tenanted by the handful of Friends. ‘You did well, Friends,’ the speaker continued, ‘well to ask to be permitted to exercise your own judgment without blame to the authorities, well to say to them in all courtesy and charity, “You are clear of us in that you have warned us” — and to stay on in your dwellings and to carry out your accustomed work. The report of this your courage and faith hath reached us in our abiding place at East Hoosack, and the Lord hath charged me to come on foot through the wilderness country these thirty miles, to meet with you to-day, and to bear to you these two messages from Him, “The Belovéd of the Lord shall dwell in safety by Him,” and “He shall cover thee with His feathers all the day long.”’ The visitor sat down again in his seat. The furrowed line of anxiety in old Zebulon Hoxie’s high forehead smoothed itself away; the eyes of one or two of the younger women Friends filled with tears. As the speaker’s voice ceased, little Susannah Hoxie’s head, which had been drooping lower and lower, finally found a resting-place, and was encircled by her mother’s arm. Young Mrs. Hoxie drew off her small daughter’s shady hat, and put it on the seat beside her, while she very gently stroked back the golden curls from the child’s high forehead. In doing this she caught a rebuking glance from her elder daughter, Dinah. ‘Naughty, naughty Susie, to go to sleep in Meeting,’ Dinah was thinking; ‘it is very hot, and I am sleepy too, but I don’t go to sleep. I do wish a butterfly would come in at the window just for once — or a bird, a little bird with blue, and red, and pink, and yellow feathers. I liked what that stranger Friend said about being ‘covered with feathers all the day long.’ I wish I was all covered with feathers like a little bird. I wish there were feathers in Meeting, or anywhere close outside.’ She turned in her corner seat and looked through the slit in the wall — why there were feathers close outside the wall of the house, red, and yellow, and blue, and pink! What could they be? Very gently Dinah moved her head, so that her eye came closer to the slit. But, when she looked again, the feathers had mysteriously disappeared — nothing was to be seen now but a slight trembling of the tree branches in the wilderness woods at a little distance. In the mean while her brother, Benjamin Hoxie, on the other low seat opposite the window, was also thinking of the stranger’s sermon. ‘He said it was a valiant thing to do, to stop on here when all the HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES neighbours have left. I didn’t know Friends could do valiant things. I thought only soldiers were valiant. But if a scouting party really did come — if those English scouts suddenly appeared, then even a Quaker boy might have a chance to show that he is not necessarily a coward because he does not fight.’ Benjamin’s eyes strayed also out of the open window. It was very hot and still in the Meeting-house. Yet the bushes certainly were trembling. How strange that there should be a breeze there and not here! ‘Thou shall not be afraid for the arrow that flieth by day,’ he thought to himself. ‘Well, there are no arrows in this part of the country any longer, now that they say all the Indians have left. I wonder, if I saw an English gun pointing at me out of those bushes, should I be afraid?’ But it was gentle Mrs. Hoxie, with her arm still round her baby daughter, who kept the stranger’s words longest in her heart. ‘Shall dwell in safety by Him, — the Belovéd of the Lord,’ she repeated to herself over and over again, ‘yet my husband hath feared for me, and we have both been very fearful for the children. Truly, we have known the terror by night these last weeks in these unsettled times, even though our duty was plainly to stay here. Why were we so fearful? we of little faith. “The Belovéd of the Lord shall dwell in safety by Him. He shall cover him with His feathers all the day long.”’ And then, in her turn, Mrs. Hoxie looked up, as her little daughter had done, and saw the same three tall feathers creeping above the sill of the open Meeting-house window frame. For just one moment her heart, that usually beat so calmly under her grey Quaker robe, seemed to stand absolutely still. She went white to the lips. Then ‘shall dwell in safety by Him,’ the words flashed back to her mind. She looked across to where her husband sat — an urgent look. He met her eyes, read them, and followed the direction in which she gazed. Then he, too, saw the feathers — three, five, seven, nine, sticking up in a row. Another instant, and a dark-skinned face, an evil face, appeared beneath them, looking over the sill. The moment most to be dreaded in the lives of all American settlers —more terrible than any visit from civilised soldiers— had come suddenly upon the little company of Friends alone here in the wilderness. An Indian Chief was staring in at their Meeting- house window, showing his teeth in a cruel grin. In his hand he held a sheaf of arrows, poisoned arrows, only too ready to fly, and kill, by day. All the assembled Friends were aware of his presence by this time, and were watching the window now, though not one of them moved. Mrs. Hoxie glanced towards her other little daughter, and saw to her great relief that Dinah too had fallen asleep, her head against the wooden wall. Dinah and Susie were the two youngest children in Meeting that morning. The others were mostly older even than Benjamin, who was twelve. They were, therefore, far too well-trained in Quaker stillness to move, for any Indians, until the Friends at the head of the Meeting should have shaken hands and given the signal to disperse. Nevertheless, the hearts of even the elder girls were beating very fast. Benjamin’s lips were tightly shut, and with eyes that were unusually bright he followed every movement of the Indian Chief, who, as it seemed in one bound and without making the slightest noise, had moved round to the open doorway. There he stood, the naked brown figure, in full war-paint and feathers, looking with piercing eyes at each man Friend in turn, as if one of them must have the weapons that he sought. But the Friends were entirely unarmed. There was not a gun, or a rifle, or a sword to be found in any of their dwelling-houses, so there could not be any in their peaceful Meeting. A minute later, a dozen other Redskins, equally terrible, stood beside the Chief, and the bushes in the distance were quite still. The bushes trembled no longer. It was Benjamin who found it hard not to tremble now, as he saw thirteen sharp arrows taken from their quivers by thirteen skinny brown hands, and their notches held taut to thirteen bow-strings, all ready to shoot. Yet still the Friends sat on, without stirring, in complete silence. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS

Only Benjamin, turning his head to look at his grandfather, saw Zebulon FAKELORE Hoxie, the patriarch of the Meeting, gazing full at the Chief, who had first approached. The Indian’s flashing eyes, under the matted black eyebrows, gazed back fiercely beneath his narrow red forehead into the Quaker’s calm blue eyes beneath the high white brow and snowy hair. No word was spoken, but in silence two powers were measured against one another — the power of hate, and the power of love. For steady friendliness to his strange visitors was written in every line of Zebulon Hoxie’s face. The children never knew how long that steadfast gaze lasted. But at length, to Benjamin’s utter astonishment, for some unknown reason the Indian’s eyes fell. His head, that he had carried high and haughtily, sank towards his breast. He glanced round the Meeting-house three times with a scrutiny that nothing could escape. Then, signing to his followers, the thirteen arrows were noiselessly replaced in thirteen quivers, the thirteen bows were laid down and rested against the wall; many footsteps, lighter than falling snow, crossed the floor; the Indian Chief, unarmed, sat himself down in the nearest seat, with his followers in all their war-paint, but also unarmed, close round him. The Meeting did not stop. The Meeting continued — one of the strangest Friends’ Meetings, surely, that ever was held. The Meeting not only continued, it increased in solemnity and in power. Never, while they lived, did any of those present that day forget that silent Meeting, or the brooding Presence, that, closer, clearer than the sunlight, filled the bright room. ‘Cover thee with His feathers all the day long.’ The Friends sat in their accustomed stillness. But the Indians sat more still than any of them. They seemed strangely at home in the silence, these wild men of the woods. Motionless they sat, as a group of trees on a windless day, or as a tranquil pool unstirred by the smallest breeze; silent, as if they were themselves a part of Nature’s own HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES silence rather than of the family of her unquiet, human children. The slow minutes slipped past. The peace brooded, and grew, and deepened. ‘Am I dreaming?’ Mrs. Hoxie thought to herself more than once, and then, raising her eyes, she saw the Indians still in the same place, and knew it was no dream. She saw, too, that Benjamin’s eyes were riveted to some objects hanging from the strangers’ waists, that none of the other Friends appeared to see. At last, when the accustomed hour of worship was ended, the two Friends at the head of the Meeting shook hands solemnly. Then, and not till then, did old Zebulon Hoxie advance to the Indian Chief, and with signs he invited him and his followers to come to his house close at hand. With signs they accepted. The strange procession crossed the sunlit path. Susie and Dinah, wide awake now, but kept silent in obedience to their mother’s whispers, were watching the feathers with clear, untroubled eyes that knew no fear. Only Benjamin shivered as if he were cold. When the company had arrived at the house, Zebulon put bread and cheese on the table, and invited his unwonted guests to help themselves. They did so, thanking him with signs, as they knew little or no English. Robert Nisbet, the visiting Friend, who could speak and understand French, had a conversation with one of the Indians in that language, and this was what he said: ‘We surrounded your house, meaning to destroy every living person within it. But when we saw you sitting with your door open, and without weapons of defence, we had no wish any longer to hurt you. Now, we would fight for you, and defend you ourselves from all who wish you ill.’ Meanwhile the Chief who had entered first was speaking in broken English to old Zebulon Hoxie, gesticulating to make his meaning clear. ‘Indian come White Man House,’ he said, pointing with his finger towards the Settlement, ‘Indian want kill white man, one, two, three, six, all!’ and he clutched the tomahawk at his belt with a gruesome gesture. ‘Indian come, see White Man sit in house; no gun, no arrow, no knife; all quiet, all still, worshipping Great Spirit. Great Spirit inside Indian too;’ he pointed to his breast; ‘then Great Spirit say: “Indian! No kill them!”’ With these words, the Chief took a white feather from one of his arrows, and stuck it firmly over the centre of the roof in a peculiar way. ‘With that white feather above your house,’ the French- speaking Indian said to Robert Nisbet, ‘your settlement is safe. We Indians are your friends henceforward, and you are ours.’ A moment later and the strange guests had all disappeared as noiselessly as they had come. But, when the bushes had ceased to tremble, Benjamin stole to his mother’s side. ‘Mother, did you see, did you see?’ he whispered. ‘They were not friendly Indians. They were the very most savage kind. Did you,’ he shuddered, ‘did you, and father, and grandfather, and the others not notice what those things were, hanging from their waists? They were scalps — scalps of men and women that those Indians had killed,’ and again he shuddered. His mother stooped and kissed him. ‘Yea, my son,’ she answered, ‘I did see. In truth we all saw, too well, save only the tender maids, thy sisters, who know naught of terror or wrong. But thou, my son, when thou dost remember those human scalps, pray for the slayers and for the slain. Only for thyself and for us, have no fear. Remember, rather, the blessing of that other Benjamin, for whom I named thee. “The Belovéd of the Lord shall dwell in safety by Him. He shall cover him all the day long.”’ A historical incident, with some imaginary actors. The outlines of this story are given in ‘HISTORICAL ANECDOTES’ by Pike. Several additional particulars and the copy of a painting of the Indians at Meeting are to be found in the Friends’ Reference Library at Devonshire House. For some helpful notes about the locality I am indebted to H.P. Morris of Philadelphia, U.S.A. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES

19TH CENTURY

1810

July 26, Thursday: George Gordon, Lord Byron arrived in Patras.

DeWitt Clinton, one-time Governor of New York State, was visiting John C. Spencer, who had served as Secretary of War, in Canandaigua. At the local coachmaker’s shop, a “plain coachee with leather curtains” with an inscription on its back in large letters V*F was in for repairs. This was brought to his attention as belonging to the prophetess Jemimah Wilkinson, who resided with 30 or 40 followers at Crooked Lake some 25 miles to the southeast. “She is opposed to war, to oaths, and to marriage; and to her confidential friends she represents herself as Jesus Christ personified in the body of Jemima Wilkinson.” QUAKER FAKELORE

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 26th of 7 M 1810// Our first meeting was a dull heavy time Our friend H Almy spoke feelingly & pertinently to the state of it as he expressed it, a “Dumb stupid Silence” seemd to prevail, I thought I was favor’d with ability to wrestle a little but it was not to much effect — In the last (Monthly Meeting) it seemd as if I had more life than in the last, & spoke to the buisness with a good degree of Satisfaction to my own mind — David Bowen & Elizabeth Folger Chase published their intentions of Marriage — We had no company at Dinner — After dinner We attended the funeral of Elizabeth Stanton from my fathers house, many people attended & I thought it was a good solid opportunity. — ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS

1819

July 1, Thursday: Dissension had developed in the Jerusalem, New York sanctuary of the followers of “Universal Friend,” Jemimah Wilkinson, as she had become rather demanding of gifts and special treatment, and had come to institute various punishments for infractions of the rules of the Society of Universal Friends. Finally the community resolved its problem by erecting this two and a half story Federal-style mansion for its inspirational leader at some considerable distance from the other homes. It is now referred to as “Friend House” and is not open to the public:

After spending her last years in isolation, at the age of 67 the religious leader died (or “left time” as her followers described it), and would be interred in a temporary vault in the building’s cellar while her followers faithfully waited for her to come back into animation, and watched as signs of decay accumulated. As her will attests, she had never swerved from the pronouncement she had originally made under the oak tree in Cumberland, Rhode Island after recovering from typhoid fever, that she had died and her spirit had been replaced with “Divine Spirit.” (Her Jerusalem community would, within the following two decades, entirely disperse. At some later date the decomposing body has been removed from its temporary vault for burial at an HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES unmarked location on the property.)

WILKINSON FAMILY QUAKER FAKELORE

Last Will and Testament: The last Will and Testament of the person called the Universal Friend of Jerusalem, in the County of Ontario, State of New York, who in the year 1777, was called Jemima Wilkinson, and ever since that time, the Friend, a new name which the mouth of the Lord hath named. My will is that all my just debts be paid by my executors, hereafter named. I give, bequeath and devise unto Rachel Malin and Margaret Malin, now of said Jerusalem, all my earthly property both real and personal; and that is to say all my land lying in said Jerusalem and in Benton, or elsewhere in the County of Ontario, together with all the buildings thereon, to them the said Rachel and Margaret, and their heirs and assigns forever, to be equally and amicably be shared between them, the said Rachel and Margaret — and I do also give and bequeath to the said Rachel and Margaret, all my wearing apparel, all my household furniture, and my horses, cattle, sheep and swine, of every kind, together with all my farming utensils, and all my movable property of every nature and description whatever. My will is, that all the present members of my family and each of them, be employed if they please, and if employed, supported during their natural life, by the said Rachel and Margaret, and whenever any of them become unable to help themselves, they are according to such inability, kindly to be taken care of by the said Rachel and Margaret. And my will also is, that all poor persons belonging to the society of the Universal Friend, shall receive from the said Rachel and Margaret such assistance, comfort and support during their natural life as they may need; and in case any or either of my family, or others elsewhere in the society shall turn away, such shall forfeit the provisions herein made for them. I hereby ordain and appoint the above-named Rachel Malin and Margaret Malin, Executors of this my last will and testament. In Witness whereof, I, the person called Jemina Wilkinson, but in, and ever since the year 1777, known as the Public Universal Friend, have hereunto affixed my name and Seal, this 25th day of the 2d Month, in the year of our Lord 1819. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS The Public Universal Friend [L.S.] In the presence of, &c. Be it Remembered — That in order to remove all doubt of the due execution of the foregoing will and testament of the person who before the year 1777, was known and called by the name of Jemima Wilkinson, but since that time, as the Universal Friend, do make, publish and declare the within instrument to be my Last Will and Testament, as witness my hand and seal, this 17th day of the 7th month, 1819. Jemima Wilkinson X Her Cross or mark, Or, Universal Friend. [“Witness,” &c.]

That evening after sunset the comet that had passed unnoticed between the earth and the sun on or about June 26th, with its tail brushing over the earth also unnoticed, became visible low in the west. (So much for comets exerting a vast influence!)18 SKY EVENT

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 1st of 7th M 1819 / Our Meeting looked small in a great room, but I believe nearly all the members were present that are in ability to attend, & several that are not members. — I believe it was a comfortable season to some present, it was in good measure so to me. — Father Rodman delivered a short testimony RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS John Keats wrote from Shanklin on the Isle of Wight to Fanny Brawne: My dearest Lady — I am glad I had not an opportunity of sending off a Letter which I wrote for you on Tuesday night — ’twas too much like one out of Rousseau’s Heloise. I am more reasonable this morning. The morning is the only proper time for me to write to a beautiful Girl whom I love so much: for at night, when the lonely day has closed, and the lonely, silent, unmusical Chamber is waiting to receive me as into a Sepulchre, then believe me my passion gets entirely the sway, then I would not have you see those Rhapsodies which I once thought it impossible I should ever give way to, and which I have often laughed at in another, for fear you should [think me] either too unhappy or perhaps a little mad. I am now at a very pleasant Cottage window, looking onto a beautiful hilly country, with a glimpse of the sea; the morning is very fine. I do not know how elastic my spirit might be, what pleasure I might have in living here and breathing and wandering as free as a stag about this beautiful Coast if the remembrance of you did not weigh so upon me I have never known any unalloy’d Happiness for many days together: the death or sickness of some one has always spoilt my hours — and now when none such troubles oppress me, it is you must confess very hard that another sort of pain should haunt me. Ask yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have so 18. “GREAT COMET, (C/1819 N1=1819 II. Period of naked eye visibility spanned the month of Jul., T=1819 June 28. Also known as Comet Tralles. Spotted on July 1st in the evening sky a little to the north of the Sun, the head being of about zero magnitude. Comet crossed eastern Auriga and was visible at both dusk and dawn for several weeks. At the end of the first week of July, 1st magnitude with a 7-8 degree tail. Comet faded rapidly as it moved toward the northeast, almost pacing the Sun. At mid-month situated in Lynx, an object of 3rd magnitude with a short tail. In the last few days of July the comet’s brightness rapidly approached the naked eye threshold.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom. Will you confess this in the Letter you must write immediately, and do all you can to console me in it — make it rich as a draught of poppies to intoxicate me — write the softest words and kiss them that I may at least touch my lips where yours have been. For myself I know not how to express my devotion to so fair a form: I want a brighter word than bright, a fairer word than fair. I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days — three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain. But however selfish I may feel, I am sure I could never act selfishly: as I told you a day or two before I left Hampstead, I will never return to London if my Fate does not turn up Pam or at least a Court-card. Though I could centre my Happiness in you, I cannot expect to engross your heart so entirely — indeed if I thought you felt as much for me as I do for you at this moment I do not think I could restrain myself from seeing you again tomorrow for the delight of one embrace. But no — I must live upon hope and Chance. In case of the worst that can happen, I shall still love you — but what hatred shall I have for another! Some lines I read the other day are continually ringing a peal in my ears:

To see those eyes I prize above mine own Dart favors on another— And those sweet lips (yielding immortal nectar) Be gently press’d by any but myself— Think, think Francesca, what a cursed thing It were beyond expression! J.

Do write immediately. There is no Post from this Place, so you must address Post Office, Newport, Isle of Wight. I know before night I shall curse myself for having sent you so cold a Letter; yet it is better to do it as much in my senses as possible. Be as kind as the distance will permit to your John Keats Present my Compliments to your mother, my love to Margaret and best remembrances to your Brother — if you please so. (The letter would be posted on the 3d.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS

1822

Friend Moses Brown, a former transatlantic slave trader, rather than being the nice guy who brought decency to Rhode Island, was the guy who racially segregated the Quaker meetinghouse and created a racially segregated school.

August 8, Thursday: The Brig Strong arrived in Monrovia on the west coast of Africa with passengers from Maryland and Pennsylvania.

In a renovation of the Quaker meetinghouse in Providence, Rhode Island, Friend Moses Brown reported, “what was called the Negros Gallery” had been removed.

The questions of course arises, why specifically was it that this “Negros Gallery” was constructed in the first place — and why lately had it come to be disused, so that it might at this point be demolished? –And why has this demolition of seating been papered over with Fake News? QUAKER FAKELORE

The answer, I speculate, is going to be (after adequate research has been done — research which has not yet been begun), that the Quakers had had segregated seating in their meetinghouses, with their servants of color seated away from the white people in such a “Negros Gallery,” but that by the turn of the century these slaves had all been granted manumission documents, and were therefore no longer obligated to accompany their Quaker masters and mistresses to worship. When they made use of the meetinghouse, they made use of it in off hours when the white Quakers were not present, and so of course they no longer went up to the dilapidated “pigeon loft” but sat anywhere they pleased. My speculation would be that with freedom had come a decision HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES to affiliate, not with these Quakers who as white racists were never ever going to accept anyone else as a whole and genuine human being (to my knowledge not one single person of color would ever be accepted as a convinced Friend during this period, despite numerous applications for such consideration), instead along color lines with one another in the African Methodist Episcopal denomination that had been set up in 1816.19 AME

I speculate, also, that when final accounts are rendered, Friend Moses Brown, the former slavetrader who could not make money in the international slave trade because his slave cargo got sick during the Middle Passage, who eventually originated a racially segregated school in Providence, the elder who had the balcony torn out of the Quaker meetinghouse there so that blacks would no longer have anyplace to sit and worship, will be considered not as an honored abolitionist as now touted, not as an honored integrationist as now touted, but instead as the very person responsible for bringing racial segregation, Jim Crow segregation, to the New England states. –Any other attitude will come to be correctly appreciated as mere Fake News.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 8th of 8 M / Our Meeting today was a pretty good one Two appearances in the Ministry Vizt Father Rodman & Anne Dennis. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

19. Subsequent to my writing the above, my suspicions have been confirmed by reading, in the autobiography of William J. Brown, a grandson of one of the men manumitted by Friend Moses Brown, that: PAGE 25: Some attended the Congregational church, Rev. James Wilson, pastor; some attended the Methodist church; some attended the Episcopal church, Dr. Crocker, pastor; a few attended the Unitarian church, Rev. Mr. Cady, pastor; and a large number attended the First Baptist church, Dr. Gano, pastor. Some were members of each of the above named churches; the largest number, however, were Baptists, and belonged to the First Baptist Church, but many attended no church at all, because they said they were opposed to going to churches and sitting in pigeon holes, as all the churches at that time had some obscure place for the colored people to sit in. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS SET AN EXAMPLE

QUAKERS LIES

1827

The increasing schism among Friends, between Hicksite and Orthodox, began to have a deleterious impact upon Quaker educational institutions. The secondary education that was available inside the city of Philadelphia was under the control of the Orthodox body. Hicksite Friends, therefore, in the country, had begun to have a problem in securing an appropriate secondary education for their young people. Since 1799 they had for instance been sending their young people to the Westtown School in Chester County, but in this year this school also came under the control of Orthodox Friends. QUAKER EDUCATION

Costumes of Philadelphia Quakers We may note in passing that the school sponsored by the New England Yearly Meeting, in Providence, Rhode Island, the school now known as “Moses Brown School,” was firmly under the control of the Orthodox side of the schism. Hicksite Friends were not welcome, not even to visit, not even to worship. The reason for that was Friend Moses Brown himself. Moses was rich, Moses was used to throwing his weight around, and Moses had decided that abolitionism, the abolition of race slavery, meant segregation, the separation of the races — but the Hicksites had decided that instead what abolitionism meant was integration into a “Peaceable Kingdom” of the races: amalgamation. The two sides, Jim Crow segregationism versus liberal race mingling, had become anathema to one another.

(It is an irony of Fake History that this pioneer in antebellum Jim Crow racial segregationism, Friend Moses Brown, is now considered to be among the Quaker saints — merely because, after he had calculated that his black slaves had paid him back through their labors the cash price he had paid for their bodies and souls, he did grant them manumission papers.)

המוסיף על הצריך גורם לחיסרון - סנהדרין כט, א HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS

— Babylonian Talmud (Talmud Bavli) created in the 3d to 6th Centuries CE in what is now Iraq warns (Sanhedrin 29) “adding to the truth subtracts from it.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES

1833

In the pages of The Friend, or Square Friend, a gazette of the Arch Street Yearly Meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, there appeared an article signed by “S.A.” of New Paltz, which has been understood as having been Friend Samuel Adams of New Paltz Landing in Ulster County. This article purported to report remarks made by George Dillwyn during a sermon at Burlington, Pennsylvania, which speaker was passing along an account by another rather than making any claim of personal eyewitness: Robert Nisbet, who lived, at that time, at East Hoosack, about thirty miles distant, felt a concern to walk through the ten wilderness country, and sit with Friends at their week-day meeting. As they were sitting in meeting with their door open, they discovered an Indian peeping round the door-post. When he saw Friends sitting without word or deed, he stepped forward and took a full view of all that was in the house; then he and his company, placing their arms in a corner of the room, took seats with Friends and so remained till the meeting closed. Zebulon Hoxie, one of the Friends present, then invited them to his house, put a cheese and what bread he had on the table, and invited them to help themselves: they did so and went quietly and harmlessly away. Before their departure, however, Robert Nesbit, who could speak and understand the French tongue, had a conversation with their leader, in French. He told Robert, that they surrounded the house, intending to destroy all that were in it; “but,” said he, “when we saw you sitting with your door open, and without weapons of defense, we had no disposition to hurt you — we would have fought for you.” This party had human scalps with them.20

המוסיף על הצריך גורם לחיסרון - סנהדרין כט, א

— Babylonian Talmud (Talmud Bavli) created in the 3d to 6th Centuries CE in what is now Iraq warns (Sanhedrin 29) “adding to the truth subtracts from it.”

20. The above hearsay would have to do, of course, with a fave Quaker kiddie story, “Fierce Feathers.” You might want to study about this because in some respects the tale has expanded and expanded until it has become quite problematic (even, in some tellings, markedly racist). “FIERCE FEATHERS” A SCHOLARLY ANALYSIS HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS

1835

Friend Moses Brown’s nephew Nicholas Brown was one out of a very long list of vice-presidents of a newly founded Providence Anti-Abolition Society. For information about the agenda of this curious group, you may want to refer to “Anti-abolition Meeting,” an article in the Providence Daily Journal for November 4th, 1835 which is to be found on the website of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice at : Resolved, That we regard the efforts of the Anti-Slavery Societies as most injurious to the welfare of the slaves; that, in our opinion, all such efforts lead to exasperate their passions, to agitate their minds with fallacious hopes; to render necessary their subjection to unwonted restraints; and, more than all, to postpone to an indefinite period all such changes in their condition as their owners, under the direction of an enlightened benevolence, might aim to accomplish. RACE POLITICS

Resolved, That, although the Anti-Slavery Societies disclaim all intention to excite servile insurrections, yet we believe that the tendency of their exaggerated statements and inflammatory appeals is, not only to create feverish discontent among the slaves, but to cause such an explosion of their worst passions as would spread havoc and consternation over entire regions of our country.21 SERVILE INSURRECTION

How is it, that the white folks who are now proclaimed as being “against slavery,” such as Friend Moses who ventured in the African slave trade until he found out that he wasn’t making money that way, had actually been so hostile to integrating with black Americans that they began to experiment in Jim Crow apartheid, tearing out for instance the black seating in their Quaker meetinghouse? Is their current reputation merely another piece of Fake News? QUAKER FAKELORE

21. Page 417 in Donna McDaniel’s and Vanessa Julye’s FIT FOR FREEDOM, NOT FOR FRIENDSHIP: QUAKERS, AFRICAN AMERICANS, AND THE MYTH OF RACIAL JUSTICE (Philadelphia: Quaker Press of Friends General Conference, 2009). HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES

At the racially segregated Yearly Meeting School of the Religious Society of Friends in Providence, Rhode Island that had been created by Friend Moses Brown, things were not going swimmingly. Finding that the governing committees of the Yearly Meeting resisted his expenditures to develop the school, Friend John Griscom resigned from his position as headmaster of the academic department.

Two other teachers also left: Samuel Gummere was hired by a school that had been founded in 1833 in Haverford, Pennsylvania, HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS and Pliny Earle decided to attend Medical College in Philadelphia.

The average annual enrollment of pupils would continue to decline.

In this year Friends Enoch Breed and Lydia Breed were replaced as superintendents by Friends Seth Davis and Mary Davis.

1819-1824. Purinton, Matthew and Betsy. 1824-1835. Breed, Enoch and Lydia. 1829-1835. Gould, Stephen Wanton and Gould, Han- nah, Asst. Supts. 1835-1836. Davis, Seth and Mary. 1837. Breed, Enoch and Lydia. 1838-1839. Rathbun, Rowland and Alice. 1840-1844. Wing, Allen and Olive. 1845-1846. Thompson, Olney and Lydia. 1847. Congdon, Jarvia and Lydia. 1847-1852. Cornell, Silas and Sarah M. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES

1851

The “Fierce Feathers” Quaker lie kept growing and growing.

Friend Edward Hicks made a declaration in this year in regard to painting that may surprise you; he expressed what was a very typical attitude of the Quakers of that period in general toward the fine arts in general: “If the Christian world was in the real spirit of Christ, I do not believe there would be such a thing as a fine painter in Christendom. It appears clearly to me to be one of those trifling, insignificant arts, which has never been of any substantial advantage to mankind. But as the inseparable companion of voluptuousness and pride, it has presaged the downfall of empires and kingdoms; and in my view stands now enrolled among the premonitory symptoms of the rapid decline of the American Republic.”22 RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

Although Wilson Armistead had diddly-squat new information (and virtually zero old information, if truth be told), in Volume VI of his supposedly authoritative SELECT MISCELLANIES, CHIEFLY ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE HISTORY, CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES AND SUFFERINGS OF THE SOCIETY OF FRIENDS; WITH ACCORDANT SENTIMENTS OF EMINENT AND PIOUS INDIVIDUALS OF OTHER DENOMINATIONS, INCLUDING MANY REMARKABLE INCIDENTS, AND A VARIETY OF INFORMATION PARTICULARLY INTERESTING TO FRIENDS, he was unable to refrain from introducing yet a further “improvement” on the fake news “Fierce Feathers” fantasy of Easton monthly meeting. —Because, that’s what such people do! QUAKER FAKELORE

המוסיף על הצריך גורם לחיסרון - סנהדרין כט, א

— Babylonian Talmud (Talmud Bavli) created in the 3d to 6th Centuries CE in what is now Iraq warns (Sanhedrin 29) “adding to the truth subtracts from it.”

22. MEMOIRS, as quoted in Carolyn Weekley’s THE KINGDOMS OF EDWARD HICKS (Williamsburg VA: Colonial Wiliamsburg/ Abrams, 1999), page 30 HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS

1852

The “Indian Treaty” Quaker Fake News kept growing and growing.

Benjamin West’s famous 1771 painting of William Penn, James Logan, Thomas Lloyd, and Thomas Story, depicting them as having been negotiating with the headman Tamanend and the elders of the Lenape tribe just outside Philadelphia in the early 1680s, arrived in the USA.23

Actually I kind of like the idea of that series of “friendship meetings” that Friend William “Onas” Penn had with various groups of the Lenapes, which, as interracial contact goes, was probably much superior to the usual “treaty negotiations” and “land purchases” lubricated by booze. The only difficulty I have is with this later being characterized by the whites, in an entirely self-serving manner, as having constituted treaty negotiations (in the absence of any evidence that it had actually resulted in a formal treaty) and as having constituted land purchases (in the absence of any evidence that land purchases were negotiated). Were we simply characterizing these contacts as exemplary or even unique race relations, there would be no HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES problem of any kind. I think I can grasp that Hicks, in those paintings, was in effect praising the good white folk of later Pennsylvania for being descended from the good white folk of earlier Pennsylvania, in order to encourage them to “continue” to behave decently toward the remaining Native Americans. But praising people for their excellence happens to be a two-edged sword, for in some cases this may result in appropriate conduct on the part of people who take such a self-conceit to heart, while in other cases this may result in inappropriate conduct on the part of people who were thus enabled to take the interracial attitude “We bought you out fair and square and then you failed to go away, you damned Indian givers.” The difficult thing, in creating a mythology, is to create one which is so unambiguous that it may only be used for the good while lending itself not at all to furtherance of the schemes of the wicked. I take it to be clear at this point that Hicks did not succeed in creating such an unambiguous mythology. Perhaps I should moderate myself by confessing that my primary concern is with later generations having assimilated the f/Friendly interracial meetings and discussions in which Friend William Penn participated both to a model of “treaty negotiations” and to a model of “property transactions.” I really do believe that the sort of thing in which Penn engaged was then and is now the right and righteous mode of conduct. What I fear, however, is that by assimilating that sort of historic meeting of minds and hearts and souls to the idea white people have of treaties and contracts, later generations created a racial situation in which the white descendants could say “We bought you out, so why didn’t you go and get lost? Why are you red people still around here bothering us?” What the painter/preacher Hicks was up to, it seems, was the creation of a mythology of righteousness by which we can believe in ourselves and congratulate ourselves, and according to which we will be inclined to behave ourselves because we so respect ourselves by way of respect for our illustrious forbears — but it is a most exceedingly difficult thing, to create a mythology which is so unambiguous that it can cut only one way, and, it seems to me, Hicks failed in this, creating instead a simplistic mythology which it is now as easy for the evil one to use for purposes of evil, as by decent people for the good. QUAKER FAKELORE

In this year Friend Samuel M. Janney offered, in his THE LIFE OF WILLIAM PENN; WITH SELECTIONS FROM HIS CORRESPONDENCE AND AUTO-BIOGRAPHY (Philadelphia: Hogan, Perkins, and Company), an utterly spurious but long-enduring fable of a conversation between Friends George Fox and William Penn over the wearing of the sword of nobility: When William Penn was convinced of the principles of Friends, and became a frequent attendant at their meetings, he did not immediately relinquish his gay apparel; it is even said that he wore a sword, as was then customary among men of rank and fashion. Being one day in company with George Fox, he asked his advice concerning it, saying that he might, perhaps, appear singular among Friends, but his sword had once been the means of saving his life without injuring his antagonist, and moreover, that Christ has said, “he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one.” George Fox answered, “I advise thee to wear it as long as thou canst.” Not long after this they met again, when William had no sword, and George said to him,

23. This artifact amounts to the only material record which the purchasers have retained, of the supposed or alleged cross-racial acquisition. The artifact is now at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. The sources I have been consulting suggest that we should bear in mind that in all likelihood there never was a single event anything like what has been portrayed in this art and artifice. Had there been actual purchases, they point out, there would obviously be written documents, and there are no records alleging that there ever were any documents. In fact, nothing like this appears in early biographies of Penn nor is there any other contemporary written description. The story as presented by Benjamin West is said to be quite uncharacteristic of treaty proceedings of the late 17th century, although it is true that Penn was still holding various “friendship conferences” such as had occurred in 1681, in 1682, and even into 1683. The story told by Voltaire is evidently an entire concoction, the reason why this is the only little white treaty never infringed upon being that it is the only little white treaty never entered into. To all appearances Voltaire had been simply prefabricating a context of fidelity in order by contrast more effectively to disdain our contexts of infidelity, which is to say, in our desire to congratulate ourselves we have failed to notice his tongue in his cheek. For a somewhat less self-flattering view of Quaker settlement from its beginnings in the Delaware Valley, consult Ralph K. Turp’s WEST JERSEY UNDER FOUR FLAGS (Dorrance, 1975). HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS “William, where is thy sword?” “Oh!” said he, I have taken thy advice; I wore it as long as I could.” This anecdote, derived from reliable tradition,24 seems to be characteristic of the men and the times. It shows that the primitive Friends preferred that their proselytes should be led by the principle of divine truth in their own minds, rather than follow the opinions of others without sufficient evidence. It must have been manifest to George Fox that his young friend, while expressing his uneasiness about the sword, was under the influence of religious impressions that would, if attended to, lead him, not only into purity of life, but likewise into that simplicity of apparel which becomes the disciples of a self- denying Saviour.

According to the footnote this was related to him by J.P. of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, who had it from James Simpson? Pray tell, what sort of historical provenancing is that for an anecdote? An incident from approximately the 1650s timeframe, that first gets written down some eight generations of human life later, with its only provenancing being that somebody told it to somebody who told it to somebody who told it to somebody who wrote it down? Please. Europe in the 1650s was a dangerous place. Both William Penn and Friend Thomas Ellwood had used their swords to defend their persons and perhaps save their own lives. Friend James Nayler, whose dying words are often quoted, was set upon by robbers who left him for dead in a ditch. Not wearing a sword was a big deal. We lack evidence that Friend William Penn ever did actually renounce the wearing of the symbolic weapon — until, that is, his advancing obesity made such a symbol utterly ludicrous. Indeed, this opportunistic fakelore may have been invented, in part, to distance Friends from the public embarrassment caused by wearing of arms by an eminent, well-connected, immensely wealthy, and therefore unreproachable Friend. In addition, the historical fact is that rather than adding to one’s security on the public street as one might suppose, the wearing of the sword probably subtracted from it. Young Penn had been assaulted once “on a point of honor” by a fellow swordwearer in the French street, a fellow swordwearer who suspected that Penn had “dissed” him as he passed, and had been obliged valiantly to “defend” himself, when we may notice that, had young Penn not been armed as a gentleman, this soi-disant gentleman would neither have taken such notice, nor have taken such offense. Even beyond the manner in which this story has functioned as an excuse for those needing an excuse, after it was fabricated, it seems likely that the belated Janney story originated as an excuse for an embarrassment. My sense of it is that William Penn the younger was not quite so benign and benevolent as he postured as being, not quite so benign and benevolent as he would have liked to have been — but that, like most of us a mere mortal, he sometimes used his religiosity to put a good face on his own needs for his own life prospering. My sense of the situation is that Friend William, one of our best Quakers but an exceedingly rich and well situated man, wore the ceremonial sword for his entire life — or, at least, wore it until he became so portly that such a sword and sword- sash became a comment upon the size of his belly. So we Quakers had the embarrassment of having our most well-situated member of our most peaceful society going around with a weapon of killing attached to his body! My sense of it is that we needed a face-saving explanation, in the face of no preserved evidence that William Penn ever in his life renounced that sword. In this situation we resorted to a self-congratulatory fabrication. My sense of it is that we created this story, originally, because we could not face the embarrassment of the truth. We were not so embarrassed at creating a lie about this historical instance, as we were at the truth of this historical instance. So, originally, toward the middle of the 19th Century, we went for the self-congratulatory fabrication, and swallowed deeply and provenanced it as something that somebody told to somebody who told it to somebody who told it to somebody who wrote it down. And, repeatedly, we now again choose the face-saving fabrication over the simple truth. But, aren’t we entitled to feel good about ourselves? Don’t we need to feel good about ourselves? How can we have the energies we must summon to set this world to rights, if we have to be critiquing ourselves all over the place alla time? :-} FAKELORE

24. Related to me by J.P. of Montgomery County, Pa., who had it from James Simpson. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS

המוסיף על הצריך גורם לחיסרון - סנהדרין כט, א

— Babylonian TALMUD (Talmud Bavli) created in the 3d to 6th Centuries CE in what is now Iraq warns (Sanhedrin 29) “adding to the truth subtracts from it.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS SET AN EXAMPLE

QUAKERS LIES

1855

The Reverend Samuel Ringgold Ward made an interesting comment about the hypocrisy of racially segregated Quaker schools such as the “Moses Brown” Yearly Meeting School of Providence, Rhode Island: They [white Quakers] will give us good advice. They will aid us in giving us a partial education but never in a Quaker school, beside their own children. Whatever they do for us savors of pity, and is done at arm’s length.25 QUAKER FAKELORE

25. Here’s an amusing anecdote about the school. Recently some historical researchers who had heard that the school’s vaunted reputation for racial justice might be merely a piece of self-serving Fake News, asked the school’s official historian in what year it had been that the Quakers had admitted their very 1st student of color. After due research into the records –or pretense of research –or simple stalling, the school administration opted to stonewall, informing the researchers that they had been utterly unable to discover in their school’s records any answer to that intriguing poser.

“Surely, men love darkness rather than light.” — Henry Thoreau, “THE SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES” HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES SET AN EXAMPLE

LIES QUAKERS

1867

Joseph Smith’s A DESCRIPTIVE CATALOGUE OF FRIENDS’ BOOKS: OR BOOKS WRITTEN BY MEMBERS OF THE SOCIETY OF FRIENDS, COMMONLY CALLED QUAKERS, FROM THEIR FIRST RISE TO THE PRESENT TIME, INTERSPERSED WITH CRITICAL REMARKS, AND OCCASIONAL BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICES ....

In 1851, although Wilson Armistead had diddly-squat new information (and virtually zero old information, if truth be told), his supposedly authoritative multi-volume SELECT M ISCELLANIES, CHIEFLY I LLUSTRATIVE OF THE HISTORY, CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES AND SUFFERINGS OF THE SOCIETY OF FRIENDS; WITH ACCORDANT SENTIMENTS OF EMINENT AND PIOUS INDIVIDUALS OF OTHER DENOMINATIONS, INCLUDING MANY REMARKABLE INCIDENTS, AND A VARIETY OF INFORMATION PARTICULARLY INTERESTING TO F RIENDS had introducing yet a further “improvement” on the “Fierce Feathers” fantasy of Easton monthly meeting. Then of course, in this year when Samuel Mcpherson Janney published his 4-volume HISTORY OF THE RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS, FROM ITS RISE TO THE YEAR 1828, in Volume III he accepted and replicated this fake news. —Because, of course, he had this on good authority!

המוסיף על הצריך גורם לחיסרון - סנהדרין כט, א

— Babylonian Talmud (Talmud Bavli) created in the 3d to 6th Centuries CE in what is now Iraq warns (Sanhedrin 29) “adding to the truth subtracts from it.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES

1878

By this point, although Princeton, New Jersey had at the beginning been a predominantly Quaker community, the local Quakers had been very much outnumbered by Presbyterians. The local monthly meeting would be “laid down” and its property placed under the trusteeship of the Chesterfield (or the Crosswicks?) monthly meeting. Those Friends remaining in the vicinity would henceforth travel either to Trenton or to Crosswicks for worship. The Stony Brook buildings would fall into disrepair, and in 1900 or 1901 the original schoolhouse would be torn down.

A publication of the HISTORY OF WASHINGTON CO., NEW YORK included the rudiments of the “Fierce Feathers” story of Easton, New York, but without any of its fake news references such as to feathers. “FIERCE FEATHERS”

In this version of the tale a preparative meeting of the local Friends was just breaking up upon completion of its worship session in its meetinghouse when a party of native warriors “with fresh scalps dangling at their girdles and leading some prisoners entered.” No interaction was reported by this source, the natives simply being reported to have entered that structure. No reaction from the Quakers was reported by this source except what this narrative would imply, fright. No words were reported as having been exchanged during this interracial encounter, nor any gestures. Note that this initial report of such an incident dates to approximately a full century after the fact. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS

1891

A photograph was taken of a rotting ship hulk at Fort Adams near Newport, Rhode Island, the rotting hulk of the slave ship Jem — a reminder of everything people commonly try to just forget all about:

TRIANGULAR TRADE

The number of Quakers on Aquidneck Island having diminished, the monthly meeting in Conanicut or Jamestown was laid down, and its remaining members absorbed into other meetings.

This is what the town of Bristol, Rhode Island looked like in this year:

READ EDWARD FIELD TEXT HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES Here is a detail of the above image of Bristol in this year:

The Reverend Solomon L.M. Conser, who had been the Chaplain in the 5th Pennsylvania Reserve Corps in the Union army of General McClellan, published a volume of reminiscences about the period from 1865 to 1868 during which he had engaged in a reorganization of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Virginia. In his volume VIRGINIA AFTER THE WAR he recounted having met a gentleman whom he identified as “Bro. A—— ” during Spring 1868 in Fairfax, and observed that he steered the conversation in the direction of being able to tell a tale about a member of the Religious Society of Friends he had met aboard a ship near the Isle of Pines, and how this believer in the Peace Testimony had dishonorably fought with his fists, and wrestled, as pirates boarded their vessel:

“‘I thought you Quakers wouldn’t fight?’ ‘Well,’ replied the brave Quaker, ‘thee knows I should not have done so, if they had stayed on their own ship.’”

The Reverend Conser mentions that on the following day he had discussed this with a neighbor of Bro. A— — and had been informed that the man had never been on the sea at all. An explanation was offered, that “He may have read these tales in his younger days, and, by repeating them often, at last come to believe that the adventures he narrates were really his own.” QUAKER FAKELORE HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS SET AN EXAMPLE

QUAKERS LIES

20TH CENTURY

1915

When World War I broke out in Europe, the Reverend A.J. Muste, inspired by the Christian mysticism of the Quakers, became a pacifist.

A group of Hicksite Friends, belonging chiefly to Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, initiated Woolman School adjoining Swarthmore College.

The “Fierce Feathers” incident at the Easton, New York meetinghouse was reported in THE NEW YORK GENEALOGICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL RECORD. DEVOTED TO THE INTERESTS OF AMERICAN GENEALOGY AND BIOGRAPHY (Volume XLVI), again without any references to any of the later elaborations such as feathers or conversations. The substantiation for this report had come from the Research Committee of the Willard’s Mountain Chapter of the Daughters of the American Republic in Greenwich, New York: Then the revolutionary struggle took place and they found themselves, notwithstanding their peace-loving principles, in the midst of the theater of war. During the continuation of this struggle they suffered much in the loss of property and by the persecution of the warriors, who looked upon the peaceful Friends with scorn.... Indians still roamed through this section; it is related they frequently peered in the log meeting house, and once a band on an expedition of murderous intention, with scalps dangling from their belts, appeared at the door; after watching the silent worshippers awhile, they departed without molesting....

(It is to be noted that the only alteration in this story during this timeframe was that although the “peering in” of the native warriors was characterized as having occurred frequently, appearing at the door and watching awhile was reported as having occurred but a single time.)

LIES QUAKERS

QUAKER FAKELORE

Professor of Bible Elbert Russell had since 1895 been the target of numerous evangelical “Holiness Friends” protests on account of his introduction of modernist methods of Bible study. His faculty adversary William Orville Mendenhall, Ph.D., D.D., was for a decade a mathematics professor (who would go on to become the president of Whittier College in California but would be forced out there during World War II because although he wanted to allow conscientious objectors as students, his Board of Directors desired instead to make the college a training center for recruits to the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps). Russell resigned amid controversy over an attempt to force the resignation of the president of Earlham based upon issues of Quaker religious life on campus for students. He relocated from Indiana to Baltimore, where he would divide his time between Johns Hopkins University and preaching, principally at the Eutaw Street Monthly Meeting (until taking a position at Woolman School in 1917). THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY The committee of the board made some suggestions of changes in practice and policy but in the main stood by the president. A friend of mine on the board was genuinely distressed by the situation, but confessed that they did not know what else to do; they could get another head of the Biblical Department but did not know where they could get another president. Professor David W. Dennis made an effort at reconciliation as late as commencement time. He got President Kelly26 and me together along with mutual friends, but the differences proved irreconcilable. President Kelly defended and justified his policy of minimizing the Quaker influence in the college, and I insisted that it must be made fundamentally a Quaker institution. I protested that I had no personal feelings that would prevent our cooperation; but he said that I had impugned his personal and financial integrity and that there could be no reconciliation unless I withdrew part of my charges before the board. I had made the charges, I asserted, at the request of the board for a statement of criticisms currently made against the administration. I had stated them as criticisms actually made; he had been exonerated by the board. I was willing to leave it there; but on the question of the policy of the college, I saw nothing to be done but for the question of policy to be fought out in the church, to see whether a board of trustees could be secured favorable to a thoroughly Quaker college. In the light of experience I have regretted that I did not pursue a different method in some ways. The division of sentiment in the faculty and among Friends left scars that hampered the college for many years. All the principal parties in the conflict left Earlham before many years passed and found fields of conspicuous usefulness elsewhere. President Kelly resigned in 1917 and not long afterward left the Society of Friends.27

26. Robert Lincoln Kelly had been a student of Professor John Dewey at the University of Chicago, and specialized in child psychology. 27. He would serve as executive secretary of the Council of Church Boards of Education, where he would author in 1924 THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION IN AMERICA: A STUDY OF ONE HUNDRED SIXTY-ONE THEOLOGICAL SCHOOLS IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA, and then as executive secretary of the American Association of Colleges, where he would author in 1940 THE AMERICAN COLLEGES AND THE SOCIAL ORDER. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES SET AN EXAMPLE

LIES QUAKERS

1917

Friend Lucy Violet Hodgkin (later Holdsworth), acting on behalf of the “1905 Committee of Yorkshire Quarterly Meeting,” prepared a children’s book entitled A BOOK OF QUAKER SAINTS (illustrated by Frederick Cayley-Robinson.) Since she was preparing these materials for the tender ears of young children, she was of course in accordance with all our conventions free to tell whatever lies she considered to be most appropriate. It was on this effort that she coined the title “Fierce Feathers.” QUAKER FAKELORE

המוסיף על הצריך גורם לחיסרון - סנהדרין כט, א

— Babylonian Talmud (Talmud Bavli) created in the 3d to 6th Centuries CE in what is now Iraq warns (Sanhedrin 29) “adding to the truth subtracts from it.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES

1924

A book ALONG THE SHORE WITH THE RED MEN AND THE WHITE: A BOOK FOR YOUNG PEOPLE (New York: Valentine’s Manual, Inc.) was “compiled by a group of Friends,” and included the fake news “Fierce Feathers” story of the Easton, New York monthly meeting of the Religious Society of Friends.

המוסיף על הצריך גורם לחיסרון - סנהדרין כט, א

— Babylonian TALMUD (Talmud Bavli) created in the 3d to 6th Centuries CE in what is now Iraq warns (Sanhedrin 29) “adding to the truth subtracts from it.”

Dr. Elbert Russell went abroad. He would speak and study in England and Germany, tour in Austria, France, Italy, Macedonia, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, and Palestine, and function as a delegate to the 1st World Council of Churches in Stockholm. I was depressed by the pervasive militarism of Paris. It was somewhat different from the impression made by England. The war monuments in English cities, the battle flags and warriors’ tombs in the churches, and the battle scenes in the art galleries seemed to belong mostly to the past. The flags were tattered, the monuments celebrated long-past victories, the warrior’s armor was rusty and antiquated. But in Paris the militaristic spirit of its monumented past seemed so ominously alive in the present generation. The streets seemed upholstered with the gray-blue uniforms of the Garde Republique. The Grave of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe was not only a memorial of the heroic dead but a shrine of living French patriotism. One felt that as Paul found ancient Athens wholly given over to idolatry, modern Paris was a city given over to the remembrance and glorification of war; its streets named for generals, battles and revolutions; its squares and monuments commemorative of victories; its Arc de Triomphe dominating spacious parks and avenues with its exaltation of the general’s victory and the soldier’s sacrifice. Even the Place de la Concorde was filled with the spoils of war, the memories of revolution. The invalides is a vast war museum, and the adjacent church has been converted into a shrine of Mars by replacing the altar of Christ with the tomb of Napoleon. Paris seemed enamored of beauty; it was filled with palaces of art. Some of its art served to symbolize and embellish Christian faith and worship; but most of this was ancient, the medieval art of Notre Dame, of the Neuve Chapelle and the Madeleine, and of the half-pagan splendor of the Renaissance paintings in the Louvre. None of it shows pacifist Christianity. The present- day art of the shrines and music of the French churches is tawdry and bizarre. The living art of Paris is dedicated to war and love; prostituted to the incitement to lust and the HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS glorification of it under the guise of love; and to the incitement to carnage and the glorification of it under the name of patriotism. The French youth could hardly escape the influences that would bind him to the chariot of Mars, even if there were no compulsory military service nor large standing army. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES SET AN EXAMPLE

LIES QUAKERS

1928

When Anna Bassett Griscom compiled PEACE CRUSADERS: ADVENTURES IN GOODWILL (Philadelphia & London: J.B. Lippincott Company) for the American Friends Service Committee, she included a 1,300-word version of the spurious “Fierce Feathers” story with a plate illustration by Marion T. Justice of native Americans entering a log meetinghouse.

המוסיף על הצריך גורם לחיסרון - סנהדרין כט, א

— Babylonian Talmud (Talmud Bavli) created in the 3d to 6th Centuries CE in what is now Iraq warns (Sanhedrin 29) “adding to the truth subtracts from it.”

Planning for future growth was introduced at Mount Rainier National Park. The Mountaineers, National Park Advisory Board, and other planners helped the park service develop a long-range plan that allowed for increases in buildings, roads, and trails, while setting aside road-free areas in the north and southwestern zones of the park. The Longmire Administration Building was constructed. Friend Floyd Schmoe resigned as the park’s naturalist to become instead an instructor in forest ecology in the Forestry Department of the University of Washington. During his teaching days he would help found University Friends Meeting in Seattle (4001 Ninth Avenue NE, [email protected]). In following years the Schmoe family would spend several summers in the San Juan Islands while Floyd was doing research for an advanced degree.

Duke University awarded its 1st Ph.D. degrees.

When the original dean of the Divinity School at Duke University, Dean Edmond D. Soper, accepted the position as president of Ohio Wesleyan University, Dr. Elbert Russell became the dean of the School of Religion (until his sabbatical year would begin in 1933). It apparently didn’t matter to anybody that Friend Elbert was a Quaker and this was not a Quaker school — and isn’t that interesting? President Few pointed out that there were plenty of Methodist ministers available locally, who could preach the communion services, and that Duke’s beginning had been in a small school for training ministers that had been conducted jointly by HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES Friends and Methodists.

There was a new edition of his 1909 THE PARABLES OF JESUS (Winston). His 72-page “The Separation after a Century” would be reprinted from the Friends’ Intelligencer.

Although Sir Alexander Fleming observed during this year that colonies of the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus could be destroyed by the mold Penicillium notatum, proving that there was an antibacterial agent there in principle, and although in a later timeframe this would lead to medicines that could kill gram-positive types of disease-causing bacteria inside the body, there would continue to be no means of effectively controlling tuberculosis and other infections that were being caused by gram-negative bacteria.

Dr. M. McConkey and Dr. David Tillerson Smith of Duke University were able to produce intestinal tuberculosis in guinea pigs by feeding them tubercle bacilli after restricting their intake of Vitamin C. This observation would lead directly to the prevention of intestinal tuberculosis in man by dietary supplementation with Vitamins A, C, and D. Additional studies in this field would demonstrate the mechanisms for the apical localization of the lesions characterizing re-infection tuberculosis, and would reveal that if administered alone corticosteroids would accelerate the spread of TB, but if accompanied by specific antibiotics, could be administered safely and with great benefit. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS

1932

In this year and the following one, the “Peaceable Kingdom” paintings of Edward Hicks were included in a collection of folk art that was on national tour and thus were becoming for the 1st time generally known (before this, they had merely been various paintings gracing various Quaker meetinghouses to which Hicks had originally presented them while on his preaching circuit).

The New York State Education Department set in place a road marker in Easton, at 42° 59.417′ N, 73° 32.4′ W: “Friends’ log meeting house surrounded by Burgoyne’s Indian allies in 1777, but finding Friends unarmed stacked arms and attended meeting peaceably.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS

1944

Friend Anna Louise Curtis’s THE QUAKERS TAKE STOCK (New York: Island Workshop Press) described “the race problem” and “the Indian problem,” although she indicated that this was “from the human standpoint.” Her volume would become one of the sources of fake news about “Fierce Feathers” for 1992’s LIGHTING CANDLES IN THE DARK.

המוסיף על הצריך גורם לחיסרון - סנהדרין כט, א

— Babylonian TALMUD (Talmud Bavli) created in the 3d to 6th Centuries CE in what is now Iraq warns (Sanhedrin 29) “adding to the truth subtracts from it.”

Because fungus diseases were a major problem not only for civilians but also in the ranks of the military, the Army Medical School asked the Duke University group focusing on fungal infections to author a MANUAL OF CLINICAL MYCOLOGY. Dr. David Tillerson Smith and his associates discovered a drug that would reduce the mortality of North American blastomycosis from 90% to 40%.

Lola Montez was portrayed by the actress Conchita Montenegro in a moralizing film LOLA MONTEZ.

Friend Elbert Russell reviewed the movie “Gone With the Wind.”

“Fiddle-dee-dee, war, war, war, I get so bored I could scream!” —Scarlet O’Hara HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES

He attended the 50th reunion of his graduating class at Earlham College, delivered the baccalaureate address, and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree.

An attitude toward Quakers in the arts: “[The artist] brings something to religion which is essential to the life of man if that life is to reach up to God by every way that is open. What the artists can express of truth and beauty through the symbols of art may have an exact and abiding quality which may not be found by some earnest souls in such symbols of religion as they can use.... For fresh vision and new growth man needs imagination — and so, too, needs the arts in which imagination is expressed. Along the path of the imagination the artist and the mystic may make contact. The revelations of God are not all of one kind. Always the search in art, as in religion, is for the rhythm of relationships, for the unity, the urge, the mystery, the wonder of life that is presented in great art and true religion.” —Horace B. Pointing28

28. ART, RELIGION, AND THE COMMON LIFE (London: S.C.M.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS SET AN EXAMPLE

QUAKERS LIES

1949

The property of the Friends in Princeton, New Jersey, which had for many years been being held in trust by the Quaker monthly meeting of a neighboring town (probably Crosswicks), was deeded back to the Princeton Monthly Meeting of Friends at Stony Brook.

Arthur Hollis Edens became president of Duke University.

Mary Esther McWhirter included an abridgment of the fake news story “Fierce Feathers” in her teacher’s book FINDING GOD THROUGH WORK AND WORSHIP.

המוסיף על הצריך גורם לחיסרון - סנהדרין כט, א

— Babylonian Talmud (Talmud Bavli) created in the 3d to 6th Centuries CE in what is now Iraq warns (Sanhedrin 29) “adding to the truth subtracts from it.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS

At Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, while attending Quaker meeting there, Kenneth L. Carroll was awarded the B.D. degree in Religious Studies.

Clerks of Meeting 1943-1947 Edward K. Kraybill 1947-1948 William Van Hoy, Jr. 1949-1949 John de J. Pemberton, Jr. 1950-1951 Harry R. Stevens 1951-1952 John A. Barlow 1952-1957 Susan Gower Smith 1957-1960 Frances C. Jeffers 1960-1961 Cyrus M. Johnson 1961-1965 Peter H. Klopfer 1965-1967 Rebecca W. Fillmore 1967-1968 David Tillerson Smith 1968-1970 Ernest Albert Hartley 1970-1971 John Hunter 1971-1972 John Gamble 1972-1974 Lyle B. Snider (2 terms) 1974-1975 Helen Gardella 1976-1978 Cheryl F. Junk 1978-1980 Alice S. Keighton 1980-1982 John B. Hunter 1982-1984 Edward M. Arnett 1984-1986 Calhoun D. Geiger HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES

1986-1988 John P. Stratton 1988-1990 J. Robert Passmore 1990-1992 Karen Cole Stewart 1992-1995 Kathleen Davidson March 1995-1998 Nikki Vangsnes 1998-2000 Co-clerks J. Robert Passmore & Karen Cole Stewart 2000-2002 Amy Brannock 2002-2002 Jamie Hysjulien (Acting) 2002-2005 William Thomas O’Connor 2005-2007 Terry Graedon 2007-2009 Anne Akwari 2009-2012 Joe Graedon 2012-2013 Marguerite Dingman 2013-2016 Co-clerks Cathy Bridge & David Bridge 2016- Toby Berla HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS

1964

Lyndon LaRouche, Jr. became a supporter of a faction called the Revolutionary Tendency which had been expelled from the Socialist Workers Party and was under the influence of the British Trotskyist leader Gerry Healy, leader of the British Socialist Labour League. His parents Jesse Weir LaRouche and Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Sr., who had withdrawn from the Quaker monthly meeting of Lynn, Massachusetts after the disownment of their son (they had not themselves been disowned) at this point formed and began to lead their own independent congregation in Boston, located at 48 Dwight Street near Tremont Avenue and known as the Village Street Monthly Meeting. This would continue until 1979. A stack of the newsletters issued by this meeting is stored upstairs at the Rhode Island Historical Society in Providence, Rhode Island. According to New England Quaker documents, “This meeting was founded circa 1964, ostensibly as a Quaker meeting, though its relations with New England Yearly Meeting seem to have been decidedly unFriendly. They were never listed in the Yearly Meeting minutes, as most independent meetings were. Lyndon LaRouche, an independent Presidential candidate, seems to have been a key member. The meeting was active at least through 1979.”

A subcommittee of the Religious Education Committee of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting produced CANDLES IN THE DARK: AN ANTHOLOGY OF STORIES TO BE USED IN EDUCATION FOR PEACE. The subcommittee was clerked by Janet E. Schroeder and included Margaret Cooper Brinton and Mary Esther McWhirter. The volume included the fake news piece “Fierce Feathers” as modified by Mary Esther McWhirter to become “a story for all ages” –which is spurious unless you happen to be one of those people who subscribe to the notion that tender ears exist in order for us to whisper our lies into– that was “based on historical or biographical records,” and “true or inspired by fact,” which again is spurious since the story is known by historians to be nothing more than a continuously elaborated invention that originated from virtually nothing.

המוסיף על הצריך גורם לחיסרון - סנהדרין כט, א

— Babylonian TALMUD (Talmud Bavli) created in the 3d to 6th Centuries CE in what is now Iraq warns (Sanhedrin 29) “adding to the truth subtracts from it.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES SET AN EXAMPLE

LIES QUAKERS

1968

Calhoun D. Geiger became a director of Quaker Lake Camp of the North Carolina Yearly Meeting-Friends United Meeting.

Kenneth L. Carroll’s “From Bond Slave to Governor: The Strange Career of Charles Bayly (1632?-1680)” (Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society 52:1, pages 19-38).

The Religious Education Committee of Pacific Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends prepared TO LIGHT CANDLES IN THE DARK: A STUDY GUIDE. (Alburtis, Pennsylvania: Hemlock Press). The guide offered study questions to accompany each of the stories in CANDLES IN THE DARK: AN ANTHOLOGY OF STORIES TO BE USED IN EDUCATION FOR PEACE. This guide informed the discussion leader that the theme of the fake news story “Fierce Feathers” was “Power of Love.” The guide did not inform the discussion leader that the story was an invention and entirely without substantiation.

המוסיף על הצריך גורם לחיסרון - סנהדרין כט, א

— Babylonian Talmud (Talmud Bavli) created in the 3d to 6th Centuries CE in what is now Iraq warns (Sanhedrin 29) “adding to the truth subtracts from it.”

August 8, Thursday: While defending against a Viet Cong attack, US troops killed 72 civilians and injured 240 at Cairang in the Mekong Delta.

When more racial violence occurred in Miami, Florida, the National Guard was called in and killed 3 citizens by gunfire.

Richard Milhous Nixon was chosen as the Republican presidential candidate and was promising us “an honorable end to the war in Vietnam.” In his acceptance speech, he had the following to say: HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES

“Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth — to see it as it is, and tell it like it is — to find the truth, to speak the truth, and to live the truth.” — Republican Presidential nominee Richard Milhous Nixon, 1968 (a birthright Quaker)

Southern Republicans understood very well that Senator Nixon might be willing to put up with the colored people as part of his “Southern Strategy,” but he obviously didn’t like colored people and was obviously uncomfortable around them — and this of course was supremely reassuring.

After his presidency, Nixon would have the following to offer:

“Always remember others may hate you but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.” — President Richard Milhous Nixon HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS SET AN EXAMPLE

QUAKERS LIES

1970

May 8, Friday: 200,000 people began 3 days of anti-US protests in Melbourne and Sydney. They also protested against their own government, for supporting the US.

Construction workers wearing helmets attacked a civil disobedience anti-war demonstration in the financial district of New York City, injuring 70. These helmeted conservatives then invaded City Hall and obliged city officials to raise a flag to full staff that had been at half-staff in mourning for the 4 students killed at Kent State University.29

7 members of the Black Panther Party, indicted for having taken part in a shootout with police, were released by the State of Illinois, on account of a lack of evidence that any of them had discharged a firearm.

Gymkhana Formule I for tape by Pierre Henry was performed for the initial time, in the Gymnase de Malakoff.

Time’s Encomium for synthesized and processed synthesized sound by Charles Wuorinen was performed completely for the initial time, at the State University of New York, Albany.

Piano Sonata no.4 by Lejaren Hiller was performed for the initial time, in Buffalo, 20 years after it was composed.

This was just 4 days after National Guard troops had opened fire on anti-war demonstrators at Kent State University. Between the end of President Richard Milhous Nixon’s 10PM press conference and 3:30AM the following morning, the White House switchboard would log 50 phone calls from POTUS, 8 of them to national-security adviser Henry Kissinger. Finally the restless president was listening to some music in the Lincoln sitting room, and from the window sighted student protesters on the grounds of the Washington Monument. He roused his valet Manolo Sanchez, a recent citizen, and asked the drowsy man if he wanted some hot chocolate. The valet declined. He then asked the valet if he had ever seen the Lincoln Memorial at

29. US Attorney-General John N. Mitchell would announce in 1971 that there wasn’t going to be any federal grand jury investigation of the killings at Kent State. The State of Ohio would agree in 1979 to the settlement of a civil lawsuit over the killings. They would agree to pay $600,000 to the parents of the students killed, and to nine students who had been injured but survived, and in addition $75,000 for legal and other expenses. Although Governor James Rhodes and 27 National Guardsmen who were defendants in the case would sign a statement that the killings “should not have occurred,” no-one would ever offer any sort of apology. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS night, found that he had not, and led an entourage of about 4 Secret Service men on an unscheduled visit. He talked to young anti-Vietnam protesters camping out at the Lincoln Memorial. He tried to chat them up with talk about football. In the course of the event he informed everyone who would listen that, having been raised as a Quaker, he was about as much of a pacifist as anyone could possibly be.

Now for a little lesson in logic. Many arguments are based on a simple “if... then” structure. These arguments are so common and useful they have been awarded a special Latinate name, modus ponens.

In addition to the phrase “modus ponens,” logicians have special technical words for the various features of these arguments. The “If... Then” premise is called a conditional, and the two truth claims, the beginning one and the end one, are called the antecedent and the consequent: Main Premise (antecedent) Helping Premise (If antecedent, then consequent) Conclusion (consequent) The solid connection between premises and conclusion is known as deductive validity. If both premises are true, then the argument is sound. In the next, generalized, illustration, the letters P and Q are used to stand for the distinct claims expressed in whole sentences. Main Premise (P) Helping Premise (If P then Q) Conclusion (Q) HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES Consider the following example of an argument purporting to have valid logical structure and purporting to be dealing in true assertions:

Obviously, the above is a proper use of the modus ponens form of logic. Now let’s consider another one: President Richard Milhous Nixon was proclaimed to be a Quaker. A Quaker would have opposed the war in Vietnam. Therefore, Friend Richard opposed the war in Vietnam.

Although they are about very different topics, these two arguments have the same basic structure: Notice that the claim P occurs twice: once in the main premise, and once after the If part of the helping premise. The claim Q also occurs twice: once after the then part of the helping premise, and once in the conclusion. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS The nice thing about modus ponens arguments is that their conclusions are quite as good as their premises. The connection between premises and conclusion is solid. This means that all you really have to do in order to evaluate a modus ponens argument is check for the sense in which the premises are true. In this modus ponens argument, if the premises are both at least probably true, the reasoning must be strong and the conclusion must be established. As always, if there is a sense in which at least one of the premises is not true, the reasoning may well be incorrect and lead to spurious conclusions. Contrariwise, if the conclusion is obviously false, then one or the other of the premises was also, in some important sense, false. The inference above is an improper one because there was a very real sense in which Richard Nixon, although he had been raised by a Quaker mother in a Quaker church, and although he was never officially disowned by that church, should not be considered to have been a Quaker.

RICHARD NIXON AND OTHER QUAKER LIARS

“[President Richard Milhous Nixon] will, with time, be a landmark in the history of quiet, determined desperation.” — Murray Kempton

DESPERATION HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES Aware of the historical nature of the event and of the potential for favorable publicity, the President would soon thereafter dictated his recollections to White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, suggesting he give the information to someone who could write it up. The Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum now has the 45-minute Dictabelt on which he related a firsthand account of the visit. On the tape Nixon says his car arrived at the memorial about 4:40AM and walked up the steps to show his aide the monument’s inscriptions. “By this time, a small groups of students began to congregate in the rotunda of the memorial. I walked over to a group of them and shook hands. They were not unfriendly. As a matter of fact they seemed somewhat over- awed and of course quite surprised.” When some of the students volunteered they had not heard Nixon’s press conference the previous evening, he “said I was sorry they had missed it because, as I had tried to explain in the press conference that my goals in Vietnam were the same as theirs — to stop the killing, to end the war, to bring peace. Our goal was not to get into Cambodia by what we were doing, but to get out of Vietnam.” “I said, ‘I know you, probably most of you think I’m an SOB, but, ah, I want you to know that I understand just how you feel.’” He recounted that he had told them that he had come from a Quaker background, “as close to being a pacifist as anybody could be in those times.” “I pointed out that I knew that on their campus, their campuses, a major subject of concern was the Negro problem. I said this was altogether as it should be, because the degradation of slavery had been imposed upon the Negroes, and it was, it would be impossible for us to do everything that we should do to right that wrong. But I pointed out that what we had done to the American Indians was in its way just as bad. We had taken a proud and independent race and virtually destroyed them. And that we had to find ways to bring them back into, into decent lives in this country.” “I just wanted to be sure that all of them realized that ending the war and cleaning up the city streets and the air and the water was not going to solve the spiritual hunger which all of us have and which of course has been the great mystery of life from the beginning of time.” At about 5AM H.R. Haldeman received a wakeup call from Presidential Advisor John Ehrlichman, that the President was at the Lincoln Memorial. By that time Presidential Press Secretary Ron Ziegler had arrived. As the first rays of dawn came, Nixon shook hands with the nearest protesters and went back to his waiting limo.

Please note that I do not classify the above as the creation of Fake News because Friend Richard really was no Quaker. No. I classify the above as the creation of Fake News because of an implication that is buried in the story that Friend Richard is a Quaker. The reason why the story was created and retailed was the impression it created, that because A. Friend Richard was a Quaker and because B. Quakers should be trusted because they are decent people, therefore C. Friend Richard should be trusted because he was a decent human being. That, that, was the Fake News. In actuality Friend Richard was a Flat Rock Quaker, which is to say, a religionist who uses the appearance of religiosity as if it were a flat rock lying on the ground in your garden, under which may over the course of time come to lie concealed any sort of beastly nastiness. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS

1973

May 4, Friday: Grand jury testimony by E. Howard Hunt was made available, and revealed that the White House, abetted by the CIA, had supervised the burglary at the office of Dr. Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. RICHARD NIXON AND OTHER QUAKER LIARS

Former Richard Milhous Nixon Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CREEP) employee Donald Henry Segretti was indicted in Florida for having during the 1972 Florida primary fabricated and disseminated a preposterously malicious campaign document. FAKE NEWS

Six Early Songs for Lyric Soprano and Orchestra was performed for the initial time, in Jordan Hall, Boston, and was conducted by their composer Gunther Schuller, 28 years after they had been written. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES

1976

Kenneth L. Carroll’s “Quaker Weavers at Newport, Ireland, 1720-1740” (Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society 54, pages).

Dorothy M. William, clerk of the Easton, New York monthly meeting, placed an article entitled “Feathers of Peace” in Quaker History (Volume 65 #1, Spring, pages 32-34) as an attempt to validate her meeting’s “Fierce Feathers” account with reference to “original sources”: “Here a band of Burgoyne’s Indian scouts foraging before the battle of Saratoga, stopped to plunder and remained to pray.” Of course she failed in that effort since there are virtually zero such historical and unchallengeable original sources! The meeting is well aware that this story is fake news, and has in its possession better information, and yet such better information is not being willingly made generally available by its author, the current Meeting Historian. “FIERCE FEATHERS” A SCHOLARLY ANALYSIS

המוסיף על הצריך גורם לחיסרון - סנהדרין כט, א

— Babylonian Talmud (Talmud Bavli) created in the 3d to 6th Centuries CE in what is now Iraq warns (Sanhedrin 29) “adding to the truth subtracts from it.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS

In this year and the following one, restoration work was done to the old Quaker meetinghouse in Conanicut or Jamestown, Rhode Island, a structure dating to 1786 (the building is now maintained by the Jamestown Historical Society).

Providence’s Lincoln School for girls was set off as a separate corporation from the New England Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends.

In the Durham monthly meeting of the Religious Society of Friends:

QUAKERS LIES

LIES QUAKERS SET AN EXAMPLE

QUAKERS LIES

1991

Kurt Vonnegut’s FATES WORSE THAN DEATH: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL COLLAGE OF THE 1980S, a bunch of reprocessed speeches and magazine articles, was published by Putnam.

Kurt had a 1st wife who was a Friend, so presumably he has had an opportunity to learn something or other about Quakerism. In FATES WORSE THAN DEATH he offered a thought on page 180 in regard to the 19th- Century American Quaker involvement with solitary imprisonment as a curative.30 Kurt comments on the fact that when his book JAILBIRD was translated into other European languages, none of these other languages turned out to possess any term for “persons who find themselves locked up again and again, since the penitentiary system, an invention of American Quakers, is so new.” —If we did this thing, as for instance in Eastern State Penitentiary atop Cherry Hill near downtown Philadelphia, then, as Vonnegut comments elsewhere in this opus on human inventiveness, We might pray to be rescued from our inventiveness, just as the dinosaurs may have prayed to be rescued from their massiveness. QUAKER FAKELORE The story has grown up, that prisoners driven mad by these Quaker ideas for “correctional facilities” ended up committing suicide. However, try as I might, I have not been able to discover any evidentiary basis for such a history of suicides at this prison. It would seem that the evidence for a wave of suicides there is the same as the evidence for a wave of suicides following the publication of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s DIE LEIDEN DES JUNGEN WERTHERS (THE SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER): the evidence amounts to nothing more than continual repetition of the accusation. In the realm of fakelore, endless repetition counts as multiple attestation and the cow did indeed jump over the moon.

So, did Quakers in fact, as Vonnegut asserts, control this penitentiary thingie? Is this sort of experiment in mental torture indeed to be laid directly and solely at our door? No, in fact, although there were Quakers involved in the development of the penitentiary system and the institution of solitary confinement, these committee members were not unusually influential and were not leaders. The head of the prison-planning group, actually, was a member of another Christian grouping (to protect the guilty, I’m not going to tell you which one), and was a person of influence in that other Christian grouping — yet no-one ever, ever accuses that other Christian grouping (which, I repeat, I have refrained from identifying) of having had bad judgment in the manner in which it has become conventional to accuse the Quakers!

30. Kurt may have acquired this false account of Quaker history from the newspapers of this year, since in this year they were reporting that with generous funding from The Pew Charitable Trusts, stabilization and preservation efforts had begun upon what remained of the structure of the Eastern State Penitentiary. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS What follows is a complete list of the members of the Philadelphia prison society in question. Perhaps, using this list as a starting point, we will be able to ferret out which of these had been Quakers, and which of these Quakers had been so influential in the prison society as to be able significantly to influence its policies of prisoner correction, and which of these influential Quakers had been advocates of the sort of “penitent” solitary confinement which was being alleged by Vonnegut to have led to insanity and suicide? (Or, maybe not. One thing I will mention, in passing, is that there is in fact an influential book dating to that period, which did seem to recommend such harsh policies — however, said book, titled THE STATE OF THE PRISONS IN ENGLAND AND WALES and issued in 1777, had been authored by John Howard, a wealthy crazed English Calvinist who has most decidedly never been accused of being any sort of Quaker. Also, when confronted by Jeremy Bentham’s “panopticon” model, Howard had insisted that this was not at all the sort of thingie which he had had in mind.) Abercrombie, James Baily, Francis Adams, Richard Baker, John Adcock, William Ballantyne, Thomas Affleck, Thomas Bankson, Jacob Allen, Andrew Barclay, James J. Allen, Enoch Barker, James N. Allen, Joseph Beaven, William Allen, Joshua Beck, William C. Andrews, John Bedell, G. T. Annan, Robert Bend Joseph G. T. Anthony, John Benezet, Philip Anthony, Joseph, Sen. Bethel, Robert Ashby, William Bettle, Edward Attmore, Caleb Bingham, Archibald Bache, Franklin Bingham, William Bacon, Job Bird, Charles Bacon, John Blackwell, Robert Bleakley, John Claypoole, John Boothe, Thomas Clifford, Thomas Boyd, George Coates, Benjamin H. Boys, Elias Coates, Josiah Bradford, Thomas, Jr. Coates, Samuel Bradford, William Coates, William Bringhurst, John Collin, Nicholas Bunker, Nathan Collins, Isaac Bush, Solomon Connelly, John Caldwell, T. Connelly, Patrick Carmalt, Caleb Conner, Michael Carmalt, Jonathan HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES Cooper, James Carson, Andrew Connelly, Henry Carter, D, B. Cope, Marmaduke C, Clark, Ephraim Copperthwaite, Joseph Clarkson, Gerardus Coxe, Charles S. Clarkson, Joseph Tench, Coxe Claypoole, David C. Cresson, Caleb. Jr. Carey, Mathew Crawford, Charles Engles, Joseph P. Cruikshank, Joseph Engles, William M. Davis, Samuel Evans, Charles Davis, Samuel Evans, John Dawes, Jonathan Evans, Joseph Delancey, William H. Falconer, Nathaniel Dobson, J. L. or Thomas Fare, John Dobson, Judah Fassit, James Dobson, Thomas Fassit, John Drais, Daniel Ferris, Benjamin Drinker, Henry Few, Joseph Duffield, Benjamin Field, John Duffield, George Finley, Francis Duncan, William Fisher, Jeremiah John Dunlap Fisher, John Du Plessis, Peter Le Barbier Fisher, William Earp, Thomas Fitzsimmons, Thomas Eldridge, Samuel Forbes, William Ely, E. S. Foulke, John Fox, George Green, Jacob Fox, Samuel M. Griffitts, Samuel P. Franklin, Benjamin Haines Ephraim Franklin, William Temple Haines, Reuben Fuller, Benjamin Hall, William Gallagher, David Hallowell, Israel Gardner, John Harding, Jasper Gardner, Richard Harrison, Thomas Garrett, Philip Hartshorne, Pattison Garrigues, Abraham M. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS Helmuth, J. Henry Garrigues, William Henderson, S. J. George, Edward Hewes, Josiah Geyer, Andrew Heysham, William Gibson, James Hill, Henry Gilpin, Henry D. Hood, William H. Gordon, Elisha Hopkins, Robert, Jr. Goffin, Joseph M. Hornor, Benjamin Green, Ashbel Howell, Isaac Humphreys, Richard La Roche, Rene Humphreys, Thomas Latimer, George Hutchinson, James Lawrence, William Ingersoll, Joseph R. Leib, George James, John Leib, Michael James, Joseph Lewis, Robert M. James, Thomas C. Lippincott, Samuel Jobson, James Lippincott, William Jones, John Lloyd, Peter Kaign, John Lloyd, Thomas Keable, John Lowber, John C. Keating, William H. Lownes, Caleb Keen, Joseph Lucas, William Jackson, Kemper Lucas, William Kidd, William Ludwick, Christopher Kimber, Thomas. 2d McCrea, John Kite, Joseph S. McGoffin, Joseph Kittera, Thomas McIllhenney, William Krebs, George McIllhenney, William, Jr. Large, Ebenezer McIlvaine, Joseph MacKensie, William Moore, Joseph Magaw, Samuel Moore, Thomas Marshall, Benjamin Moore, Thomas L. Marshall, Benjamin Morris, Benjamin W. Marshall, Charles Morris, Israel W. Marshall, Christopher, Sen. Morris, John Marshall, Christopher, Jr. Morris, Robert HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES Maule, Israel Morrison, John Mead, George Morrison, Thomas Meder, John Morrison, William Merriam, Ezekiel Morton, John, Jr. Miles, Samuel Morton, Samuel G. Miller, Clement S. Moyers, James Mitchell, Abraham Neal, Benjamin T. Mitchell, Thomas Needles, Edward Molyneux, Robert Norris, Joseph P. Montgomery, James O'Brien, Michael M. Moore, Charles Oldden, Daniel Moore, James Oldden, John Palmer, Samuel Pilmore, Joseph Palmer, Thomas Pleasants, Samuel Parke James P. Potts, David Parker, Jeremiah Poulson, Charles A. Parker, Richard Poulson, Zachariah Parker (Parkinson), Thomas Poultney, Benjamin Parrish, Isaac Price, Richard Parrish, Joseph Price, William Paschall, Joseph Pyle, Joseph Paul, John Ralston, Gerard Paul, Joseph M. Randolph, Edward, Jr. Paxson, Benjamin Randolph, Jacob Pemberton, James Rawle, William Pennock, Abraham Read, John M. Penrose, Jonathan Reed, Joseph Perot, Elliston Reed, William B. Perot, John Redman, John Pickering, Elihu Remington, Job B. Riley, John Shields, Thomas Reynolds, James Shipley, Thomas Robbins, Samuel J. Shippen, William, Jr. Robinson, James Shoemaker, Abraham Roberts, George Shoemaker, Benjamin Roberts, Robert HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS Shoemaker, Jacob Rodgers, F.R.B. Sims, Joseph Rogers, Thomas Smith, George Washington Rogers, William Smith, Henry Rotch, Joseph Smith, Robert H. Rundle, George Snowden, Jedediah Rush, Benjamin Sproat, James Rutledge, E. Stansbury, Joseph Ryerson, Thomas Starr, James Sansom, Samuel Starr, John Say, Benjamin Starling, John Shade, Peter Stewardson, Thomas Shewell, Thomas Stockton, Richard Stroud, George McD. Waln, Nicholas, Jr. Swanwick, John Waln, Robert Taggart, Robert Warder, Jeremiah Tatem, Joseph Watson, Thomas, Jr. Thaw, Benjamin Wayne, Joseph Thomas, Jacob Wayne, William, Jr. Thompson James B. Weatherly David Thompson, Jonah Weiberg, Caspar Thornton, William Welbert, F. Anthony Tittermary, Richard Weller, George Todd, John Wells, Richard Towers, Robert Wharton, George M. Troth, Henry Wharton, John Tyng, S. H. Wharton, Kearney Tyson, Daniel Whim, Francis Uhler, George White, William Vaux, Richard Whitall, James Vaux, Roberts Wilcox, Mark Will, William Yarnall, Ellis H. Williams, George Young, William Williams, Joseph Zane, William Williams, Thomas Wistar, Bartholomew Wistar, Bartholomew Wistar, Caspar HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES Wistar, Richard Wistar, Thomas Wood, James Wood, Samuel R. Wood, Thomas Wylie, Samuel B. Wynkoop, Benjamin Yarnall, Benjamin H. Yarnall, Charles Yarnall, Edward Yarnall, Ellis

Also, in this book FATES WORSE THAN DEATH, Vonnegut wrote the following: “The United States of America had human slavery for almost one hundred years before that custom was recognized as a social disease and people began to fight it. Imagine that. Wasn’t that a match for Auschwitz? What a beacon of liberty we were to the rest of the world when it was perfectly acceptable here to own other human beings and treat them as we treated cattle. Who told you we were a beacon of liberty from the very beginning? Why would they lie like that? Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, and not many people found that odd. It was as though he had an infected growth on the end of his nose the size of a walnut, and everybody thought that was perfectly OK.” – Kurt Vonnegut, FATES WORSE THAN DEATH, page 84

THOMAS JEFFERSON HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS SET AN EXAMPLE

QUAKERS LIES affirmative evidence.

ESSENCES ARE FUZZY, GENERIC, CONCEPTUAL; ARISTOTLE WAS RIGHT WHEN HE INSISTED THAT ALL TRUTH IS SPECIFIC AND PARTICULAR (AND WRONG WHEN HE CHARACTERIZED TRUTH AS A GENERALIZATION). HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS

1992

When Representative Michael Fair introduced a bill in the South Carolina House of Representatives to ban so- called “New Age” thinking and meditation practices from the state schools, Representative Timothy Wilkes objected that this would prevent the teaching of Henry Thoreau and Waldo Emerson — and the bill was defeated 69 to 32.

Jinzaburo Takagi received the Yoko Takda Human Rights Award in recognition of his work to expose the incredible and inescapable dangers surrounding our nuclear technology. Meanwhile the world’s atomic testing continued: TIMELINE OF EXPLOSIONS

With the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Soviet aid to North Korea was no more. When electrical output plummeted, agricultural productivity also declined because of the dependence of North Korean irrigation systems on pumping. Already paranoid and isolated, the regime became even more paranoid and isolated under Kim Il-sung’s son Kim Jong-il, the new “Dear Leader.” Taller than his father (which isn’t saying much), he would focus on dating North Korean movie stars and dancers while traditional farm families starved. Although a famine during the late 90s would produce a death toll as high as 500,000, from the government’s standpoint that would be a significant plus rather than any sort of minus: these people simply hadn’t been needed, they were a drag. Focusing on the positive, North Korea accelerated its nuclear weapons program. The United States of America, supporting its South Korean ally, made efforts to halt North Korea’s nuclear efforts using the carrot as well as the stick. The Clinton White House would negotiate a deal called the Agreed Framework: we would help North Korea build 2 light-water nuclear reactors (ones that weren’t of much use for the creation of weapons materiel) and provide much needed resources like oil, while North Korea would pledge to cease constructing weapons-capable reactors and would pledge to accept international inspections. IAEA inspectors would visit the reactors at Yongbyon and set up security devices to make it less likely that facility could be used to surreptitiously produce weapons-grade radioactive materials. Ha-ha.

LIGHTING CANDLES IN THE DARK included a version of the story “Fierce Feathers,” titled “Feather of Peace,” prepared by an editorial committee consisting of Friend Marnie Clark, Friend Elinor Briggs, and Friend Carol Passmore of the Durham Monthly Meeting: “The Committee found several quite different versions of this story and visited Easton Meeting to talk with several current members. Some of the details will never be known for sure. Our version represents our best judgment of what may have happened. In writing it, we have drawn on material in: “Washington County NY Quaker Records” in New York Genealogical and Biographical Records, 1915, volume 46, pages 122-125. “Fierce Feathers” by L. Violet Hodgkins in A BOOK OF QUAKER SAINTS, 1917; THE FEATHER OF PEACE, written and originally published by Walter and Mildred Kalhoe; THE STORY OF FIERCE FEATHERS, by Elizabeth M. Lantz, with help from Anna Curtis (1961): “Feathers of Peace” by Dorothy Williams in Quaker History, volume 65, Spring 1976, #1, pages 32-34; the script of a play used at Easton Meeting; and personal communications.” “FIERCE FEATHERS” A SCHOLARLY ANALYSIS

Clearly the historian of this meeting, Christopher Klemek, could not have been present, for he would have been able to warn them that the story they were attempting to document amounted to fake news, or as he himself would put the matter, “a pedagogical story, to illustrate Quaker principles, as opposed to a work of history.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES

המוסיף על הצריך גורם לחיסרון - סנהדרין כט, א

— Babylonian TALMUD (Talmud Bavli) created in the 3d to 6th Centuries CE in what is now Iraq warns (Sanhedrin 29) “adding to the truth subtracts from it.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS SET AN EXAMPLE

QUAKERS LIES

1995

Friend Floyd Schmoe was at the age of 100 again nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. At some point he commented during an interview that “You feel hopeless sometimes, but the only answer to hopelessness is to have optimism to expect things to be better — to hope that you in some way can make them better.” THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering, and Professor of History, at Duke University Henry Petroski’s ENGINEERS OF DREAMS: GREAT BRIDGE BUILDERS AND THE SPANNING OF AMERICA.

On the Duke campus, the freshmen class began to occupy the dormitories of East Campus (as now). This had been the 1st major residential change to occur in a couple of decades. Living groups in the dorms would be named “Randolph Hall” after Trinity College’s origins in Randolph County, North Carolina, and “Blackwell Hall” after Blackwell Park, the old Durham fairground and racetrack that Julian Shakespeare Carr had donated to be the college’s new home.

In this year Duke’s School of the Environment became the Nicholas School. The Nicholas School has its roots in the School of Forestry, and in the Marine Laboratory at Beaufort (this would be redesignated as the Nicholas School of the Environment in recognition of a $20,000,000 gift by Peter M. Nicholas, Class of 1964).

If the South can get away with hoo-hah the North can get away with hoo-hah. In a related piece of news from this year, with funding from the William Penn Foundation, permanent museum exhibits were constructed and a marketing campaign began at the city of Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary. An on-site art exhibit, HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS “Prison Sentences,” received international attention. A cultural performance series began, that lay the blame for crazy-making solitary confinement at the feet of those sincere but doofus Quakers. It didn’t matter one little bit that historically, actually, the Quakers had had nothing whatever to do with this harmful historical use of crazy-making solitary confinement, that this is nothing but a piece of Fake News, because of course everybody now knows that they did. The eminent historian Kurt Vonnegut had attested to this in a trade-press book, and even the Quakers, glad for the publicity, were admitting that they had, even though there was zero evidence for this! In the realm of fakelore, endless repetition counts as multiple attestation and the cow did indeed jump over the moon. The site was featured in The New York Times, Art in America, and on BBC and PBS. Attendance nearly doubled. QUAKER FAKELORE

In the Durham monthly meeting of the Religious Society of Friends:

QUAKERS LIES

1984-1986 Calhoun D. Geiger 1986-1988 John P. Stratton 1988-1990 J. Robert Passmore 1990-1992 Karen Cole Stewart 1992-1995 Kathleen Davidson March 1995-1998 Nikki Vangsnes 1998-2000 Co-clerks J. Robert Passmore & Karen Cole Stewart 2000-2002 Amy Brannock 2002-2002 Jamie Hysjulien (Acting) 2002-2005 William Thomas O’Connor 2005-2007 Terry Graedon 2007-2009 Anne Akwari 2009-2012 Joe Graedon 2012-2013 Marguerite Dingman 2013-2016 Co-clerks Cathy Bridge & David Bridge 2016- Toby Berla HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS SET AN EXAMPLE

QUAKERS LIES

1998

Associate Professor of History Christopher Klemek’s “Feathered Friends: History and Representation in a Quaker Fable” reported the absence of any historical basis for the nice Quaker story “Fierce Feathers” that had sprung up around the events preceding the Battle of Saratoga during September 1777. “FIERCE FEATHERS” QUAKER FAKELORE

Paul Hoffman, Alan Kaufman, Galen Halverson, and Daniel Schrag offered a Neoproterozoic snowball earth theory, that during the late Precambrian this planet had undergone global glaciations followed by extreme greenhouse conditions, that had spurred the evolution of multicellular life forms.

Xiao, Zhang, and Knoll described in Nature some fossilized animal embryos, while Li, Chen, and Hua simultaneously described some in Science. The specimens were from the Doushantuo phosphorites in southern China estimated to be about 570,000,000 years old — the oldest fossil embryos so far discovered. Nine years later, however, Bailey and collaborators would challenge this interpretation, arguing that such “fossil embryos” might just as easily have been large bacteria. That challenge would be answered, however, by an announcement of the discovery of such fossil embryos inside egg cysts. PALEONTOLOGY

Andrew Parker suggested that Wiwaxia, Canadia, and Marella had developed flickering displays of iridescent color at about the same point at which Cambrian animals were evolving eyes.

Aterian artifacts at sites in Libya (named for stone tools discovered in Algeria in 1917) were estimated at 70,000 years. Over the next dozen years the age of artifacts found at various sites in northern Africa would be pushed back to at least 110,000 years. THE SCIENCE OF 1998 HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS “FEATHERED FRIENDS”

(text copyrighted 1998) Christopher Klemek, Ph.D. Associate Professor of History George Washington University In his foreword to the recently published QUAKER CROSSCURRENTS: THREE HUNDRED YEARS OF FRIENDS IN THE NEW YORK YEARLY MEETINGS, religious historian Martin Marty discusses the disproportionate influence which the members of the Society of Friends have had, given their small numbers, relative to other groups. Marty attributes this to their distinctiveness, manifested for a long time visibly in terms of dress. But there was also their “peace witness,” an issue which, “albeit ambiguous, has set them apart.”31 Indeed, particularly in a place like New York, where, unlike Pennsylvania, Quakers were not ubiquitous, they were often most visible during conflicts. As Marty notes, “their plot is webbed into this war plot more inextricably and vividly than are the attitudes of some bodies fifty times their size.”32 One such example of disproportionality is found in the Revolutionary War tale of “Fierce Feathers” (among other titles). This story recounts supposed events preceding the Battle of Saratoga in September of 1777, in which a group of Native Americans encountered a group of Quakers at Meeting for Worship. Though a seemingly minor incident, this is a story which will simply not stay put. Instead, it has undergone numerous revisions by numerous authors and storytellers over two centuries. It has become a story beloved among Quakers worldwide, suspected by Native Americans, and contested by both groups to this day. ORIGINS Though very much partisan and sympathetic, QUAKER CROSSCURRENTS is probably the most hard-nosed, rigorous history yet produced on Quakerism in New York. And so it should not be surprising that the Fierce Feathers story does not receive extended attention there. For though it clearly has some basis in fact —something did occur in that Fall of 1777 between Quaker settlers and Native Americans— it’s [sic] existence in the Quaker world is primarily as a Story. A historian is very limited in what can be deduced from the extant primary sources on the event. Hardly any even exist, and they are all from the Quaker perspective. Furthermore, they are perhaps best cast as the first examples of storytelling in the Fierce Feathers tradition than as primary documents of any sort. It is this tradition that I aim to survey here, tracing the development and elaboration of story tradition, whose influence is disproportionate to its origins. Nevertheless, we shall begin where the editors QUAKER CROSSCURRENTS 31. Martin E. Marty in QUAKER CROSSCURRENTS: THREE HUNDRED YEARS OF FRIENDS IN THE NEW YORK YEARLY MEETINGS, Hugh Barbour et al., ed. (Syracuse U. Press, 1995) Foreword, xvii. See also Hugh Barbour and J. William Frost, THE QUAKERS (Westport: Greenwood, 1988), the first comprehensive history of American Friends since Elbert Russell’s HISTORY OF QUAKERISM (1942). 32. Ibid. xix. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS do, for they take up what is perhaps the earliest —and most conservative— source. Their account is drawn from the JOURNAL OF THE LIFE, RELIGIOUS EXERCISES, AND TRAVELS IN THE WORK OF THE MINISTRY OF RUFUS HALL, LATE OF NORTHHAMPTON, MONTGOMERY COUNTY IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK. (Byberry, PA: John and Isaac Comly, 1840), which, though published later and perhaps also written much after the fact, is nevertheless a first-person account by an eyewitness to the event: Rufus Hall, a young Dutchess County farmer with Rhode Island roots, bought land in Easton in the fall of 1773. The following year Easton Friends numbered one hundred in three places of worship. This included those scattered in White Creek, Greenwich, and other towns to the north. By the time Burgoyne invaded in August– September 1777 some dozen Quaker families from his former home and southeastern Massachusetts had joined Hall. Hall’s matter-of-fact journal recorded: “One day the Indians came to our meeting just as it was breaking up, but they offered no violence: their warlike appearance was very shocking, being equipped with their guns, tomahawks and scalping knives: they had a prisoner and one green scalp taken but a few hours before.” Hall continued, when the intruders “understood that Friends were at a Religious Meeting, they went to one of their Houses, got some victuals, of which a prisoner with them partook, and they quietly departed.” Friends lost much property that summer, he continued, but none were injured and only a few were briefly imprisoned a suspected Loyalists. Because Friends were at worship and probably weaponless in the war zone, it is easy to imagine the Indians assuming by their peaceful body language that Friends were on their side. How could they conceive of Quakers as disengaged from the conflict? The rebels also assumed they were Loyalists. Legend has it that Robert Nisbet of East Hoosac Meeting, forty miles away in Adams, Massachusetts, was visiting when a raiding party encountered Friends, and helped with his knowledge of French and Indian tongues.33 Here we are provided with a good overview of the event, drawn from an early source, simultaneously as it were, with the latest scholarly interpretation. Within this thumbnail sketch we can see the two primary vectors of tension: At the end of the paragraph, under the disclaimer of “legend has it,” is the conception popular among Quakers, that the Friends were the active arbiters of the contact, despite their pacifism (or rather through its restraint), and even married to a quasi- mystical coincidence of the chance visitor who saves the day. Preceding this is a scholarly skepticism which suspects such self-congratulation, and places all agency with the native scouts: If they did not kill the Quakers, it must have been due to their method of apprehending the situation, rather than the intentions and sentiments of the worshippers. Perhaps the Quakers did send certain cues through their body language and lack of weaponry, but they message could not have been received as intended (“We are Friends of Peace.”) but rather mistranslated in a positive way (“We are on your side in this 33. QUAKER CROSSCURRENTS, pp. 31–32. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS

conflict.”) In my opinion, QUAKER CROSSCURRENTS is thus dismissive of both the storytelling tradition within Quakerism (though perhaps justifiably in a History), and also the ability of the Native Americans to apprehend Quakers. After all, many among the Six Nations had urged disengagement from the conflict, so this would not have been incomprehensible, and it is not incomprehensible that local tribes were already familiar with Friends. However, it is not my purpose here to contest the validity of historical accounts, but rather to present various sorts of accounts in a comparative framework. If we assume that Rufus Hall’s journal was written at some time close to the actual event, the next known reference to it is to be found in the minutes of the Meeting for Sufferings of New York Yearly Meeting, recorded January 9, 1787. Meetings for Sufferings provided ritual recounting of hardships, often for the purpose of gaining money of [sic] other resources for a Meeting. The minute reads as follows: A party of Indians with two Frenchmen surrounded the house; one of the Indians looking in, withdrew and beckoned with his hand upon which a friend was asked by signs whether there were soldiers there, the Indian shook hands with him and the rest came into the house, they were marked, painted and equipt for War, and it being about the conclusion of the Meeting, they shook hands with Friends, and one Friend having the French tongue could confer with them with the assistance of the two Frenchmen. When they understood Friends were at a Religious Meeting, they went to one of their houses got victuals of which a prisoner with them partook, and they departed.34 WEAVING A TALE This exhausts those sources which might be considered primary with regard to the incident. Next, the course of the Fierce Feathers story begins down that road which would bring it to the attention of Quakers worldwide. In 1833, an account was published in THE FRIEND (sometimes called the SQUARE FRIEND, “the house organ of the Arch Street Yearly Meeting” in Philadelphia), apparently a sectarian paper the likes of which flourished in this period. The article was signed S.A. of New Paltz, which has been taken as Samuel Adams, of New Paltz Landing, Ulster County, who was an agent for THE FRIEND for several years about this time.35 Adams journalism is much more dramatic than the short citations which I mentioned above. His column reports an interview at Burlington city with George Dilwyn, “that well known, and much esteemed minister of the gospel.”36 Among other interesting embellishments are comments (second or third hand) of the Indian visitors. After setting the background for the Quakers residence in a war zone, Adams then recounts Dilwyn’s rendition of the story: Friends requested to be permitted to exercise their own judgment, (saying, you are clear of us in that you have warned us,) remained at their homes, and kept up their 34. Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College. 35. See Dorothy Williams. 36. The Friend Vol. 7, No. 8, 11/30/1833, p. 60. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES meetings. Robert Nisbet, who lived, at that time, at East Hoosack, about thirty miles distant, felt a concern to walk through the ten [sic] wilderness country, and sit with Friends at their week-day meeting. As they were sitting in meeting with their door open, they discovered an Indian peeping round the door-post. When he saw Friends sitting without word or deed, he stepped forward and took a full view of all that was in the house; then he and his company, placing their arms in a corner of the room, took seats with Friends and so remained till the meeting closed. Zebulon Hoxie, one of the Friends present, then invited them to his house, put a cheese and what bread he had on the table, and invited them to help themselves: they did so and went quietly and harmlessly away. Before their departure, however, Robert Nesbit, who could speak and understand the French tongue, had a conversation with their leader, in French. He told Robert, that they surrounded the house, intending to destroy all that were in it; “but,” said he, “when we saw you sitting with your door open, and without weapons of defense, we had no disposition to hurt you—we would have fought for you.” This party had human scalps with them.37 In no way is Dilwyn inserted into the story, and it does not appear that he was present at the events he narrates. If anything, the familiarity of this “minister” with the story is a testament to its circulation throughout the region. Adams, however, cleverly infuses his article with authenticity by linking it to the actors in a final paragraph. He verifies his source by approaching Zebulon Hoxie, the first clerk of Easton Meeting (Friends actually met in his home prior to the erection of a meeting-house) and a prominent actor in the events. Hoxie verified the story to Adams: The writer, when reflecting upon this extraordinary circumstance, concluded to call on Zebulon Hoxie, who said “the occurrence had been clearly stated by our dear aged Friend, George Dilwyn.38 But if the story was already well-known around New York by 1833, Adams publication of it in Philadelphia that year would make take [sic] it further still. Thereafter, Adams’ account was included in [Wilson] Armistead’s SELECT MISCELLANIES, ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE STORY, CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES AND SUFFERINGS OF THE SOCIETY OF FRIENDS [SELECT MISCELLANIES, CHIEFLY ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE HISTORY, CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLES AND SUFFERINGS OF THE SOCIETY OF FRIENDS; WITH ACCORDANT SENTIMENTS OF EMINENT AND PIOUS INDIVIDUALS OF OTHER DENOMINATIONS, INCLUDING MANY REMARKABLE INCIDENTS, AND A VARIETY OF INFORMATION PARTICULARLY INTERESTING TO FRIENDS] (London 1851, Vol. VI, p. 170). Armistead’s account, in turn, was copied in Samuel [Mcpherson] Janney’s HISTORY OF FRIENDS [HISTORY OF THE RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS, FROM ITS RISE TO THE YEAR 1828] (1867, Vol. III, 441 v. 2). In short, the story from Easton was being taken up into the canon of Quakerism, 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS as illustrative of the power and principles of the Society of Friends. To what extent we can attribute this to Adam’s cast on the story, versus its preceding development as an oral testimony apparently circulating among ministers like Dilwyn is uncertain. It should be remembered that all Friends are considered “ministers” and most in fact do “minister” to each other, which might catalyze the spread and development of faith testaments faster than otherwise. At any rate, the story has by 1850 arrived in London, where it is probably being regarded as an exciting adventure story of the Quaker errand into the wilderness. The consummation of this sacralization project of British Quakers came in the form of Lucy Violet Hodgkin (b. 1869). In 1917, Hodgkin published A BOOK OF QUAKER SAINTS, under the auspices of the “1905 Committee of Yorkshire Quarterly Meeting.” A collection of inspirational stories for children, Hodgkin’s is one of the most widely circulated of all Quaker pedagogical materials, until recent times. And probably the best known story from her collection is that of “Fierce Feathers.”39 (To my knowledge it is Hodgkin who first applies this title.) The Hodgkin version was published in “Fierce Feather’s” offprints by Yorkshire and other English Quaker bodies, and it is widely reprinted in other volumes. Hodgkin acknowledges her own sources in a Historical Note in the Appendix: A historical incident, with some imaginary actors. The outlines of this story are given in ‘Historical Anecdotes’ by Pike. Several additional particulars and the copy of a nineteenth-century painting of the Indians at Meeting are to be found in the Friends Reference Library at Devonshire House. For some helpful notes about the locality I am indebted to H.P. Morris of Philadelphia, USA40 The account is prefaced by a [sic] six pertinent aphorisms by Quaker “saints.” Founder George Fox addresses issues of Quakerism in the New World (“My friends that are gone or are going over to plant and make outward plantations in America, keep your own plantations in your hearts with the spirit and power of God, that your own vines and lilies be not hurt.”); Pennsylvania Quaker John Woolman speaks to the Native American response (‘An old Indian named Papunehang appreciated the spirit and atmosphere of a Friends’ meeting, even if he did not comprehend the words, telling the interpreter afterwards, “I love to feel where words come from”); and an early Christian martyr Justin conveys a precedent for pacifism (We who were once slayers of one another do not now fight against our enemies.’— JUSTIN MARTYR. AD 140.) Hodgkin’s story is set in a romantic colonial wilderness cabin, contrasted with a drab English meeting-house. It is also meant as a story for children, and hence emphasizes a child’s perspective: The children of Easton Township liked their wooden house, although it was made only of roughhewn logs, nailed hastily together in order to provide some sort of shelter for the worshipping Friends. They would not, 39. A BOOK OF QUAKER SAINTS (T.N. Foulis, London &Edinburgh: First editions published November 1917, reprinted march 1918, printed Scotland by R. & R. Clark, Ltd., Edinburgh) pp. 464-478. 40. Ibid. p. 546-7. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES if they could, have exchanged it for one of the more stately Meetinghouses at home in England, on the other side of the Atlantic. There, the windows were generally high up in the walls. English children could see nothing through the panes but a peep of sky, or the topmost branches of a tall tree. When they grew tired of looking in the branches of the tree for an invisible nest that was not there, there was nothing more to be hoped for, out of those windows. The children’s eyes came back inside the room again, as they watched the slow shadows creep along the white-washed walls, or tried to count the flies upon the ceiling. But out here in America there was no need for that. She paints the visitor Robert Nisbet as a charismatic Quaker mystic, putting in his mouth the prescient words of the 91st Psalm (“And now, how shall the Beloved of the Lord be thus in safety covered ? Even as saith the Psalmist, ‘He shall cover thee with His feathers and under His wings shalt thou trust’.... These promises of covering and of shelter are truly meant for you. Make them your own and you ‘shall not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day.’”). To a contemporary reader, Hodgkin’s account is highly problematic. Among other things, she dates the event incorrectly in 1775. But far more disturbing is the bald racism —obscenely embellished— with which this English Quaker contrasts the Native Americans in her story to the Aryan Quakers. As is [sic] straight out of HEART OF DARKNESS, civilization here meets the savage: Then [Hoxie], too, saw the feathers — three, five, seven, nine, sticking up in a row. Another instant, and a dark-skinned face, an evil face, appeared beneath them, looking over the sill. The moment most to be dreaded in the lives of all American settlers — more terrible than any visit from civilized soldiers — had come suddenly upon the little company of Friends alone here in the wilderness. An Indian Chief was staring in at their Meeting-house window, showing his teeth in a cruel grin. In his hand he held a sheaf of arrows, poisoned arrows, only too ready to fly, and kill, by day [sic]. ... There he stood, the naked brown figure, in full war- paint and feathers, looking with piercing eyes at each man Friend in turn, as if one of them must have the weapons that he sought. But the Friends were entirely unarmed. There was not a gun, or a rifle, or a sword to be found in any of their dwellinghouses, so there could not be any in their peaceful Meeting. A minute later, a dozen other Redskins, equally terrible, stood beside the Chief, and the bushes in the distance were quite still. The bushes trembled no longer. It was Benjamin who found it hard not to tremble now, as he saw thirteen sharp arrows taken from their quivers by thirteen skinny brown hands, and their notches held taut to thirteen bow-strings, all ready to shoot. Yet still the Friends sat on, without stirring, HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS in complete silence. Only Benjamin, turning his head to look at his grandfather, saw Zebulon Hoxie, the patriarch of the Meeting, gazing full at the Chief, who had first approached. The Indian’s flashing eyes, under the matted black eyebrows, gazed back fiercely beneath his narrow red forehead into the Quaker’s calm blue eyes beneath the high white brow and snowy hair. No word was spoken, but in silence two powers were measured against one another — the power of hate, and the power of love. For steady friendliness to his strange visitors was written in every line of Zebulon Hoxie’s face. The children never knew how long that steadfast gaze lasted. But at length, to Benjamin’s utter astonishment, for some unknown reason the Indian’s eyes fell. His head, that he had carried high and haughtily, sank towards his breast. He glanced round the Meeting-house three times with a scrutiny that nothing could escape. Then, signing to his followers, the thirteen arrows were noiselessly replaced in thirteen quivers, the thirteen bows were laid down and rested against the wall; many footsteps, lighter than falling snow, crossed the floor; the Indian Chief, unarmed, sat himself down in the nearest seat, with his followers in all their war-paint, but also unarmed, close round him. Whereas the earlier accounts implied that the Meeting was breaking up just as the Indians arrived, Hodgkin has her visitors join the Friends in worship. During this tense sequence, she emphasizes the Indians as romantic extensions of nature. The Friends sat in their accustomed stillness. But the Indians sat more still than any of them. They seemed strangely at home in the silence, these wild men of the woods. Motionless they sat, as a group of trees on a windless day, or as a tranquil pool unstirred by the smallest breeze; silent, as if they were themselves apart of Nature’s own silence rather than of the family of her unquiet, human children. Hodgkin impart [sic] to the leader a wooden, broken English, rather than good French. ‘Indian come White Man House,’ he said, pointing with his finger towards the Settlement, ‘Indian want kill white man, one, two, three, six, all!’ and he clutched the tomahawk at his belt with a gruesome gesture. ‘Indian come, see White Man sit in house; no gun, no arrow, no knife; all quiet, all still, worshipping Great Spirit. Great Spirit inside Indian too;’ he pointed to his breast; ‘then Great Spirit say: “Indian! No kill them!”’ With these words, the Chief took a white feather from one of his arrows, and stuck it firmly over the center of the roof in a peculiar way. ‘With that white feather above your house,’ the French-speaking Indian said to Robert Nisbet, ‘your settlement is safe. We Indians are your friends henceforward. and you are ours.’ HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES Finally, in order to reiterate that this is a story about the transformative power of Quaker faith, Hodgkin emphasizes that these were savage beasts whom the Friends had pacified. A moment later and the strange guests had all disappeared as noiselessly as they had come. But, when the bushes had ceased to tremble, Benjamin stole to his mother’s side. ‘Mother, did you see, did you see ?’ he whispered. ‘They were not friendly Indians. They were the very most savage kind. Did you,’ he shuddered, ‘did you, and father, and grandfather, and the others not notice what those things were, hanging from their waists? They were scalps — scalps of men and women that those Indians had killed,’ and again he shuddered. His mother stooped and kissed him. ‘Yea, nay [sic] son,’ she answered, ‘I did see. In truth we all saw, too well, save only the tender maids, thy sisters, who know naught of terror or wrong. But thou, my son, when thou dost remember those human scalps, pray for the slayers and for the slain. Only for thyself and for us, have no fear. Remember, rather, the blessing of that other Benjamin, for whom I named thee. “The Beloved of the Lord shall dwell in safety by Him. He shall cover him all the day long.”’ Hodgkin’s version obviously reflects some highly ironic patterns of thought within English Quakerism. The fact that it was so widely received is even more telling. In any case, hers stood as the version of record for most of the twentieth century. Reprinted versions often took liberties in adaptation (often to condense the story, at the same time toning down its racism), but nevertheless acknowledged Hodgkin as the primary source.

Fifty years later, in 1964, Hodgkin’s account was remained largely intact. At that time, the Religious Education Committee of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting produced CANDLES IN THE DARK: AN ANTHOLOGY OF STORIES TO BE USED IN EDUCATION FOR PEACE. This was a book of instructional tales, very much in the vein of A BOOK OF QUAKER SAINTS. The committee was chaired by Janet E. Schroeder; other preparers included Margaret Cooper Brinton and Mary Esther McWhirter. In her preface, Schroeder writes: This book abounds in heroes, some quiet and some less quiet. May these stories so nurture the spirits of young people that their lives become imbued with understanding of love as a way of life, in order that coming generations will be equal to the moral challenge of our atomic age.41 The stories are divided into categories of “specific principles to be illustrated,” such as Service, Self-Control, Awareness of God, or Foregiveness [sic]. “Fierce Feathers” is included under Power of Love, as a story for all ages “based on historical or biographical records.” [For these editors—and in fact within this entire genre of Quaker inspirational literature for 41. CANDLES IN THE DARK: AN ANTHOLOGY OF STORIES TO BE USED IN EDUCATION FOR PEACE. (Alburtis, Pennsylvania: Hemlock Press, 1964), preface. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS children—it is of particular importance that “the majority of these stories are true or based on fact.”] The version included in CANDLES IN THE DARK was “adapted by Mary Esther McWhirter from ‘Fierce Feathers,’ by L. Violet Hodgkin, A BOOK OF QUAKER SAINTS, Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1922. Used by permission of the Friends Home Service Committee, London.”42 McWhirter’s adaptation, as you will see, is in the same spirit as Hodgkin’s, if abbreviated. Without making the slightest sound, the Indian Chief walked around to the open doorway. For what seemed like hours, he stood there as straight and as still as a bronze statue. With keen black eyes he studied the men, scrutinizing each one from head to toe. At last he seemed to have assured himself that not one of them carried a gun, a knife, or any other weapon. Following a motion of his hand, a dozen other Indians came from their hiding places to stand beside their Chief in the doorway. In full sight of the worshippers each Indian took an arrow from the quiver which he carried. Then he made ready to release the arrow at a signal from his Chief. The silent worship continued. Dinah looked at the Indian leader and then at her grandfather. Even now, in this moment of danger, his blue eyes had not lost their gentle expression. With unwavering kindliness they gazed directly into the flashing black eyes of the Chief. Neither man spoke. Neither moved a muscle. But in the long moments of silence an intense struggle went on. It was a struggle which could not be seen or heard, but which was felt by everyone present. Dinah knew that it was a struggle between hate and love. At last, the eyes of the Indian fell, and he bowed his head. Love, greater than hate, had won. He then beckoned to his warriors, who came with him into the Meeting House. Following the example of their leader, they placed their bows and arrows in a comer. With steps as quiet as falling snowflakes they crossed the floor and sat down upon a bench. The silent Meeting not only went on, but increased in power and solemnity. The presence of God, as real and as joyous as sunlight, filled the little log room as Indians and Friends worshipped together. When the hour ended, Zebulon Hoxie advanced toward the Indian Chief and shook hands with him. Because the Chief knew only a little English, ZebuIon Hoxie made signs, inviting him and his warriors to dinner. As long as Dinah lived, she remembered the sight of the little company which moved through the woods toward her grandfather’s house that noon. The plain dark clothing worn by the Friends contrasted sharply with the bright feathers and war paint with which the Indians had adorned themselves. As host, Zebulon Hoxie placed bread and cheese upon the

42. CANDLES IN THE DARK p. 190. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES table, asking the Indians to eat. They thanked him with nods and smiles. Speaking with difficulty, the Indian Chief explained: “Indian come.” He pointed in the direction of the Meeting House. “To kill.” With these words he touched the bow and arrow hanging at his side. “Indian see white men. No gun. No knife. White men still. Worship Great Spirit. Great Spirit in Indian, too.” The Chief placed his hand over his heart. “Great Spirit say, ‘Indian, no kill white men.’” Dinah always remembered the next moment when the Chief, moving toward the door of the cabin, placed over it a white feather, plucked from his own headdress. Then he reached out his arms toward his hosts, declaring: “Safe! All Indians and you — friends.”43 Mary Esther McWhirter, incidentally, had included an abridgment of Hodgkin’s “Fierce Feathers” already in her 1949 teacher’s book, FINDING GOD THROUGH WORK AND WORSHIP, which preserved almost all the sense of the 1917 version.44 The close connection between Philadelphia Quaker publication committees and English sources, even for North American subjects, became all the more clear when, in 1968, the P.Y.M. Religious Education Committee released a study guide entitled TO LIGHT CANDLES IN THE DARK.45 The guide essentially consisted of study questions to accompany each of the stories in CANDLES IN THE DARK. For “Fierce Feathers,” for example, the discussion leader is informed that the Theme of the story is “Power of Love.” Discussion questions focus on the tensions between the Quakers and Indians, as well as their commonalties. Some of these 1968 questions in fact work against the highly ethnocentric viewpoint of the 1964 (née 1917) story they accompany, while nevertheless maintaining the episode as a victory for Quakerism, pacifism, etc.: Why did the white people fear the Indians? Why were the Indians afraid of the white people?

Why did the Quakers continue in silent worship after they saw the Indians?

What was the Indian chief trying to find out as he stood in the doorway?

Why did the Quakers have no weapons? How did this fact affect the Indian chief’s intentions. (See Background Information: Quaker Beliefs and Customs.)

What sort of struggle went on between Dinah’s grandfather and the chief? Who won? How?

What common belief linked the Indians and the Quakers? 43. Ibid. pp. 191–193. 44. Mary Esther McWhirter. FINDING GOD THROUGH WORK AND WORSHIP: A VACATION CHURCH SCHOOL COURSE FOR GIRLS AND BOYS OF GRADES FOUR, FIVE, AND SIX (Boston, Chicago: Published by the Pilgrim Press for the Co-operative Publishing Association, 1949). 45. TO LIGHT CANDLES IN THE DARK: A STUDY GUIDE. (Alburtis, PA: Hemlock Press, 1968). HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS How did this affect their relationship? This last ecumenical note is recapitulated with the suggestion to have children “read ‘Teachings from Other Religions’ in the Worship section, ‘Power of Love.’” For an additional activity, the reader is encouraged to “look at and discuss the J. Doyle Penrose painting based on this story. Note ways in which the Indian and Quaker garb have changed since the time of the story.... List ideas suggested by the painting which you think are still true today.” James Doyle Penrose (1862–1932) was an English Quaker, and his painting, owned by London Yearly Meeting, is the visual equivalent of Hodgkin’s QUAKER SAINTS version of “Fierce Feathers.” As of this 1968 book at hand, copies were still “available from The Board on Peace and Social Concerns, 101 Quaker Hill Dr., Richmond, Ind. 2¢.” More recently, in 1992, the Religious Education Committee of Friends General Conference decided to update CANDLES IN THE DARK. Friends General Conference is a broad umbrella group which seeks to unite the disparate wings of Quakerism internationally. An editorial committee headed by Marnie Clark, Elinor Briggs, and Carol Passmore produced LIGHTING CANDLES IN THE DARK.46 The editors explain their mission in a Preface: This revision of CANDLES IN THE DARK, like the original edition. has grown out of a wish to help our children learn the ways of peace and align themselves with the ‘ocean of light’ that George Fox saw overcoming the ‘ocean of darkness.’ ... This new collection retains close to half of the original stories. As before. it spans the centuries and its characters come from many parts of the world and many different societies. Most stories are true or based on actual events. Many are about Quakers. Again the stones are intended especially for children between seven and twelve. We see the stones as a resource for parents and teachers to read or tell to children. as wen as stories that the older children will be able to read themselves. In a number of cases. brief ‘setting’ statements have been added to introduce stories that may need some explanation for today’s children. They also explain the genesis of the new revision, emphasizing its typically Quaker basis in committee participation: The first edition was very successful, was quickly reprinted, and then sold out. Plans for a revision were started when Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, the earlier publisher, gave permission to Friends General Conference to prepare and publish a new edition. Two successive subcommittees of the Religious Education Committee of Friends General Conference have worked on this revision in the intervening years. The Editorial Committee has worked under the guidance of a project team representing both the Religious Education and Publication Committees of Friends General Conference. Reviewers from both committees have read the stories and offered helpful comments. The story about Easton 46. LIGHTING CANDLES IN THE DARK. Prepared by the Religious Education committee of Friends General Conference. (Philadelphia: FGC, 1992) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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appears as the second story in LIGHTING CANDLES IN THE D ARK, as an illustration of principles under the heading of “Courage and Nonviolence.” In this variant, however, the title is changed from “Fierce Feathers” to “Feather of Peace.” The account retains some of the embellishments of Hodgkin et al. (91st Psalm allusions), and accentuates the mystical calling of Robert Nisbet even further. But this version goes down much easier on the late twentieth century palate. It is much fairer to the perspective of Native Americans, more accurate with regard to context and detail (it corrects the date to 1777). It is a researched piece, in distinction the highly romanticized conjectures of English Quakers. Of course, it is still a pedagogical story, to illustrate Quaker principles, as opposed to a work of history. But there is clearly an interest in sources behind this version (When discussing the Indians’ prisoner, the committee writes “The records say that they let their prisoner eat too, but do not make it clear whether they released him.”). The penultimate paragraph in the story reads: Today, a white frame meetinghouse stands near where the little log one stood in 1777. The gravestones in the little cemetery under the trees show that Friends have been worshipping in Easton Meeting for more than 200 years since that bright September day. And there is still a white feather above the door. In short, unlike their English counterparts, this committee of American Quaker storytellers had finally discovered Easton the place —in addition to the canonical versions— as a rich source for substance and authenticity. Evidence of this appears in a note to the story: The Committee found several quite different versions of this story and visited Easton Meeting to talk with several current members. Some of the details will never be known for sure. Our version represents our best judgment of what may have happened. In writing R, we have drawn on material in: ‘Washington County NY Quaker Records’ in NY GENEALOGICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL RECORDS, 1915, vol 46, pp 122-125, ‘Fierce Feathers’ by L. Violet Hodgkin’s IN A BOOK OF QUAKER SAINTS, 1917; THE FEATHER OF PEACE, written and originally published by Walter and Mildred Kalhoe; THE STORY OF FIERCE FEATHERS, by Elizabeth M. Lantz, with help from Anna Curtis (1961); ‘Feathers of Peace’ by Dorothy Williams in Quaker History, vol 65, Spring 1976, #1, pp 32-34; the script of a play used at Easton Meeting; and personal communications. HISTORY AS A RITUAL What they had discovered was an intervening development in local historical consciousness, which had been mounting even as Quakers in London and Philadelphia continued to tell the story without any relation to either the Quakers or the Indians at Easton. Residents of Easton and Washington County became actively interested in matters of local history and genealogy by the late nineteenth century. A very active chapter of the HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS Daughters of the American Revolution was founded in 1898, in addition to a “book club,” which Susan B. Anthony had founded as forum for women’s rights issues. Such organizations sometimes complimented and at other times conflicted with the interests of Quakers (such as the DAR’s activities in support of WWI). In any case, Easton Friends maintained a high profile in the history of the region. An 1878 publication of the HISTORY OF WASHINGTON COUNTY included the Meeting incident, and it was again cited in the 1915 NEW YORK GENEALOGICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL RECORDS (Vol. 46, pp. 122–125). The editor of that volume cites the Research Committee, Willard’s Mountain Chapter of D.A.R., Greenwich NY for his information, which seems to imply Quaker membership, or at least awareness, within that group. The entry is as follows (note that there are no feather references): Then the revolutionary struggle took place and they found themselves, notwithstanding their peace-loving principles, in the midst of the theater of war. During the continuation of this struggle they suffered much in the loss of property and by the persecution of the warriors, who looked upon the peaceful Friends with scorn. ... Indians still roamed through this section; it is related they frequently peered in the log meeting house, and once a band on an expedition of murderous intention, with scalps dangling from their belts, appeared at the door; after watching the silent worshippers awhile, they departed without molesting. ... During the anti-slavery times noted speakers were heard in this old meeting-house, among them Lucretia Mott, Charles Redmond, Parker Pillsbury and Fred Douglass. On the 25th of the 12th month, 1887, an appropriate centennial was held. [Present meeting house constructed 1787.] Easton benefited from a number of boosters, mostly with family connections to the region and its Quakerism, who published or otherwise propagated on its behalf. One of the persons cited by the 1992 FGC Committee as a source for LIGHTING CANDLES IN THE DARK was Anna Louise Curtis (b. 1882). Curtis’ attachment to Easton and its stories was both long and personal. In 1928, one Anna Bassett Griscom compiled PEACE CRUSADERS: ADVENTURES IN G OODWILL for the American Friends Service Committee.47 PEACE CRUSADERS included a version of Fierce Feathers, which was adapted by Curtis from the by then widely circulated Hodgkin story. At 1300 words, “Fierce Feathers” is the longest of all the stories and essays in the book, and is regarded by the author as suitable for 7th, 8th, and 9th grades. The story is accompanied by a plate illustration from Marion T. Justice, depicting the Indians as they enter the log Meetinghouse. Curtis graduated from the Friends Seminary in New York City in 1900, and was actually a member of New York Monthly Meeting. She was deeply engaged with Quaker causes for most of her life, including a long stint of writing for the American Friends

47. PEACE CRUSADERS: ADVENTURES IN GOODWILL (Philadelphia & London: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1928) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Service Committee, which she chronicled in her 1944 book, THE QUAKERS TAKE STOCK, “pictures of the Service Committee work, which appeared during the years from 1926 to 1941.”48 Thus is would seem that Curtis was publishing actively for the AFSC when her Fierce Feathers story appeared in P EACE C RUSADERS. Some of her AFSC work was in fact concerned with Indian affairs, as she relates in a chapter on “Home Service: 1932”: Both these girls —and all the other workers in Indian fields last summer, and previous summers— have gained a first-hand knowledge of the Indian problem, from the human standpoint. The lastmentioned girl, by the way, complied and sent into the Service Committee office a summary of conditions as she found them among the Indians in South Dakota, with suggestions of new lines into which Home Service workers might branch out. The workers with Indian boys or girls are confronted with one race problem; but the young people who are assigned to Settlements or their summer camps may meet with all the races of the world.49 In addition to “Fierce Feathers,” four other Indian stories are included in PEACE CRUSADERS. “A Ride Toward War Paint” and “The Latchstring” are reprinted from CHILDREN’S STORY GARDEN (see below). “The Peace Pipe,” an account of Native American peace commandment from the Master of Life is “adapted [by Frances M. Dadmun] from the “Song of Hiawatha” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and “Children of the Father.” “How a Doll Saved a War” (by W. Evans Darby) is which a child’s gift avoids a war between Apaches and “soldiers” is borrowed from the Peace Society, London. But despite all her cosmopolitan involvements, Curtis maintained a long-standing connection between the traditional stories of Easton and her publications. Her contribution to a 1924 book “compiled by a group of Friends,” ALONG THE SHORE WITH THE RED MEN AND T HE W HITE: A BOOK F OR Y OUNG P EOPLE (New York: Valentine’s Manual, inc., 1924) probably included Fierce Feathers. In 1941 she published STORIES OF THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD, with a foreword by the eminent Quaker historian Rufus M. Jones.50 The volume included several stories about members of Easton Monthly Meeting. THE GHOSTS OF THE MOHAWK: AND OTHER STORIES (1953) offered “fifteen stories of pioneer and colonial days in this country, nearly all based on fact and several passed down by the author’s own ancestors.”51 These “twice-told tales of my Quaker ancestors” dealt with the Folger family of Easton. In 1965 she published BROTHER SAM, which extended the exploits of the Folgers through an entire volume. Chapter IV was devoted to the Meeting incident, under the title “Unexpected Guests.”52 All of Curtis’ versions of the story remain close to the example of L.V. Hodgkin, including its dramatic battle in which the Meeting’s patriarch stares the visitors into submission, and savage depictions of the Indians. The primary contribution of Curtis’ writings is an attention to the lore of Easton — 48. Anna L. Curtis. THE QUAKERS TAKE STOCK. (New York: Island Workshop Press, 1944). 49. Ibid. p. 48. 50. Anna L. Curtis. STORIES OF THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD. (New York: The Island Workshop Press Co-op., Inc. 1941) Foreword by Rufus M. Jones. Illustrated by William Brooks. 51. THE GHOSTS OF THE MOHAWK: AND OTHER STORIES (Island Press Cooperative, 1953) Illustrated By Luman Kelsey. 52. Anna L. Curtis, BROTHER SAM (Brooklyn: Theo. Gaus’ Sons, 1965) HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS including but not limited to the Fierce Feathers story— as well as the further dissemination of that incident. Already by 1922, L.V. Hodgkin’s version had been published as a pamphlet in Germany, in translations by Quaker offices in Berlin.53 Shortly thereafter, in 1924, Curtis’ “Ein Besuch von Indianern” appeared 54 in DREI KINDERGESCHICHTEN. Curtis assisted Elizabeth M. Lantz with the compilation of a pamphlet entitled “The Story of Fierce Feathers,” published in 1961. Again her adaptation did not stray far from Hodgkin’s, but it did included a “History of the Establishment of the Easton and Saratoga, New York, Monthly and Quarterly Meetings,” prepared by one Oren B. Wilbur. Wilbur —ninety-eight years old by that time— schoolteacher, principal and Harvard graduate, had been Recorder of Easton Meeting for many years. The Foreword to the pamphlet expressed the status that legend had attained in Easton tradition: There are few actual facts. It is one of the oldest and most significant stories which has come to us as a heritage of the past. It is revealing and enduring, since it contains the very essence of a basic Quaker faith, “there is that of God in every man.” Every few years this story is enacted by members of the Easton Meeting, and it is frequently portrayed in other Meetings in this country. Easton Friends had been cultivating an active historical consciousness of the Revolutionary War incident at least since the Depression era. Post cards were produced which depicted the 1787 meeting-house but recounted the 1777 event. Oren Wilbur was probably instrumental in the erection of a 1932 New York State Education Department marker, which read: “Friends’ log meeting house surrounded by Burgoyne’s Indian allies in 1777, but finding Friends unarmed stacked arms and attended meeting peaceably.” Shortly thereafter, began what was probably the first in a tradition of reenactments of the event. An unattributed 1937 newspaper clipping reports: “Pageant by Easton Friends Attracted Many Visitors: Old South meeting House Scene of Interesting Portrayal of Historic Event of Revolutionary Days.” Saturday and Sunday, May 26 and 27, were gala days in Easton for the Friends, and friends of Friends, who gathered in large numbers at the Old South Meeting House to attend the pageant, “Fierce Feathers,” given by the Easton Friends under the efficient direction of Mrs. Jacob F. Pratt. The incident portrayed occurred near the time of the battle of Saratoga in 1777, the Friends, who had remained in their homes although warned of the danger surrounding them, were gathered in their log meeting house Wednesday morning at their usual mid-week meeting. A visiting minister, Robert Nesbit, who had walked thirty miles from East Hoosick, (now Adams) to meet with them, was present. Near the close of the meeting a band of Canadian Indians, allies of Burgoyne’s army, appeared at the door. They looked around, and finding the Friends unarmed they stacked their weapons 53. Hodgkin. UNTER STARKEN FITTICHEN: EINE QUÄKERGESCHICHTE FÜR KINDER. (Darmstädter Werkkunst Verlag) translated into German by P. Baltzer. [Friends Library, Swarthmore College]. 54. DREI KINDERGESCHICHTEN (Quäkerverlag Berlin W 8, 1924) [Friends Library, Swarthmore College] HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS and came in and say quietly until the close of the meeting. Zebulon Hoxie, who lived near, invited them to his home and fed them. They talked with Robert Nesbit in French and said they had intended to massacre the people, but finding them unarmed they came in to worship with them instead. In the presentation of the pageant the three seats across the meeting house facing the audience, known as the minister’s gallery, were filled with those presenting the pageant, most of whom were dressed in the Friend’s costume of that day. The typical bonnets and shawls of the ladies were much in evidence but only one beaver hat appeared among the men’s garb. Saturday the parts of Zebulon Hoxie and Robert Nesbit were taken by Friends from Glens Falls, also several of the Indians. Sunday the part of Zebulon Hoxie was taken by Raymond Smith of Quaker Springs and Robert Nesbit by Howard Hintz of New York. Mrs. Franklin Briggs, with children, John and George Briggs and Alice Wilbur represented the family of one of Zebulon Hoxie’s sons, and Mrs. John Visser with sons, James Visser and Charles Wilbur, were another son’s family. The meeting opened with Phebe A. Hoag intoning the 91st Psalm. Howard Hintz gave a very pleasing sermon, short remarks were made by Mrs. Charles E. Wilbur and Misses Winnifred Thomas and Esther Esmond and Mrs. Raymond Smith offered prayer. Then, the Indians, lead by Forrest Pratt as chief, entered and after satisfying themselves that the people were not armed, sat down until the close of meeting. Zebulon Hoxie sent his grandsons out for food and bread and cheese was served to the Indians. The chief then placed a white feather of peace over the door as a sign that no Indian would disturb the little settlement. The visitors register indicates that 300 people attended this first event. Such reenactments were performed sporadically over the next forty years. A photograph from 1952 depicts such an performance, with the note that “Later the Easton Friends portrayed the scene on a float in the pageant at Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and repeated it the next year.” By 1962, the event was being called Easton Day, and held in September to correspond with the supposed date of the original incident. Newspapers reported attendance by “Friends from the surrounding counties of Rensselaer, Albany, Schenectady, Saratoga, Washington and Warren.” The 1962 event also featured a panel discussion on the topic, “African Independence: How Friends Can Help,” with reports from AFSC observers. On September 10, 1967 Easton Day was held again without any reenactments. The 1960s saw a groundswell of interest in Quaker history and genealogy in the Easton area. In 1959, the Washington County Historical Society had produced a handsome volume, HISTORY OF WASHINGTON COUNTY, NEW YORK: SOME CHAPTERS IN THE HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF EASTON, in which devoted a whole chapter to the Quakers. Jane Betsey Welling published THEY WERE HERE TOO: GENEALOGIES OF THE OWNERS OF THE INN AT EASTON CORNERS AND RELATED FAMILIES OF SOUTHERN WASHINGTON COUNTY AND ENVIRONS, STATE OF NEW YORK (Greenwich, N.Y.: Washington County Historical Society, 1963); Jo Anne McCart wrote “The HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS Quakers of Easton” (MS: Oneonta: January 3, 1963); and even high school projects like Diana R. Norton’s “The Abolition Movement in the Greenwich/Easton Area” (MS: Greenwich Central School: April, 1964) made it practical for Easton to have a “Town Historian,” in Emma Briggs. But by the 1970s, there was also growing concern about preservation. Dorothy Williams, Easton Member and noted Quaker poet, published a notice, “To Raise Funds for Repair of Friends Meeting House” in a local paper: Great concern has been expressed by the community of Easton and many beyond its boundaries eager to safeguard this historical landmark of Washington County. Friends, especially from many parts of the United State and across the world have visited and revered this meeting house completed in 1778 on the site of the log cabin where a decade before in 1777 Burgoyne’s Indian allies had surprised a meeting of Friends at worship, and finding them unarmed, had stacked their own weapons outside joining with Friends to worship the Great Spirit. it is noted in Johnson’s “History of Washington County, 1878” that this party of savages had green scalps dangling from their girdles and that they were leading prisoners. It is also interesting to note that the Quakers who wished to live in that spirit which makes war unnecessary fed both the captors and the captives before they went on the way.55 Then, in 1970, adding urgency to such calls, the 1787 meetinghouse which had replaced the storied log cabin was struck by lightning. Since the Meeting did not have funds for repair, it eventually reached an agreement for the Easton Rural Cemetery Association to assume responsibility and stewardship of the building. But following this incident, the Friends began holding Easton Day celebrations on an annual basis, “to remind people that we’re there.”26 A script by Meeting member Anna Pratt from 1971 for “The Fierce Feathers Pageant” indicates the revival of reenactments at this time. In 1974 Easton Day commemorated the 200th anniversary of the Meeting with the presentation of various papers on Easton Friends, and a ceremonial reading of the 1787 Minute from London Yearly Meeting of Friends for Sufferings on the Easton Indian Incident. In 1976, Williams published “Feathers of Peace” in Quaker History (Vol. 65 No. 1, Spring 1976) pp. 32–34. A brief attempt to verify the story with “original sources,” by the then Clerk of Easton Meeting, this is the most recent, “official” version, which continues to be distributed by members. Its appearance in a journal lent an air of authoritativeness to the story, and Williams shift from “fierce” feathers to peaceful ones seemed more sensitive. In the scrapbook kept at the Meeting-House to this day, a copy of Williams’ article is notated, by hand, as “The authentic [underlined] version of Easton’s ‘Feathers of Peace.’” Each year the Easton Day event generated a perennial flowering of stories in the local papers, recounting the historic events and spotlighting the continuing worship tradition. Many articles were copied verbatim from press releases prepared by Friends. 55. The Post-Star (Glens Falls, NY: Friday, Aug. 28, 1970) 26 John B. Briggs, oral communication 1998. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES Notices from Sept. 8, 1985, for example, read: “Many Attend Annual Easton Day Worship”: EASTON—Ninety one Friends and guests from seven area Meetings and four states, attended Easton Day at the South Meeting House, Easton. An annual event hosted by the Easton Friends’ Meeting, Easton Day commemorates the day in 1777 when Burgoyne’s Indians found Friends in worship, and finding no weapons, joined them in meeting and for a breaking of bread afterward. On leaving, they placed a white feather over the door to indicate a place of worship, to be undisturbed by further Indian visits.... Following lunch, group singing was led by Joshua Brown, pastor of the Adirondack Meeting, South Glens Falls. Jeannine Lavery of Saratoga, a well known area professional story teller, recited “Amos Bar Your Door,” a story poem in keeping with the spirit of the day. Next came the dramatization called “The Feather of Peace,” written by Joel Plotkin of Hamilton Meeting, directed by Jan Greene of Syracuse, and acted by children from Syracuse, Adirondack and Easton Meetings. Through the years, a number of portrayals of the “Fierce Feathers” event have been presented, but never before have we seen the story through the eyes of the children. The enthusiasm of the young people was contagious, and those present felt that the spirit of Friends is alive and well, with a future of great promise. The following year, Easton Day was held on September 7, 1986, and Gordon Bugbee, “Quaker Historian from Boston,” spoke on the themes of “The Spiritual Basis of the Peace Tradition, Quaker Community and History.” 125 Friends and guests were estimated in attendance, representing 13 area Meetings of NYM and NEYM, as well as “members of several area congregations, both Protestant and Catholic.” Leaders included Emma Fleck, former clerk of the Friends’ Indian Rights Committee, who displayed “a collection of crafts made by Indians.”56 “Waldo Williams of Aryle, Easton member, “retold the famous ‘Fierce Feathers’ story, known worldwide.” The program from 1987 (the bicentennial celebration of the replacement House) again featured Williams with “Tales of the South Meeting House, Easton Friends and ‘Feathers of Peace.’” followed by comments from Elizabeth Moger, curator of the Haviland Records Room of NYYM, and discussion by the Executive Secretary of the AFSC in NY, Dan Seeger. When the town of Easton celebrated the bicentennial of its incorporation in 1789, Easton MM hosted an Ecumenical Service on July 9, 1989 (program), during which they presented a “pageant ... reenactment” on the grounds for the community. An article in the local news observed: “It has been noted that Easton day is becoming a major event for Friends in the Northeast.” An undated photograph (probably late 1970s) shows Congressman Edward (Ned) Pattison, D-29th district on a visit in which he “shared in the noon meal which commemorated a 1777 meal denoting peace between the Quakers and Burgoyne’s Indian scouts.” This last caption also seems to indicate that, 56. The Times Record, (Saturday, August 30, 1986) HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS particularly in the press, the story is cast strongly within the topos of interfaith Thanksgiving. This was probably encouraged by a press release from members which summarized the event, romanticizing: “At the close of meeting, Friends shared their meager food with the Indians.” UNEXPECTED GUESTS By the mid-1980s Native American themes had become a central part of the Easton Day ritual. A clipping from Easton Day, 1987, reports: Hank Hazelton of Grafton spoke on the North American Indian Tree of Peace Project. Through the years Quakers have made many treaties with Indians, none of which have been broken. He presented Easton meeting with a chart depicting the Brotherhood of the Ojibway and Iroquois Indians. [...Resource people attended the celebration to answer questions on Quaker genealogy.] Often these presentations were feel-good, self-congratulations about Quaker/Indian relations (as in the previous example). Easton Friends increasingly focused on Indian issues: The main speaker of 1996 was Chief Jake Swamp, “sub-chief of the Wolf Clan for the Mohawk Nation and Director of the Tree of Peace Society.” 1997 featured a talk about “The Great Spirit.” But this contact eventually generated tension. Native Americans began encountering the Fierce Feathers story, but they did not always agree with the Quakers’ interpretations of it. Joseph Bruchac is the grandson of an Abenaki Indian, with a Ph.D. from Union Graduate School, who writes Native American stories for children. Growing up in Saratoga Springs, NY, Bruchac first heard the story as a child from “a Methodist minister ... who told me the tale of hostile Indians ... being so moved....”57 But he was again reminded of it when he “read a version of it sometime in the 1980s in a local newspaper.”58 Standing on the site in the early 1990s (possibly at Easton Day) Bruchac claims he was urged by an inner voice —in addition to his editor— to retell the story. Bruchac invoked his younger sister, Margaret Bruchac to aid with research. Margaret Bruchac is a consulting interpreter for Native American Cultures for Old Stuyrbridge [sic] Village and other New England museums, among whose “special areas of expertise is the histories and traditions of both Native and non-Native people in the colonial period.”59 The younger Bruchac possess considerable skills as a critical scholar, which she proceeded to direct to the story of Fierce Feathers, with some interesting and controversial results. Margaret Bruchac scoured the sources on the incident with the intention of discerning what really happened; her notes were subsequently deposited at the Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore. She was understandably offended by the generic and exaggerated representation of Native Americans in traditional Quaker versions. In response, she performed an extensive survey of Native groups in the region and posited (based on the French language connection) that they were probably Abenaki (her own 57. Author’s note in THE ARROW OVER THE DOOR (New York: Dial Books, 1998) p. 81. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. p. 84. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES heritage). This counterperspective on the story filled a much needed gap in the one-sided accounts. Regardless of whether the visitors were in fact Abenaki, Muhheakunuk, Nipmuck, Stockbridge Mohican or any other tribe, it was no longer appropriate for them just to be anonymous Indian “others.” Bruchac challenged the Quaker accounts on many strong grounds (“What does a story like this say about the Quakers need for moral superiority — winning over the savages, instead of simply interacting with them in a sharing way?”), and recognized that the popular account was “a mostly fabricated version that has preserved little or no real knowledge of that ‘other’ culture.” This research resulted in Joseph Bruchac’s 1998 book, THE ARROW OVER THE D OOR. His book maintains that theme of the older accounts, “that a true commitment to peace can transcend race and culture,” but challenges some of their most emblematic features: One detail, which appears to have been an invention of Hodgkin’s, is the placing of a feather over the door of the Meetinghouse by the “fierce” leader of the Indians (who himself wears a multicolored band of feathers unlike anything this side of the Western plains!). This detail is repeated in other retellings of Hodgkin’s story. I have never heard of a feather being placed over a door as a sign of peace, but I have heard of the shape of an arrow being drawn on a wall or an actual arrow (without a point) being placed over a doorway as a sign of friendship. I believe that it is very likely that those Indians did do something to mark the Meetinghouse as a place of peace, a place under their protection. Thus I changed the feather to an arrow and put bows and arrows in the hands of the Indian characters.60 Bruchac replaces the representation of warlike Indians with one in which, at most, “when they reached Easton Meeting, they did not know what was going on and were undecided about their course of action.” [His sister had maintained that the group were not at all ignorant of the settlers, but Bruchac preferred the dramatic possibilities of the former scenario.] The release of Bruchac’s book caused something of a stir in Easton. Friends decided that they had had enough of the Fierce Feathers story and would instead focus on the Meetings role in the Underground Railroad at Easton Day this year. This latest attack of revisionist history needn’t really have alarmed anyone, for the existence of an incident was never challenged, nor even its central themes. But embarrassment was perhaps in order at a Meeting which had long pointed out to children a feather displayed over the inside door, whose only authentic origins apparently lay in an old English storyteller’s romantic imagination. THE OTHER FEATHER But this account of a tradition of internal representations, with occasional external exposures, cannot end here. The Fierce Feathers story may be special, particularly in terms of its connection to the identity of a particular community in a larger 60. Ibid. p. 88–89. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS religious body, but is not alone. The Fierce Feathers story has a not-too distant cousin. Almost as strongly represented in Quaker literature is another tale, often entitled, “The White Feather.” “The White Feather” appeared as the first story in THE CHILDREN’S’ STORY GARDEN (Philadelphia & London: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1920), which was assembled by “a committee of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends, Anna Pettit Broomell, Chairman” and illustrated by Katharine Richardson Wireman and Eugénie M. Wireman. The committee began meeting in 191561, and also included Elizabeth W. Collins, Annie Hillborn, Emily Cooper Johnson, Alice Hall Paxson, and Anna D. White. The editors gave their book “the direct aim of teaching ethics and religious truth to children,” and to this end included “stories illustrating the ethical principles and religious truths that Friends wish especially to emphasize.”62 The editors categorized “The White Feather” as with a P “For Primary Children (approximately under 9 years)” as well as with an F for “Stories About Friends.”63 In the “Historical Notes” included as an appendix to THE CHILDREN’S STORY GARDEN, it is noted that “The White Feather” was: Retold from “Christian Non-Resistance,” by Adin Ballou. Also told in “The Arm of God,” Dunkerly. The names and the children are imaginary, but the essential details are all true.64 The White Feather is set at an unspecified time, as many settlers are fleeing Indians, “who are on the war-path, and at any moment may descend upon Cincinnati.” Thomas Newlin refuses to move his family, and also refuses to arm himself, chiding the others that “we have said that so long as we ourselves acted and felt toward the red men as toward human brothers, they would not harm us.”65 The warriors later appear dramatically, and finding no guns in the house, accept the food that Newlin offers them. Then, just before departing: The Indians settled into silence for a moment. Then one of their number —he who had led the line— sprang up and ran toward the house, a long white feather in his hand. The feather curved gracefully, and Joseph longed to smooth it. The Indian reached the doorway — his face was no longer dark and stern. “Ugh —brother —paleface,” he said, with a large gesture which Joseph knew was meant for one of friendliness. Quickly and deftly the Indian stuck the quill in the crack above the doorway, so that the feather stood upright, beautiful and glistening white in the sunshine. When Joseph turned from admiring it, not a sign of an Indian was to be seen. The place where thy had sat was deserted, and he saw only his father and mother holding one another’s hands quite tightly. Sarah was dancing up and down below the feather. “It is the Indians’ sign of peace,” said Father. “All

61. See Broomell preface to THE CHILDREN’S STORY CARAVAN (1935). 62. THE CHILDRENS’ S TORY GARDEN (Philadelphia & London: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1920) p. 7. 63. Ibid, p. 229. 64. Ibid, p. 226. 65. Ibid, p. 13. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES red men will respect it. Even so they have respected the peace in our hears, to which we have been steadfast.”66 “The White Feather” is illustrated with a plate of an ink drawing by K.R. Wireman, which depicts the family gazing wistfully from the cabin doorway, beneath the feather. The caption reads: “It is the Indians’ sign of peace,” said the Father. THE CHILDREN’S STORY GARDEN also includes two other stories in subsection “3. Indians” (immediately following “2. Colored People”) of the subject heading of “III. Loving Our Neighbors.” Both were intended for older children. The first, “A Ride Toward War Paint,” is about a false alarm of battle between Pennsylvania colonists and neighboring tribes, the former discovering that they have nothing to fear from the latter. “The Latchstring” tells of James Tyler who left out the leather thong on his door, enabling anyone to enter, despite the fact that the British troops had been inciting tribes to attack civilians. Indians entered the house shortly thereafter, only to retreat and burn the neighboring cabin. As a representative to an Indian conference after the war, the story relates, Tyler was told by a man in attendance: “I was one of those Indians. We crept up in night. We meant to burn and kill. We hound [sic] latchstring out. We said, ‘No burn this house. No kill these people. They do us no harm. They trust the Great Spirit.’”67 For further reading, the reader is referred to the Fierce Feathers story in Hodgkin’s QUAKER SAINTS, as well as to E.F. O’Brien’s AN ADMIRAL’S SON and “An Incident During the American Revolution” in ARM OF GOD by Dunkerley. In 1935 Anna Pettit Broomwell (and essentially the same Religious Education Committee of twenty years before) updated the collection and republished it as THE CHILDREN’S STORY CARAVAN (Philadelphia & London: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1935). “THE CHILDREN’S STORY CARAVAN has the same purpose as THE CHILDRENS’ STORY GARDEN,” she writes in the preface, “the setting forth of ethical and spiritual principles — ideas which would be difficult to convey to a child in abstract from [sic] but which can be suggested by carefully directed narrative.”68 Dorothy Canfield Fisher provided an introduction to the volume (from Arlington, Vermont), in which she defends “stories with morals” against the scorn of literary critics, and concludes: The Friends, more than most Americans, have many true stories come down by oral tradition in their families, which need but to be set down as they happened in straight-fibred honest prose to make a tale of bravery stirring to any child’s imagination, because the characters breathe in the air of danger and risk as truly as any pirate or soldier. The old time Quaker boys and girls who helped their parents carry on the “underground railroad” — there’s romance for you of the thickest kind! Secrets, hidden fugitives, dangerous parleys with wicked pursuers, food to be carried in the dark, paths through thickets to be found — it’s a fine thing that memories of such exciting days are not to be passed on only to the grandchildren of those who were children eighty or ninety years ago. And those 66. Ibid, p. 17–18. 67. Ibid, p. 179. 68. Ibid, p. 13. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS seventeenth century Friends, walking quietly, weaponless and safe, among savage Indians who everywhere else on the continent proved relentlessly cruel enemies to white settlers. There’s something new in Indian stories for children! To preserve stories of this kind, written down in straight-forward prose, was well done. I am honored to have been asked to write an introduction to such a book.69 But despite all Fisher’s excitement about Quaker Indian stories, THE CHILDREN’S STORY CARAVAN contains only two. The volume does not duplicate any stories from THE CHILDRENS’ STORY GARDEN. “High Tea” is a kind of comedy of manners in which Aunt Betsy, a city Quaker from Philadelphia, shares tea with peaceful Indians on a visit to her niece in the countryside. The authors see it as a depiction of “aesthetic prejudice against the Indians.”70 The other story is a cautionary tale. “Faint Heart Failed” stands in opposition to stories of pacifist victories in the Quaker literature. Set in “New England, Colonial times,” two brothers are debating whether to resist arming themselves against strange Natives, despite good relations with others. In distinction to the other stories in which faith sustains the Friends’ principles, the brothers are overcome by their fear and arm themselves as a precaution. Then as they walk ominously to the fields “with a musket over one shoulder and a hoe over the other”: The path they took skirted the knoll called Indian Rock. Suddenly from behind thickets of hazel and alder came a rain of arrows. Miles was struck, and then Henry. Side by side they lay, not a hundred yards from their growing corn. They lay still, mercifully pierced to the heart by the sure aim of the warriors. Later in the day came Arrow-in-the-Dark to the corn field to see if the brothers were safe. He found them lying scalped in the path. “Those were my friends who you have slain,” he said sternly to his tribesmen. “Friends do not bring muskets when they work in fields, O Chief!” Replied the warriors. “They came against our Council Rock with a musket. Behold beside their bodies, the musket loaded to kill. So we killed first. Yesterday we watched also. They brought only hoes, and food. They ate berries and drank water. We let them live. Today they are dead. Peace had gone from their hearts.”71 [The outline of this story is told in ARM OF GOD, by Dunkerly, pp. 47-48, and in COLIN WRITES TO FRIENDS HOUSE, Elfrida Vipont, pp. 179-180. The incident is true but the particular characters and setting are imaginary.72] In 1948, Anna Pettit Broomell compiled and edited a third reader, this one entitled THE FRIENDLY STORY CARAVAN. It was 69. Ibid, p. 11. 70. Ibid, p. 314. 71. Ibid, p. 65–66. 72. Ibid, p. 318. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES reprinted in 1949. A paperback edition came out in 1962, and a reprint in 1981. Included were “A Ride Toward War Paint,” “The White Feather,” “The Latch String,” and “Faint Heart Failed.” Ruth Eitzen published an extended version of THE WHITE FEATHER for children in 1987, with illustrations by Allan Eitzen.73 The cataloguing summary reads, “A Quaker family living in Ohio in the 1800s makes peace with a Shawnee Indian tribe during a very troubled time.” In an endnote called “About the Story,” Eitzen relates: In the early days of North America there were many ways of life among the settler, just as there were many different tribes of Indians. Some pioneers never helped themselves to Indian lands or used guns against them. The only weapons they trusted were fairness and confidence toward their Indian neighbors. A warring chief was asked why one such settlement was never attacked, while others around it were being destroyed. He replied, “We warriors meddle with a peaceable people? That people, we know, will not fight. It would be a disgrace to hurt them.” THE WHITE FEATHER is based on the experience of a Quaker family in the settlement of Cincinnati, Ohio, about 1812. The official name for Quakers then, as now, is Friends.45 In Eitzen’s version, the names are changed, but it is not clear if this is meant to increase the stories fidelity or its dramatic effect (The log cabin boy is now Abe). The story includes a visit to a Shawnee village and the following climactic dialogue: Abe knew that their family had always been at peace with the Indians. Still, would Indian strangers know that? “We have no way to protect ourselves,” Abe said. He looked at the empty pegs above the door where the gun had been. His father saw him. “We don’t need that,” said Father. As far as he was concerned, everybody in the world was God’s family. That included Indians.74 Not all of the stories in any of these books deal with Quakers. They are in fact quite consciously drawn from a diverse range of cultures. What is striking, however, is how many of the stories about Quakers deal with their interactions with Native Americans. The only other major focus is on Quaker founders/ saints in England. But clearly these Quaker storytellers find something special to be illustrated in these exchanges. They, of course, stand as counterexamples to other groups’ Indian dealings, and race relations more broadly. But the stories also deepen the Quakers sense of themselves. It becomes clear through these stories that Native Americans are viewed as a test of Quaker faith. They validate and reinforce it. When the Friends have peace in their hearts, and reflect this in their actions, they are spared potentially gruesome fates at the hands of angry warriors. But when they are doubtful, and question their faith in peace, they are mortally rebuked. The Indian recognition of Quaker principles in Fierce Feathers 73. Eitzen, Ruth. THE WHITE FEATHER. (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1987) 45 Eitzen, p. 64. 74. Eitzen, p. 34. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS of The White Feather, and in particular their understanding of humble trust in the Great Spirit, universalizes the author’s message and the Quaker faith. The Quakers connect with the Indians. At the same time, the Indians are agents of God, sensing the strength of the Friends’ faith. One of the most interesting facets of this phenomenon is that it is not that it is a battle over identities and interpretations, but that it is one so obviously fought on the field of stories for children. I am grateful to Beth Wenger for suggesting that what a people tells their children is a sign of what they think —or want— to be the case. In 1932, QUAKERS AND INDIANS was published by S. Lucia Keim, M.A. Her preface illustrates my point: The early history of the Quaker settlement of Pennsylvania represents an idealistic experiment in social living, the success of which is typified in the conspicuous absence of Indian warfare and bloodshed, and the rapid progress of Philadelphia and the outlying Pennsylvania settlements. This heritage of high objectives, co-operative living, and far-sighted leadership has great potential value for boys and girls. The aim of this story is to make the experiences and purposes of these first years of Indian and Quaker 75 history meaningful to children. Quakers have long taken their relationships with Indians to be emblematic of their special attitudes and identity. But if we are to believe Joseph and Margaret Bruchac, then much of the mythology which serve to support this vision is highly inventive, despite being clad in the air of historicity. The emergence, development and proliferation of a story like Fierce Feathers, and its cleavage into entirely separate stories with their own claims to authenticity, is very insightful into the nature of the lore which sustains religious identity and coherence. The basis is substantial enough to be believable, but limited enough to require —to literally sustain— faith.

75. S. Lucia Keim, M.A. QUAKERS AND INDIANS: A STORY OF WILLIAM PENN FOR BOYS AND GIRLS TO READ AND PLAY (Philadelphia: John C. Winston Co., 1932). Illustrated by Evelyn J. Eggeling. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES

21ST CENTURY

2006

Rappleye, Charles. SONS OF PROVIDENCE: THE BROWN BROTHERS, THE SLAVE TRADE, AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION (NY: Simon & Schuster, 2006)

The burden of this book about the brothers John Brown and Friend Moses Brown of Providence, Rhode Island is that Moses probably discontinued his abolitionist work after the death of his brother John because the struggle had not been so much between enslavement and liberation, as between two brothers locked in a game of “sibling rivalry.” Rappleye concludes that “With John gone, Moses had lost his personal stake in the contest.”

Those of you who want to know the real reason why Moses discontinued his abolitionist work may consult Rosalind Cobb Wiggins’s article “Paul and Stephen, Unlikely Friends” in Quaker History, Volume 90 Number 1 (Spring 2001). The truth of the matter is that as soon as the antebellum American friends had divested themselves of their slaves, and as soon as these black people had affiliated themselves into separate-but-equal religious groups such as the AME church, race relations became for the white Quakers one of those “not our problem” problems. Quakers, in purifying themselves of involvement in slavery, had established a sort of apartheid, an apartheid which has been papered over by Fake News releases pointing out that they were against using the black people as slaves. The Quakers were all white people. The Quakers were quietists, isolated within their “Quaker Close.” They had set up a region of personal and corporate purity, within which they were safe and secure. Persons of color who approached the Quaker meetings and asked to become members were simply stiffed, endlessly stiffed. The situation got so unwholesome that when “Hicksites” such as Friend Lucretia Coffin Mott visited Providence and attempted to enter the Friends meetinghouse there for worship, Friend Moses had someone posted at that door to turn them away. These “Hicksites” were Quakers who had remained abolitionist after these “Orthodox” Quakers had purified themselves by separating themselves entirely from people of color and the concerns of HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS

people of color, in effect embracing apartheid or segregation, so they were not about to allow themselves to be contaminated by them — so Friend Lucretia had to go worship with the Unitarians (nowadays, of course, we teach our children the Fake News that they all just adored the daring of Friend Lucretia, America’s Mother). QUAKER FAKELORE

Now get this. You might suppose that the line of continuity stretches across the Civil War, from the antebellum white abolitionists to the Reconstruction-era white liberal integrationists. It does not. The line of continuity that stretches across the Civil War starts with the antebellum white abolitionists such as the Quakers and ends up with the Reconstruction-era white segregationists and Jim Crow. How do we know that? We know that because, even before the Civil War, abolitionists like Moses had already become “Orthodox” segregationists, and had shunned those “Hicksites” who had refused to become racially segregationist.

The newsman storyteller Rappleye –with his reductionistic “John died and so the sibling rivalry was over” pseudoexplanation– entirely missed this, and the reason why he missed this is that he didn’t do his historical homework.

The author offered a book talk in Providence, sponsored by the Rhode Island Historical Society which Moses Brown helped to found. He began with an explanation: “I’m not a historian, I’m a storyteller.” He sold hardcover copies of his book, autographed, and I bought one. What I found was that this storyteller has copied a bunch of stuff from previously published books about the Brown brothers John and Moses, and larded this out with general historical paragraphs about the American revolution and Rhode Island’s involvement in the Triangular Trade, and added a slew of his own new factoids (all of which are incorrect). That’s sorry enough, but he did this in order to support a simplistic, reductionist, and inaccurate conclusion, that Moses Brown’s opposition to the international slave trade is primarily to be accounted for as a mere case of sibling rivalry.

On the back cover, the book receives an “advance praise” blurb from the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of TEAM OF RIVALS: THE POLITICAL GENIUS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN, which also happens to be issued by the trade press Simon & Schuster (a mere coincidence). Here is the blurber, posing with a reader who had the face of HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES

Abraham Lincoln tattooed onto his shoulder:

Goodwin describes her fellow author’s book as “a terrific story.”

On its back cover, Rappleye’s book also receives an “advance praise” blurb from A.J. Langguth, author of PATRIOTS: THE MEN WHO STARTED THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, which also happens to be issued by the trade press Simon & Schuster (another mere coincidence).

On its back cover, Rappleye’s book also receives an “advance praise” blurb from Thomas Fleming, author of WASHINGTON’S SECRET WAR: THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF VALLEY FORGE, a book which was issued by the publisher HarperCollins’s American subsidiary. Collins happens to be a trade press devoted to books on “Wellness, Lifestyle, Business, Design, and Reference, with the mission to empower consumers to Live More, Do More, Learn More.”

On its back cover, Rappleye’s book also receives an “advance praise” blurb from Henry Wiencek, author of AN IMPERFECT GOD: GEORGE WASHINGTON, HIS SLAVES, AND THE CREATION OF AMERICA, a book issued by Farrar Straus Giroux, a trade press specializing in literary fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children’s books. Wiencek alleges that “[t]his powerfully told narrative sheds new light.” —Evidently he didn’t take note of Rappleye’s factual errors even when those factual errors extended into his own field of expertise, that of the relationship between President Washington and his slaves.

One can only hope that these blurbers’ standards of accuracy and responsibility, in doing their own work, are substantially higher than the standards by which they provide their “advance praise” blurbs for a trade press effort as crowdpleasing, and HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS as offensive, as this one.

This is not a book published by a scholarly press, with peer review. Had there been some sort of peer review by actual historians such an amateur effort would have died the silent death of a thousand papercuts. It is, instead, a book published by Simon & Schuster, a commercial corporation which one might characterize as one of the “trade presses.” That is to say, when an author comes to such a press with a manuscript, the schlockmeisters have one question at the forefront of their minds and one question only. How many copies of this piece of shit can we sell?

The day of the academic press, publishing subsidized scholarly monographs, is well known in the groves of academe to be over — there simply isn’t the money available, for the universities to maintain that kind of publishing. The day of the trade press, publishing unanalyzed schlock like this, however, ought to be over, and ought to be over as soon as humanly possible. From now on let’s do internet publishing, and by means of internet publishing combined with peer review, let’s raise our scholarly standards. HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES

2007

March 8, Thursday: Several articles about Governor Stephen Hopkins appeared in the Providence, Rhode Island newspaper, the “ProJo.” One illustration, an oil by John Philip Hagen, has a caption saying “Hopkins, despite his accomplishments, lived an unpretentious Quaker lifestyle and never sat for a portrait.”

Yes, this 1999 oil is not based on any record of the actual appearance of Hopkins, the artist having based the painting upon the appearance of descendants. However, the allegation that Hopkins lived according to an unpretentious Quaker lifestyle seems not to be at all an accurate record of this man’s flamboyance and zest.

This newspaper didn’t quite make Governor Hopkins out to be a Friend, but it quoted Brown curator Robert Emlen as saying, “It’s not surprising that Hopkins would not have had a painting of himself done in life ... He was by all accounts a modest person. Later in life, he became a Quaker, so his values would have been ‘to shun vanity and to speak from the heart.’” That cited remark, which the newspaper made no attempt to evaluate, does claim as definite fact that Hopkins’s membership in the Religious Society of Friends was official and documented, but this, of course, amounts to Fake News since in fact we have no historical record whatever of any application by this man to any monthly meeting of the Religious Society of Friends for membership, or of any acceptance of him by the Religious Society of Friends (the only record we have is that this man did get married with a Quaker woman and then did begin to wear Quaker-type clothing, and that the Friends dealt HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS gently with the resultant situation). QUAKER FAKELORE

Perhaps the reason the 18th-Century Quakers dealt gently with the situation was, that by their own standards they should have disowned the Quaker woman who married him, for “marrying out” was in that period a standard cause of such disownment. Clearly the Providence Quakers didn’t want to disown her if there was a way to stall and wait for the situation to mature. Apparently, the curator Emlen is not aware that local Friends here were sufficiently annoyed by Hopkins’ reluctance to free his slaves that they publicly disassociated themselves from him. (It would not be accurate to say that they read him out of his Meeting’s roster of members. This would be saying too much, for 3 reasons. The 1st of the 3 reasons is that we have no record of his ever either applying or being accepted by any monthly meeting as a member of the Friends. The 2d of the three reasons is that there simply never was any such thing in that period in this locality as a monthly meeting’s roster of members. I think I can safely say that the lists of names and addresses that we currently take for granted are a phenomenon of our present era, and that they do not extend back into the past. I have never seen a roster of members dating to the 19th Century or earlier, for any Quaker meeting. None whatever. The 3d of the 3 reasons is, the function of the disownment procedure that they followed in this case was not to “read someone out of his Meeting’s roster of members.” It was very different from that. It was a notification to the greater local community, that they should not consider this person to be in fellowship with the Friends, and it was a permission in the Meeting for Business to disregard this person’s objections. This is of importance because, in the case of Stephen Hopkins, uniquely, we kept his disownment a secret for about a year after thus disowning him. Keeping it a deep dark secret of course destroyed one of the two purposes that disownment fills!)

In this issue of the ProJo newspaper, in regard to John Greenwood’s oil-on-bed-ticking painting “Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam” painted between 1752 and 1758 and now in the Saint Louis art museum in Missouri, the caption writer speculated on whether a man seated next to Captain Esek Hopkins, Stephen’s brother, asleep with his head on his hand in the middle of the “raucous party” might be Stephen himself.

However, the article’s author, Journal Staff Writer Katherine Imbrie, points out that Stephen in 1757 spent September in Worcester suing a political enemy for slander, and then was campaigning for election in March 1758 to be governor, and thus wouldn’t have had time to sail to Surinam in South America and return. (This would be presuming that the painting was made in Surinam or that the painter visited Surinam and I do not have such evidence — I think it is quite likely to the contrary that the painting was done right here in New England.)

In the timeframe in question Hopkins was elected to his third one-year term as Governor during his total of nine years in that office and was deeply entangled in said lawsuit (the lawsuit was against his archrival, Samuel Ward, who twice unseated Hopkins before Hopkins finally succeeded Ward in 1767). Emlen says that Professor Robert Kenney decided that Stephen Hopkins was not only not a mariner, but not the sleeping drunkard in the painting, and that the drunkard must therefore have been another Hopkins brother, William. That seems to me to be likely.

The newspaper article credits Hopkins for freeing his slaves without indicating when that was supposed to HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES have happened. Hopkins, in his will, did express a desire that his slaves, plural, be set free after his death. However, the will made no provisions for the costs of this and the slaves were part of the estate. It was not an easy thing, to grant manumission to a slave: for one thing, the town needed to consent (because there might be public costs for later care) and we have no record that the town did consent in this case. Since, in a probate proceeding, the settlement of debts comes first before the disposition of any remaining assets, the slaves could not have been set free unless assets were available to do so. We therefore need to verify, before we draw any conclusions from this provision in this will, that the decedent’s estate was large enough, and unencumbered enough, to leave sufficient funds to set these slaves free. I myself suspect that they were not set free, simply because there is no record of any manumission documents for them down at the town real-estate office where such manumission documents were stored. There is only one manumission record in that office, and it is a record in which his adopted daughter after his death took one man to the town office, Toney, testified that Toney “had been free for a long time” but that his manumission document had been “lost or misplaced,” and obtained for him a new “copy.” This action, of course, would have been unnecessary, had Hopkins’s slaves indeed been freed in accordance with his will, because the office to which the daughter took the man would have possessed a written record of any such previous manumission. Also, except for this one person named “Toney,” we don’t even know the names of these Hopkins slaves. The conclusion I have to come to is that Hopkins’s slaves, plural, with the single except of this one person Toney, did not ever become free.

Note well that in a parallel situation, George Washington would express the same sentiment in his will, about freeing the estate’s slaves after his death and the death of his wife Martha — and we know, in the case of Washington, that despite this sentiment, these slaves did not ever become free (the widow Martha would be dead set against any of them becoming free, and they would merely become the property of her heirs).

The newspaper article says Hopkins had acquired those slaves through marriage, perhaps indicating his first marriage rather than his second; and says that although Hopkins was a merchant he was never involved in the slave trade. It is curious that the article makes that assertion, since nobody has ever suggested that Hopkins ever himself personally went on any of the slaving voyages. Before making such a historical assertion, however, we ought to have investigated whether he might have been a silent partner in some of Captain Esek Hopkins’s slaving voyages –since he and Esek were thick as thieves– and I do not have assurance that this has in fact already been investigated. Gov. Stephen Hopkins slept here March 8, 2007 DAVID BRUSSAT GEORGE WASHINGTON slept in the Stephen Hopkins House. Twice. We know the neat little wine-dark house in Providence where Stephen Hopkins lived, probably even better than we know the history of Hopkins himself. Yesterday was the 300th anniversary of his birth, on March 7, 1707. The oldest part of the house that sits on the street that now bears his name was built in the same year he was born, although he did not move into it until they both were 36 years old. By the time he bought the house from John Field, Hopkins had held several official posts in Scituate, where he was raised. While its representative in the General Assembly, he was elected speaker in 1742. That year he moved to Providence and bought the house at the corner of the Town Street and Bank Lane, now South Main and Hopkins. He added four rooms to Field’s two (now the rear el). The house is still becomingly modest by today’s standards. General Washington’s first visit was on April 5, 1776. He was on his way to take command of the Continental Army in Boston. Hopkins himself was in Philadelphia, at the Continental Congress. His daughter-in-law served as host. Her family wanted to lend her better china for the occasion. “What’s good enough HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS for my father,” she is said to have replied, “is good enough for General Washington.” Modesty fit the Providence of the era, but Hopkins worked to change all that. He helped to start the Providence Library Company, a precursor to the Providence Athenaeum, and the Providence Gazetteer & Country Journal. In 1764 he was named the first chancellor of Brown University, then called Rhode Island College. He was elected governor nine times between 1755 and 1767. In the colonial politics of the era, he led Providence in the competition with Newport for civic and commercial supremacy. Only after he left the governor’s office did Hopkins begin his famous career as a founder and patriot. In 1772, as chief justice of the Superior Court, Hopkins directed the cover-up of the burning of the H.M.S. Gaspee, America’s first major violent act against the crown. The tavern where the conspirators met, led by the town’s richest merchant, John Brown, was a block south of the Hopkins house. Everyone knew who was involved, but Hopkins could find no one to indict. The whole town kept the secret from the enemy. (Imagine that today!) Stephen Hopkins later served in the Continental Congress and signed the Declaration of Independence. In penning his shaky signature, he had to hold his right hand steady with his left. Aged 69 and in poor health, he is said to have declared to his fellow Rhode Island delegate, William Ellery: “My hand trembles but my heart does not.” Hopkins himself hosted General Washington in 1781. Moses Brown wrote: “I sat some time viewing the simple and friendly and pleasant manner in which these two great men met and conversed with each other on various subjects.” Stop the presses! Hopkins died in 1785 and was laid to rest in the North Burial Ground in Providence. This Saturday at 2 p.m., the Rhode Island chapter of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America will hold a procession to the gravesite, led by the Pawtuxet Rangers, the Newport Artillery and the 2nd Rhode Island Regiment, and a ceremony to commemorate his life. The Hopkins House will be open 1-4 p.m. that day. The Dames run the house as a museum on behalf of its owner, the State of Rhode Island. In 1804, the house, already of obvious historical status, was relocated half a block uphill, doubtless to save it from “progress.” In 1927, this time to make way for a new Providence County Court House, it was moved even farther up the hill to where it sits today, at the corner of Hopkins and Benefit. After the move, the house was restored by Norman Isham, the famous Rhode Island architectural historian. I toured the house last Thursday with Kiki Anderson, of the Rhode Island Colonial Dames, who showed me some old Journal clippings about Isham’s work. One was about Isham’s reaction to interference from the Women’s Christian Temperance Union: “Isham Waxes Wroth Over W.C.T.U. ‘No Bottles’ Edict — Noted Authority on Colonial Architecture Irately Says He is in Mind to Put Some ‘Good Old Stuff’ in Every Room of Hopkins House.” No doubt Hopkins would be amused. He was portrayed in the 1972 film 1776 as the cranky old drunkard who kept a fractious Continental Congress’s nose to the grindstone. This put the local bluenoses out of joint. A column by Journal art critic Bradford F. Swann was headlined “Stephen Hopkins a drunken buffoon? We should say not.” Today, the “Good Old Stuff” is not in evidence. No matter. With or without the assistance of HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES spirits, few houses can say, “George Washington slept here twice.” Because of that, however, it is one of the few houses that can also say, “I was moved to a new location twice.” You could say the house lives up to the exploits of its heroic resident. Happy 300th, Stephen Hopkins 03/08/2007 By Katherine Imbrie Journal Staff Writer When the Founding Fathers of the country are mentioned, few people think first of Stephen Hopkins of Providence. But Hopkins was one of two signers of the Declaration of Independence from Rhode Island, and he had already had a long career in Colonial government by the time he put his signature to the Declaration at age 69. The Hopkins signature on the most famous American document is not as bold as that of the better-known John Hancock. Hopkins’ shaky hand was due to a medical condition that is now supposed to have been either Parkinson’s Disease or another type of palsy. (For this reason, Hopkins earned a bad rap in the 1969 musical and 1972 musical, 1776, in which he was portrayed as a cantankerous drunkard — a characterization not based in fact.) Hopkins’ most famous quote acknowledges his disability while at the same time testifying to his strength of purpose in signing the Declaration: “My hand trembles, but my heart does not.” He made the statement when his fellow Rhode Island signer, William Ellery of Newport, seemed to look askance at his shakiness while signing. Hopkins was born in Providence 300 years ago yesterday, and on Saturday he will get his due with a birthday celebration. A free three-hour open house — complete with cider, cookies and ginger cake — will be held at his home to mark the occasion, and there will be a ceremonial procession and plaque dedication at his gravesite. The open house is a good opportunity to see the inside of the 1707 Stephen Hopkins House, normally open four days a week in summer, or by appointment. The little red house, set in its small formal garden overlooking the Financial District, is a beloved landmark of the historic East Side. For Saturday’s event, its tiny Colonial rooms will be enlivened by the presence of a costumed actor portraying Hopkins, David Ely. A flawed person Ely, who teaches theater at Lincoln School in Providence, has made a sideline of portraying famous historical characters of Rhode Island for a couple of decades, since he began by playing Roger Williams and Samuel Slater in a Rhode Island school program called “Legacy Plays.” For the past five years, he’s made a specialty of portraying Hopkins for 4th- and 5th-grade Rhode Island school programs about the Revolutionary War, and he also steps into the role on occasions such as Saturday’s, for which he’s hired by the Rhode Island Chapter of the Colonial Dames of America, the society that operates the historic Hopkins house. Besides donning his Hopkins costume (which consists of black slip-on shoes, Colonial-style knickers and white hose, and a HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES dark-blue coat and vest), Ely says he gets into the role of the Colonial leader by trying to integrate the good and the bad things he’s learned by reading about Hopkins over the years: “He was a flawed person. He had a long-term nasty dispute with his archrival in state politics, Samuel Ward. In governor’s races of the time, Ward tended to be backed by the southern landholders in the state, while Hopkins had the backing of the merchant Brown brothers. There was a certain amount of political goings-on, such as an accusation of having paid voters likely to support Ward to stay home.” But on the positive side, says Ely, “Once the two rivals became united in the bigger fight against Britain, they stopped squabbling and even became friends. Hopkins was always a big supporter of public education — he helped establish the first library and the first college in Rhode Island,” Brown. “He freed his slaves, which he had acquired through marriage, and although he was a merchant, never was involved in the slave trade. He was a highly educated person at a time when not many people were.” For Saturday’s event, Ely will not present a performance on Hopkins, but will be in period costume, along with Kim Clark portraying his wife, Sarah. Famously modest Besides his house, few artifacts have come down through history from Hopkins, who was famously a modest person, according to Brown University curator and senior lecturer in American Civilization Robert Emlen. “Among the stories I like about Hopkins is that when George Washington came to stay in Providence, he chose to stay in the Hopkinses’ very small and modest house, rather than at a more imposing house such as John Brown’s. At the time of the visit, Hopkins was away at the Continental Congress, and someone is said to have urged his wife to at least get in some better china dishes in honor of Washington’s arrival. But she said no, what was good enough for her husband to dine on was good enough for anyone.” Besides being a nine-times-elected governor of Rhode Island, a state chief justice and a delegate to the Colonial and Continental Congresses, Hopkins was the first chancellor of Brown University, which owns a portrait of him similar to one that hangs in the Rhode Island State House. Emlen explains that, although the portraits are intended to represent Hopkins, they both are actually 1999 simulations made by Newport artist John Hagen. Hagen worked from a sketch made by John Trumbull in 1793 for his famous group portrait of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, the painting that hangs in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. “By the time Trumbull got to Rhode Island to make his sketches, Hopkins had been dead several years,” says Emlen. “But everyone told him that Hopkins’ nephew looked exactly like him, so Trumbull painted the nephew as a stand-in for Hopkins. “Brown (University) had never had a portrait of its first chancellor, so we had Hagen work from the Trumbull sketch. So in fact, the so-called Hopkins portrait is not actually him, but HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES is a 1999 rendering of a 1793 sketch of Hopkins’ nephew.” “He kept the chair” It’s not surprising that Hopkins would not have had a painting of himself done in life, says Emlen. “He was by all accounts a modest person. Later in life, he became a Quaker, so his values would have been ‘to shun vanity and to speak from the heart.’ “Hopkins didn’t make a public spectacle of himself the way his contemporary Benjamin Franklin did. He didn’t need to show off, but he had a good reputation, and from the number of times he was elected and served in public offices, he was trusted and well-respected by the people of Rhode Island.” He had a sense of humor, too. A historic Spanish leather chair that is the official chair used for public occasions by presidents of Brown University was a gift to the university from a Hopkins descendant, says Emlen. “The story is that Hopkins, who was a merchant, had a share in a privateer during one of the 18th-century wars with Spain. When the privateer captured a Spanish ship, some of Hopkins’ friends got him this chair, telling him that it was one that he ‘couldn’t be unseated from’ — a reference to the fact that Hopkins had been in and out of the Rhode Island governorship so often. “So he kept the chair, and his grandson gave it to Brown, which allows us to describe the presidential chair as pirate loot.” The 300th Birthday Celebration of Stephen Hopkins will be held Saturday at the Stephen Hopkins House, 15 Hopkins St. at the corner of Benefit Street in Providence. Admission is free. The house will be open from 1 to 4 p.m., with costumed actors portraying Stephen and Sarah Hopkins. Cider, cookies, and ginger cake will be served. At 2 p.m., a commemoration ceremony will be held at the Hopkins gravesite in North Burial Ground, 5 Branch Ave. at the corner of North Main Street. Members of the Newport Artillery Company, the Pawtuxet Rangers, the Colonial Dames, the Society of Colonial Wars, and the 2nd Rhode Island Regiment will march from the cemetery gates to the gravesite beginning at 1:30 p.m. For more information, call the Colonial Dames, (401) 421- 0694. Although at the last minute I had been disinvited as a speaker at the 300th Birthday Celebration for Governor Stephen Hopkins at his gravesite, since I still had my engraved invitation card, I did attend that ceremony at 2PM as the card stated. Quite frankly, I was expecting to be turned away at the gate in the high iron fence that surrounds this graveyard. What I found, however, when I arrived at big gate, was that the guard accepted my invitation card and allowed me to enter the grounds. However, when I reached the gravesite at the top of the hill just prior to 2PM, what I discovered was that all the speechmaking at the podium had been already completed. (Imagine that: a public event that, instead of beginning ten minutes later than announced, is already over and done with by the time that they had advertised it to begin! –You don’t suppose, do you, that they were doing things this way in order to make certain that I would have no opportunity for telling them truths they did not need to hear?) The only thing remaining for me to witness in the ceremony at the gravesite was the ragged volleys of black-powder musket fire by uniformed re-enactors, and the resultant clouds of acrid gunsmoke. I stood there and endured this and then listened as a guy who clearly was not part of the ceremonies stepped forward and volunteered to inform all onlookers that he was proud to be himself personally a descendant of Stephen Hopkins. He added that his ancestor had been a Quaker “although,” he added, “I’m not sure what that meant, I don’t know much about the Quakers.”

Back at Providence Monthly Meeting, later, there was no channel by which I could express any of this to any HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS other Friend — since this was not an approved-by-Ministry-and-Counsel topic on which to report at the monthly meeting for business, and was not an approved-by-Ministry-and-Counsel topic “relating to the life of the community” on which I might be allowed to report during the announcements period after meeting for worship. And, since the “Media Committee” has already informed me (in writing) that no submission would be accepted for publication in the meeting newsletter –if they suspected it to be written by me– there had been no way whatever for me to respond to their war-celebratory front page center entry in the February 2007 issue of our meeting newsletter, “The Provident FRIEND.”

(I think that a lot of this has to do with Friends in our meeting who have been “silently uncomfortable” with the Quaker Peace Testimony, in the same manner in which some of them are known to be “silently uncomfortable” with gay marriage. I suspect that, because this situation has been obtaining for me ever since I helped aged Friend John R. Kellam, a WWII prisoner of conscience, write his autobiography about his years in federal maximum security prison as a Conscientious Objector, http://www.kouroo.info/RSOF/ FriendJohnKellam.pdf. We had copies printed and bound at Kinko’s, and he had presented one of these bound Kinko’s copies to the library of the Moses Brown School. Almost all the kiddies at this school are now non- Quaker, and I don’t think they want them or their parents to have their noses rubbed in the fact that the Quakers are traitors.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES SET AN EXAMPLE

LIES QUAKERS

2013

August 25, Sunday: On this day designated as “Easton Day,” the Religious Society of Friends sponsored a presentation by Christopher Klemek, an Associate Professor of History at George Washington University in Washington DC, in Easton’s South Meetinghouse at 227 Meeting House Road off Route 40 north of Schaghticoke, New York, his topic being “A People’s History of Peacemaking in the Hudson Valley.” PROFESSOR KLEMEK

Children 12 and under were not subjected to this historical examination of the evidences, but were of course provided with a separate agenda. In this presentation the professor attempted to place the history of the Easton Quaker Meeting in the larger context of the social justice endeavors of the Quakers of that region. Professor Klemek was offering himself as uniquely qualified for this topic due to his own family’s connections with the Quakers of Easton, connections that evidently had begun during the 18th Century. After his presentation there was a potluck and then singing and a retelling of the Fake News “Feathers of Peace” story, for the benefit of the tender minds of all the assembled innocent little children. QUAKER FAKELORE

Each year the Easton Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) celebrates this Easton Day, which they allege commemorates an incident they record as having occurred in the fall of the year 1777, “when a party of Burgoyne’s Indians set aside hostilities and joined Easton Friends in worship.” Again quote unquote from their meeting literature, “After sharing the Friends’ modest meal, the Indians left a white feather over the door of the meeting house to signal that this building should be left in peace.” Those wanting more information may call Jeannine at 518-587-8932; she is very interested in getting to the bottom of this and is somewhat distressed due to gaps in the evidence. AMERICAN REVOLUTION HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES SET AN EXAMPLE

LIES QUAKERS

2019

April: I, Austin Meredith, am currently contemplating asking for a Clearness Committee at my monthly meeting of the Religious Society of Friends in Durham, North Carolina. I have been discussing this with my friend and neighbor Toby Berla. The people whom I fancy might constitute an adequate Clearness Committee would include him, Carol and Bob Passmore, John Hunter who offers a regular “Quakerism 101” public relations course for our meeting, some Friend who teaches at the Carolina Friends School affiliated with this meeting, and Joe and Terry Graedon. The agenda would be, preparing me to make a presentation to our Friends Meeting on our need for a new Quaker Testimony, one of Objectivity, in which we embrace a new discipline, of not making claims to know stuff is true, for which actually we lack adequate evidence: • First don’t tell lies, of course, that’s the easy part. Now for the hard stuff. • We need to stop trying to raise our little children into decent adults by telling them self- congratulatory lies — that enterprise has always been on a tight loop to failure. The only Quaker adult such an education can construct will be a person prone to creating more such self- congratulatory lies, such as a person we once created, Richard Nixon. QUAKER FAKELORE • Cease alleging to people that stuff is true, that we do not know to be true. Given the monstrous demonstrable lies that we have scattered through Quaker “history” the way raisins are scattered through raisin bread, the excuse “I read it in a book” is approximately as valid as “I was only following orders.” Notice, just as a person who tells lies is a liar, because telling a lie is telling a lie, the person who claims to know something for which they do lack credible evidence is also a liar, because claiming to know something one does not know amounts to telling a lie. • Formalize the above into a new Testimony of Objectivity in which we, as Quakers, develop a tradition of confining our discourse to what we do know.

Although such a testimony would be new to us, it is in fact not new at all, not new at all. This is something that was totally understood already, get a clue, in Judaism during the 6th Century of our Common Era, during its exile from the land of Israel in what was then known as Mesopotamia, the prosperous land between the two rivers Tigris and Euphrates:

המוסיף על הצריך גורם לחיסרון - סנהדרין כט, א

— Babylonian Talmud (Talmud Bavli) created in the 3d to 6th Centuries CE in what is now Iraq warns (Sanhedrin 29) “adding to the truth subtracts from it.”

Friend Toby’s initial questions are: “What primary source evidence is there regarding the ‘White Feather’ incident?” The only primary source evidence I have been able to uncover was from an associate professor of history whose Quaker family hails from the area of Easton, New York along the Hudson River. His name is Christopher Klemek and he is an Associate Professor of HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS History at George Washington University in Washington DC. He had made a historical presentation in Easton’s South Meetinghouse at 227 Meeting House Road off Route 40 north of Schaghticoke, New York, “A People’s History of Peacemaking in the Hudson Valley.” When I contacted him by telephone about this, he first referred to me as “you are the one who is describing Quakers as liars” and then mentioned that he was affiliated with a famous Washington DC Friends school, I think he said “Sidwell Friends” although his voice was agitated and muffled, and then by a pretense that he was getting poor phone reception, hung up on me as I repeated my email address and phone number and pleaded with him to call me or email me. It is clear from the fact that he would never get back with me, that this “poor phone reception” had been a lie. (My guess is that he may be fearful that revealing the truth will damage his relationship with this school, or will damage the reputation of his Easton monthly meeting, which has for generations been functioning as a Quaker tourist destination.) “Are there any secondary sources from close to the time of the alleged event?” No, as it turns out, there are none whatever. “What is our best understanding of the surrounding historical context within which to understand that alleged incident?” The focus of these “White Feather” stories is a racist/ antiracist early 20th Century focus, retrojected implausibly back into the late 18th Century mentality. Historians aren’t supposed to do this, they aren’t supposed to retroject later popular attitudes back into earlier minds. What I mean by “a racist/anti racist early 20th Century focus” is that the authors of these stories considered that what they were constructing were antiracist materials, although in fact what they were doing was utterly counterproductive: they were creating characters of color whose sole function was to attest to the righteousness of white people — and then vanish back into the shrubbery: “Your settlement is safe. We Indians are your friends, and you are ours.” This actually does bear on the recent “n-word” controversy we have experienced at meeting. Remind yourself how that visitor of color castigated us for having put our white words into black mouths, rather than allowing black people to speak for themselves! That is precisely what these “White Feather” stories do, because all of them, in all of their flavors, create unnamed red communicators whose sole function is to walk onstage, reassure us white people as to how righteous we are, how gentle we are, how admirable we are, and then walk offstage into anonymity. “Are there versions of the story through the years, in which the particulars change? How did those particulars change?” The field of writing children’s books is enormously competitive. Each successive writer tries harder than the predecessors to create a greater false sense of verisimilitude and veracity, by sprinkling their invented narratives over with layers of plausible fake names for these various fake white Quakers. They even add footnote references to scholarly-sounding texts that HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS do not exist, or provide scant substantiation for their remarks. I’ll give this to them, with each generation of new fake stories, these children’s writers cover their tracks more fulsomely. “Why would Friends have persisted in re-telling the story and ‘improving’ it?” I don’t know that these authors actually were Friends, although typically they claim to be. This is a business, the creation of children’s books. There is money to be made. “What might that tell us about Friends’ image of themselves? About human nature?” What this tells us is something we already know, that Friends have an urgent need to think highly of themselves, but on the cheap. They need without any great investment to reassure themselves that they are indeed superior to all non-Quakers merely by being who they are. It is as if we are a collection of Little Jack Horners, who are sitting in our corner eating our Christmas pie and sticking in our thumbs and pulling out plums and exclaiming “What a good boy am I!” The whole thing for this Little Jack Horner cartoon character was his relentless self-congratulation. Relentlessly, he was going to stick in his thumb and pull out his self- privileging. Self-congratulation and self-privileging was what it was all about, for Little Jack. — And likewise, unfortunately, for your typical Quaker consumer of Quaker historical literature: this self-congratulation and self- privileging Quaker, since for him or her the whole thing about being a Quaker is enabling oneself, is going to dip into one or another Quaker history, history that is as intermingled with outrageous lies as raisin bread is intermingled and sprinkled with raisins, and relentlessly discover and consume one or another of these lies. The lies that are embedded in Quaker historical accounts are, for this consumer of Quaker historical accounts, what such activity is all about. If it were not for these outrageous lies, this type of Quaker would be entirely uninterested in our shared lived experience over generations as it is to be discovered in Quaker history, would in fact be bored or offended by it, would in fact traipse away to some other religious congregation that would offer this Little Jack Horner some more convenient and more fulsome and more spurious opportunity for his relentless self-congratulation and self- privileging.

I propose that we need to begin by anticipating some objections that are certain to arise. The 1st objection will be that, no, Austin is very mistaken, in fact we Quakers are not trying to raise our little children into decent adults by, among other neat tricks, telling them lies. How dare he suppose that to be what is going on? Well, it can be easily demonstrated that this is in fact what we are up to. We can do so merely by considering the “The White Feather” or “Fierce Feathers” story, although it does not stand alone. The 2d objection that I would anticipate will be that we have always already been refraining from telling people that stuff is true that we do not know to be true. It can be easily demonstrated that in fact Quakers do this all the time, that in fact there is no particular difference to be observed HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES between us and non-Quakers in such a regard. The 3d objection I anticipate will be that we Quakers do not need a new Testimony of Objectivity because we already have a Testimony of Truth. No, in fact we do not have a Testimony of Truth, for whenever I have proposed such a thing as a Testimony of Truth to anyone in our meeting, one of the first objections I have encountered is that such a Testimony of Truth would be a horrid invasion of the privacy of our inward religious relationship with our deity, and as such would be a non-starter. For instance, one of the most dispiriting phenomena I have encountered in my decades as a Friend, has been to attempt to point out that we need to find a way to prevent ourselves from spawning future generations of Richard Milhous Nixons, by exploring the wrongness of Friend Richard’s personal ethics — only to have people first agree with me wholeheartedly but then attempt to indoctrinate me in their personal ethics that is their own solution to this problem, that is in every respect precisely identical with the personal private unimpeachable self-privileging rhetoric of evasion of Friend Richard Nixon. The Quaker Testimony of Integrity perfectly fits the “choose your own reality” trend of our times. Friend Richard absorbed this testimony at his “sainted” mother’s knee in Whittier, a suburb of LA that contains an evangelical Quaker “Church,” and then during his invasion of Cambodia he obliged the American public to accept his leadership on the ground that since he knew himself to be a pacifist, he ought to be the one we trusted to decide our issues of war and peace. Surely he, a pacifist, would not lead us into war unless absolutely necessary. Since religion is inward and the inward is unchallengeable, we had to simply believe him, for not to believe what he said would be to deny him his religiosity, a religiosity which was his right as a human being. Since he said he was a religious person he must be a religious person, for only he, in his inwardness, could directly experience the validity of that. But then came the tapes, the tapes that recorded him talking out of the other side of his mouth! Had the Quakers had, at that time, a Testimony of Objectivity to buttress and support their Testimony of Integrity, those Oval Office tapes would have enabled our Testimony of Objectivity to function alongside our Testimony of Integrity. (But we did not have any Testimony of Objectivity, because this is the geist in which we get to “choose our own reality.”) I know I am going to need to provide examples of the above Quaker lying, to force awareness of the fact that it is indeed pervasive. The problem is that there are so very many examples. I think I will need to restrict myself to one easy-to- demonstrate example, and the example I have initially selected is a story that recently came up during our Meeting for Business, “The White Feather.” I will present what historians know and suspect, within the bounds of historical verifiability and likelihood, being careful not to go beyond the evidence. Then I will present a record of how the snowdrifts of little white lies accumulated around this little pile of evidence, until what evidence still remained got completely buried over with a snowdrift of nice Quaker just-so stories, and then these stories came to be magnified and regularized through ever-improving retellings. In the original situation, during the Revolutionary War, there HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS was no hint of any of today’s race-relations awareness. Race relations were not part of their mindset. Real historians know that. There was an exceedingly dangerous insurrection going on, on the one side of domestic colonial white-racist terrorists led by Virginia plantation slavemasters, and on the other side British Army redcoats some of whom were local colonials who were loyalists, and other of whom were soldiers from elsewhere in the British empire, and others of whom were hired mercenaries who did not even speak English, and others of whom were native American warriors on the warpath who had allied themselves with the British Army to serve as its surrounding scouts and guides and flankers. In the middle were the Quakers and other peaceable white settlers who were simply trying to stay out of harm’s way, and who were constantly being victimized by both sides in the customary “if you aren’t with us then you are against us” manner. One of these two sides in this continental conflict was going to win and seize the spoils, and the other side was going to lose and be stripped of all possessions, and after being stripped perhaps be hanged, or at least expelled out of the American colonies. This was the most massive asset transfer of our entire trajectory as a nation. At the end of the revolution we would see the exit of between one/fourth and one/third of our white colonial population, and they would depart with nothing but the clothing on their backs. Then the winners would be free to designate themselves as patriots, and the winning Virginia- slavemaster-in-chief would get to rebrand himself as the Father of the American Nation, and at the end of his life would get to pretend that he was freeing his slaves, which was something that he did not do. None of this had anything whatever to do with PC attitudes toward peoples of races other than white. In particular, it did not much matter at that time that the group of fighters who passed through this little community were native Americans with scalps dangling from their belts. A white man in a red coat speaking the King’s English can shoot you just as dead, or slit your throat, just as well as an Algonquian-speaking native from Canada. What mattered was not that you were giving food to persons of another race, what mattered was that you were providing sustenance to enemy soldiers who were fighting on behalf of the King of England, and in doing that, you were becoming a traitor. Hey, you don’t give aid and comfort to the enemy, you just don’t, not if you want to survive the hostility this creates among your revolutionary neighbors, and your local revolutionary “Committee of Correspondence.” If your revolutionary neighbors find you providing aid and comfort to their enemy, then either immediately or at the conclusion of the warfare, they are going to seize all your lands and all your houses and barns and all your livestock, and best case condition, they are going to put you Loyalists out on the road to hike north toward Canada, or they are going to require you to board a log raft and float down the river to New-York harbor, where you can, if you can afford it, board ship for Nova Scotia or Bermuda or some other place still controlled by the King of England. Everything you have will be theirs, you traitor who in our hour of peril offered aid and comfort to our enemy. The only thing you can do is plead with these revolutionaries. Maybe you could look their in the eye and go “Look, we’re your neighbors.” Maybe you could go “We were only trying to be good HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES Christians and follow the Golden Rule and act as Good Samaritans for those in need.” Maybe you could go “Please, we were unarmed and these savage men had us terrified, so terrified that our fear overcame our better judgment and we gave them stuff to eat in an attempt to get them to go away without killing us or burning down our house.” Maybe you could go “See, the thing is, these savage men had a white revolutionary captive with them, a friend of yours, whom they were intending to sell for ransom, and this local guy was starving, and we knew that we could not give him anything to eat unless we gave everyone something to eat. So actually, you should not strip us naked, because actually we were on your side, and were merely attempting to help one of your own fighters who had been captured.” You would need for sure to think hard, think of something persuasive. A lot will depend on your neighbors taking pity on you. At this point I was tempted to go beyond the facts at hand, and say that obviously these peaceable Quakers were successful, and after the revolution their neighbors would allow them to keep their Quaker farms in this area. Then I needed to stop and think, do we actually know that? No, in fact, we don’t actually know that there was such a continuity between the local Quakers of before the Revolutionary War, and the local Quakers of after the Revolutionary War. It is within the realm of the possible that this “White Feather” sob story they told didn’t work on their revolutionary neighbors, and at the conclusion of the revolution these Quaker families were stripped of their properties and driven out. There may be such continuity, but the research has not been done, has not even been started. Instead of doing real historical research, what we have been doing is fabulating, making up nice-sounding lies dating to the mindset of a later generation, nice-sounding lies with which to impress our vulnerable innocent young children. See, a curious thing happens when there is a military triumph. Afterward the winner gets to rewrite all the history into a record of their triumph. They become the good guys. For instance, those domestic colonial white-racist terrorists I mentioned, who were being led by Virginia plantation slavemasters, would be redesignated as patriotic American fighters for freedom and justice, freedom and justice for all. Those Quakers who had resisted involvement and been brutalized would be reconceptualized, by themselves, in a self-serving manner, as early devotees of the Peace Testimony. Those native American parties of warriors who had served as flankers and scouts and guides for the redcoats would be reconceptualized as colored folks who had become wise through living close to Mother Earth, and emotionally wise by living naturally in direct touch with their emotions, so wise in fact that they could look on our white Quaker families with benevolence and consideration. We would write up a bunch of stories in which we would allow them to testify, in their native untutored wisdom, as to what great people our white ancestors had been. And, of course, in these fabrications these Quakers had no guns with which to shoot squirrels for their supper, or defend themselves, or protect their women and children — perhaps because they had been vegetarians. Is anyone going to need me to go on now, and demonstrate that “Wear your sword as long as you can” is a just-so fable? I can do that if anyone is interested. Is anyone going to need me to HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS go on, and demonstrate that Quakers had nothing whatever to do with the wickedness of solitary confinement? I can do that, if anyone is interested. Is anyone going to need me to go on, and demonstrate that our Peace Testimony was restricted at first, all and only, to disputes among rational white men? Is anyone going to need me to go on, and explain that Friend Moses Brown was actually the guy who started the American tradition of Jim Crow apartheid, and founded a racist school in which only white children would be acceptable? I can most assuredly do that. How about Richard Nixon, am I also going to need to demonstrate to you that this man was a Quaker solely because he was an stone opportunist who coldly seized upon every opportunity to advance his own personal agendas of life success?

This is why I feel a calling to open a campaign for a new Quaker Testimony. We have a Quaker tradition that we are the people who have, from the get-go, renounced religious symbols as unnecessary, and as unnecessarily divisive. We have rejected religious divisiveness in favor of religious inclusiveness. We embrace no cross, no star either 5-pointed or 6-pointed, no crescent moon, no “Ommm,” no flag, no nothing. However, that does not seem to me to have been sufficient, for over the centuries a culture of separateness has grown up within our community, a culture of separateness that is based on a set of beliefs, or myths, about Quaker religious history. Yes, we have foregone unnecessary and divisive religious symbols, but we also have merely replaced these unnecessary and divisive religious symbols with equivalently unnecessary and divisive beliefs, or myths, about our own Quaker religious trajectory. Now we fill our children’s imaginations with made-up stuff that has no historical foundation whatever, such as “Wear the sword as long as you are able,” and “William Penn refusing to do Hat honour,” and “Jury Nullification,” and “White Feather,” and “we originated solitary confinement,” and whatever. We see no harm in lying to our own little children. Why have we done this? These unnecessary and divisive beliefs, or myths, about Quaker religious history, have come to offer us a sense of superiority over others, that is just as powerful as a cross-symbol, or a star-symbol, or a crescent symbol, or whatever. They have come to legitimate our self-entitlements. What we need, and need urgently, is a new Quaker Testimony, one according to which our mantra can become a Socratic “What we know is that we don’t know what we can’t know.” There are for instance Quaker theists, and Quaker atheists. One might even go so far as to say that this is the primary distinction that can be made between the people whom we refer to as the Church Quakers, who have ministers and a gospel, versus the people whom we refer to as the Meetinghouse Quakers, who have no ministers and no gospel. The Quaker theists go “We believe in God, so we must have churches in which we worship separately from those other Quakers who do not believe in God, and be superior to them.” The Quaker atheists go “There is no God, so we must have meetinghouses in which we worship separately from those other Quakers who worship their God in churches, and be superior to them.” So in some parts of Quakerdom the LGBTQ+ community is being shunned, whereas in other parts of Quakerdom that community is being welcomed. In some parts of Quakerdom you can hear, from outside the church, the Quakers HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES inside thumping on their Bibles, while in other parts of Quakerdom, one needs to look around fairly hard in order to discover any Bible book lying around anyplace, lying around being disregarded. I would propose that this new Quaker Testimony, which we need to embrace, the new Quaker testimony according to which we resolve to have no more involvement with religious beliefs than we have with religious symbols, be termed “the Quaker Testimony of Objectivity.” According to this new Quaker Testimony of Objectivity, when we encounter anyone who believes in the existence of a God, we should ask “How could any human being actually know anything on such a topic?” And then, when we encounter anyone who refuses to believe in the existence of a God, we should ask “How could any human being actually know anything on such a topic?” And then, when we encounter anyone who insists that they know stuff about Quaker history, stuff for which actually there is no historical foundation whatever such as “Wear the sword as long as you are able,” or “Hat honour,” or “Jury Nullification,” or “White Feather,” or “we are the ones who originated solitary confinement,” or whatever little white lie they want to impress upon their little children so that their little children will come to believe that they are unique children who are privileged above other non-Quaker children, we should ask “How could you know stuff like that for which our actual historians report there is really no historical foundation?”

May: Writer Craig Mazin and director Johan Renck presented a HBO special miniseries (in co-production with the British network Sky) entitled CHERNOBYL, about the explosion that had destroyed the newest of the 4 uncontained nuclear piles at the nuclear electricity station on the Pripyat River in what is now Ukraine. This 5-part presentation depicts everyone’s inability to grasp initially that something was going disastrously wrong, or what it was that was going so disastrously wrong, or why and how things were going so disastrously wrong, and also presents the fact that subsequent to the meltdown, none of the USSR’s recovery strategies had helped much at all. The disaster is ascribed accurately, in this presentation, to the social climate of that place and that time: nobody could ever trust anyone, nobody could afford ever to tell anyone the truth, everyone was terrified of being shot or sent to Siberia or being passed over for the next promotion. There was no social glue of honesty left with which to bind this society together. Soon the Soviet Union would collapse of its own weight, overwhelmed by lies and by distrust.

There is one scene in this presentation that encapsulates this general haze of disinformation and threat, by dramatically presenting a single incident of radical contrast (never mind whether such a dramatic moment ever actually took place; this is shatteringly effective merely as a dramatic presentation). Miners have been brought in to tunnel under the smoldering pile of radwaste and corium and debris, obviously at the cost of their lives. The miners have all stripped off their clothing because it is so hot in their hole, and the are mining as their grandfathers used to mine, butt naked. The chief miner crawls out of the hole and stands there before the Communist Party political officer, full frontal, uglies hanging out, and asks “Afterwards, will we be taken care of?” The political officer, amazingly, tells this chief the unadorned truth: “I don’t know.” The clouds seem to part and a wash of white light passes across the screen, while the two men stand there and stare into one another’s eyes. The miner obviously recognizes that of all people, this Soviet political officer has paid him what in their society is the ultimate compliment, of revealing a simple unadorned piece of truth. So he stands there and repeats, meditatively, what the political officer has just said: “You don’t know.” Then, because he is of course aware that the lives of millions of Ukrainians and Russians are at stake, aware that compared with these millions, the lives of he and his fellow miners are of little consequence, he turns around and crawls back down into the hole under the smoldering pile of radwaste and corium and debris. HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS I thought, here I am trying to explain to the American Quakers how it is that we so desperately need a new 7th testimony, a Testimony of Objectivity that will buttress and reinforce and hold upright our existing Testimony of Integrity that, in the case of Friend Richard Nixon, has demonstrated itself to be so utterly inadequate. We need an elaboration of our traditional “Let your yea be yea, let your nay be nay,” that will sponsor an attitude of “Quakers say only what is so.” We don’t make up stories and pretend they are true because everyone needs for them to be true, stories like “nuclear power plants cannot go off like atom bombs.” Once upon a time, in a simpler and less fraught era, we Friends had a habit of making up all sorts of pseudohistorical stories and by repetition coming to believe them, perhaps because these fabrications made us seem important or a little interesting, but we are now renouncing all that stuff and going with the straightforward, unadorned truth of saying only the very few things that we actually do know. No more Fake News, or, at least, not from us Quakers! We’ve turned over a new leaf! And here is this HBO Special on British TV, and it is pointing out to us that if the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had had a Testimony of Objectivity, like the Testimony of Objectivity that I am now urging upon the Quakers, quite likely this Chernobyl disaster could have been prevented, or at least more capably mitigated.

December: Matters had come to a head, in our Durham monthly meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. A young member had made a complaint against me, Austin Meredith, with our Ministry & Council Committee, on the basis of my having asked her to provide factual backup for a testimony she had offered during our Silent Worship. My attempt to elder her had gone seriously wrong and had evidently resulted in fear or anger, or something. This had brought up the sensitive topic of what the real world of mundane facts has to do with the world of testimony guided by the spirit. A committee has been organized to examine my conduct, and for the time being, I have agreed to withdraw from our 10:00AM regular First Day group worship session, pending its report back to the Ministry & Council Committee on my fitness as a member. Perhaps I will, and perhaps I will not, be allowed to continue to consider myself a member of this Religious Society.

THE TESTIMONY OF OBJECTIVITY

Friend Emily stood during Silent Worship at our Durham Friends monthly meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, and drew a bright red line of contamination between the factory ships of the white Quaker whaling families of New Bedford, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket during the 19th Century, on the one hand, and on the other hand the “negrero” ships that had been used for the “Middle Passage” between Africa and the New World during what was called the “Triangular Slave Trade.” I could not grasp the connection that this Friend was formulating in her mind, except that these whaling vessels of the white Quaker families were seagoing ships engaged in a vicious and exploitative purpose, and these “negrero” seagoing ships were in the same broad category, to wit, also seagoing ships, likewise engaged in a vicious and exploitative purpose. In this Friend’s testimony during silent worship, she described the hull planks of the former type of vessel being refashioned in a shipyard into the hull planks of the latter type of vessel. Then she had the souls of the whales the white Quakers had slaughtered, cruising along beneath the holds of the “negrero” slaving vessels, recognizing those re-used guilty planks, and crooning their watery songs to rows and rows of enchained black African slaves, who moaned call-and-response to the songs coming up from underneath these black slave cargoes. Obviously, this was a pre-planned, rehearsed message, although we prefer for our messages to be spontaneous outpourings of the Spirit of Light. However, the problem I was having was, I could not figure out how this Friend had derived such information (I was told that she is not a researcher or an academic historian), and as a historian myself, I considered that it was extremely unlikely to be accurate simply because the Quaker whalers had been slow, rolling, factory vessels and the “negrero” vessels had been light, maneuverable, blockade-running, tacking types of vessels. It seemed to me as a historian to be vanishingly unlikely, that a vessel of the former type could ever be refashioned into a vessel of the latter type, more difficult indeed than to refashion an old Mack Truck into a HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES new Ferrari. Also, in all my years of research I had never heard a whisper about any white Quaker whaling family that had been in any manner involved, even remotely, in the African slave trade. Therefore, after rise of meeting, I went over to this young Friend and asked her the source of her information. If there was any substance to it, I pointed out, I needed to add it to my scholarship! The Friend explained that she had gotten this from “a podcast” and told me that she would send me, by email to [email protected], the URL of that podcast so that I could myself appreciate the compelling images and sounds of it. That contact was all very polite. I did not hear back from this young Friend, and so I let about a month go by, and then at rise of meeting approached her for a 2d time to remind her that I was eager to look at this URL, to further my scholarship and correct my historical materials. I fear I must incautiously have used a sensitive term, “promise,” a word that I was not aware would be the sort that might set off an intense emotional reaction. She took my terminology badly: I must be attempting to humiliate her in front of some other people who happened to be standing around, who were her friends. She had not “promised,” she informed me — she had merely said she would. As the encounter grew heated, I attempted to get her to go into the meetinghouse library with me, as a relatively quiet and private place for us to de-escalate and continue such a discussion, but she refused. She was too startled by my conduct, or something, to sit down in the library with an old historian and chat. This was just as I was experiencing congestive heart failure and going into the hospital for a series of procedures of catheterization, defibrilation, and TAVR aortal heart valve surgery. I was absent from meeting for several months while bedridden. After this series of procedures my health was improved but my heart was continuing to afibrilate and therefore the surgeon advised me not only to get steady aerobic exercise but also to avoid life stresses. Evidently, during my absence due to illness, this Friend filed a complaint against me with the Ministry and Council Committee? — a complaint evidently that I had frightened or offended her or something? — and evidently, registering this complaint, the M&C Committee had begun to discuss my problematic conduct among a number of other Quakers of the meeting, including a number of couples who are friends with me and my wife? Therefore, when I was able to return to First Day worship, in the meetinghouse playground after our Meeting for Worship, I was approached by Friend Diane Wilkinson representing M&C. She informed me that Friend Emily had filed a complaint against me, and that M&C had been discussing this generally (of course such could hardly be termed gossiping, or character assassination, since M&C needed to take action in regard to any serious complaint). Friend Diane told me that Friends Joe and Terry Graedon had been informed, and Friends Bob and Carol Passmore, and Friends John and Linda Hunter, three couples who are our closest contacts in the meeting. Since I had not died, since I had survived my heart surgery, they needed to meet with me a series of times and decide what to recommend to M&C, in regard to my future standing in our monthly meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. I need to mention at this point, that there has been an ongoing bone of disagreement between this M&C committee and me. I believe that our Quaker faith badly needs a new Testimony, to go along with our Testimony of Integrity, a new Testimony that I have chosen to term our new Testimony of Objectivity.76 According to this new Testimony, which is designed to cope with aberrations such as Friend Richard Nixon, 76. The 6 currently recognized Quaker Testimonies are known by the initialism “S-P-I-C-E-S” in which “I” stands for “Integrity.” Of these currently recognized Quaker values, Integrity has been summarized as: Let your outer life reflect your inner life. Nurture one another’s inner moral compass, cultivating motivations not touched by externals such as rewards or punishments. Treat others with respect and honesty. Set a tone of high expectations of conduct and demeanor, encouraging others in their process of self- assessment. Acknowledge interconnectedness and essential oneness. Draw out the teacher within. Many times, when I have spoken with other Quakers about our need for a Testimony of Truth, I have encountered vigorous disagreement. One of the objections usually is “We already have a Testimony of Truth, it is merely that we refer to it as the Testimony of Integrity.” A cluster of other objections seemed to have to do with a reluctance to prioritize mere material facts over spiritual values. Eventually I was forced to abandon this terminology “new Testimony of Truth or Truthfulness” as for negotiating reasons a nonstarter, and venture off in the direction of the nomenclature “a new Testimony of Objectivity that can provide a needed buttress and support for our existing S-P-I-C-E-S Testimony of Integrity.” The key phrase of this new testimony, which is derivative of “Let your yea be yea and your nay be nay,” would be “Quakers say only what we know is so” or perhaps “we need to be careful whenever we attempt to add to the truth, for fear we might inadvertently instead subtract from the truth.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS we need a buttressing testimony, one which will recognize once and for all that objectivity and therefore truthfulness is not to be found in wanna-believe subjectivity, but only in matter-of-fact objectivity itself. Things are as they are, not some other way, so we need to know how things are or we will go seriously wrong. I had asked this meeting to allow me a Clearness Committee by which I might test my leading for a new, 7th, Testimony, but I could not get even so far as to persuade the business meeting to make a record of my request. The members of the M&C committee had been fully involved in thus stonewalling me, perhaps because they had committed to memory a number of fanciful Quaker just-so stories during their childhoods, which they were not prepared to re-evaluate — stories such as the racist lies spread for so many decades by Easton monthly meeting. Therefore, one possible explanation for these church ladies spreading gossip and slander about me while I was struggling for my life, was that they were resenting my having asked for a Clearness Committee. I need to mention, also, at this point, that there is a precedent by which my interaction with Friend Emily might have developed very differently from the manner in which it did develop. Once upon a time Friend Joe Graedon stood during our Silent Worship, to remind us of how we had been complicit in the mental harm done to prisoners by a tradition of solitary confinement that had been foolishly urged by Philadelphia Quakers. After rise of meeting I sought out Joe and asked him where he had gotten such information, and he told me that in his work for National Public Radio, he had heard this being broadcast, and was certain that they would not have broadcast it had they not checked it out and verified that it was in fact accurate. One salient difference in that prior circumstance involving Joe, was that this NPR segment actually had been broadcast, and that Joe actually had experienced it, and was able to produce it for me — Joe was telling me the truth of his experience. Well, acting as a historian, I then alerted Joe to the very recent provenance of this NPR segment, originating as a just-so story that had been shopped around by Kurt Vonnegut (who was not a historian and had heard it only from his wife, who also was not a historian) during the 20th Century. I explained to Joe that we know very well where the Philadelphia prisons had gotten their mistaken belief in the beneficial effects of solitary confinement, and it had not been from any Quaker source, or from any Philadelphia source. As we historians well knew, they had in fact derived this from carcerial institutions in Great Britain, carcerial institutions run by Anglicans and Baptists. The point is, obviously, that when Joe learned of this from me, he did not go behind my back to file a complaint against me with Ministry & Council. And also, since then he has not been angry with me, and he has not ever again told such a story.

Here is a series of 12 queries for the clerk of this listening committee meeting, Friend John Hunter, to forward today to Clerk Karen Stewart of our monthly meeting’s M&C Committee, for its careful consideration:

1. Once upon a time Friend John Hunter rose during silent worship and delivered some sort of message, I forget about what. Immediately thereafter some other member of the meeting rose and castigated Friend John by name, condemning whatever message it was that he had just delivered, but irrelevantly, almost as if John had been a target of opportunity for the delivery of a preplanned message. I had never in my life witnessed such a preposterously offensive event take place during a Quaker meeting for silent worship, so afterward I discussed the matter thoroughly with John and then went to Clerk Toby Berla, and expressed to him also how shocked I had been by this misconduct. Surely our M&C Committee must have met with the person who had thus attempted to start an argument or discussion within silent worship. Query: Has M&C ensured that such an event would never ever be allowed to happen again?

2. When Friend Emily more recently came to M&C with a complaint against Friend Austin Meredith, did M&C appoint a listening committee to meet with this young Friend and examine her conduct? Appointing such a group would have seemed an appropriate thing for any M&C to do whenever a person comes to it behind another person’s back! — Query: Is that not so? HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES

3. Did M&C explore with Friend Emily the fact that she had risen during silent worship and shared an internet story that implied that the white Quaker whaling families of New Bedford, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket were tainted by an association with the black transatlantic slave trade? Did the committee explore with her whether or not this internet story amounted to a truthful and well-founded account, or was instead perhaps a baseless fake-news fabrication like the baseless fake-news fabrication that Joe actually had heard on NPR? Raising this sort of issue would have been an appropriate thing for a M&C to do! — Query: Did they do it?

4. Did M&C explore with Friend Emily what she had alleged, that she had become aware of this story from listening to a podcast at “an URL” on the internet? Did it then attempt to explain to her that Silent Worship is an inappropriate place and time, at which to inform other Quakers of podcasts one has experienced on the internet, regardless of their content? Exploring the purposes and limits of Quaker testimony during Silent Worship, with someone who has demonstrated a lack of awareness of such things, would have seemed an appropriate activity in which a M&C ought to engage! — Query: Did they do it?

5. Did M&C take this opportunity to explore with Friend Emily what promises amount to — how important such a social glue is to hold us together in productive and positive human groups — for us to train ourselves by continuously making promises to one another and then continuously honoring these promises? — that it is human trust and trust alone that can bind us together? Did it advise this young Friend that when she alleged that her message during Silent Worship had been based on “a podcast,” and promised to supply via email the URL of that podcast, it became incumbent on her to follow up by honoring such a promise, and promptly? When a month later Friend Austin reminded her that she had not yet kept her promise, she responded “I never promised, I just said I would.” Did M&C point out to her that this amounts to a distinction without a difference? –That might have transformed this into a valuable learning experience for her! Making such an observation would be an obviously appropriate function for the elders on M&C to perform in regard to relative youngsters who have perhaps not yet heard a phrase such as “distinction without a difference.” — Query: Did they avail themselves of this opportunity?

6. When M&C learned that Friend Austin had repeatedly asked this young Friend to follow him into the library where they might hold such a sensitive conversation in private, and that she had repeatedly and loudly refused, turning to bystanders for support and indignation — people she then has described as her colleagues in front of whom Austin was attempting to humiliate her? It would seem to be an obviously appropriate function for M&C, to explain the techniques of de-escalation, and the importance of de-escalation — de-escalations such as for instance moving to a quiet and private location. — Query: Did they avail themselves of this opportunity?

7. Has M&C attempted to ascertain whether or not there in fact exists such a “podcast” as she allegedly listened to at an URL on the internet, to verify that she was telling the truth, not lying, about the existence of such a corroborative source? Query: Did they test this situation as they should have tested it? Likewise, has M&C now vetted the original sounds and images, and verified that this material actually is roughly as she had characterized it during Silent Worship?

8. Has Ministry & Council conducted appropriate historical research, to determine whether or not our white Quaker whaler families actually ever participated, even by remotest extension, in anything having any connection whatever with the black transatlantic slave trade? — Or is this level of detail not worthwhile, for a body attempting to provide mere spiritual leadership? HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS

9. Character assassination only works when one can find an excuse by which one can guiltlessly spread the word against the evil one who is to be attacked, because without a seemingly valid excuse one might be suspected of sheer malice and slander! When M&C informed these six friends of Friend Austin about the complaint that had been registered against him, and asked them to form themselves into a disciplinary committee to meet with him about the accusation immediately after he survived his heart operation — did it do so because such is its proper and guiltless function — or did it do so in order to have something ready at hand with which to attack the evil one if by chance he should have survived?

10. If Friend Emily knows anything about Quaker whaling, if she knows anything about the transatlantic slave trade, she has produced as yet no body of work to corroborate such scholarship. Friend Austin, by way of contrast, is a scholar, a historian, who has spent decades studying and writing about Quakers, about whaling, about human race slavery, about the American abolitionist movement, and about the international slave trade. He has published any number of Adobe Acrobat Reader PDF files, some more than a thousand pages in length, a body of historical work that substantially corroborates his scholarship, perhaps dull and tendentious but nevertheless available to anyone who desired to consult it and evaluate its worthiness and critique it. Query: Did it not amount to antiintellectualism for M&C to disregard such a difference between Emily and Austin, by putting their work on an equivalent footing?

11. Charles Jordan and Austin Meredith were f/Friends who had hearts that afibrillated. That was part of their bond. Due to his afibrillation, Charles died and left his estate to the meeting. Austin has now survived heart surgery but his heart is still a concern because it is still chronically afibrillating and the doctors don’t seem to be able to do anything about that. Austin seems better now, but is it wise for M&C to cast him into a disciplinary status and thus subject him to unnecessary stress, since there is at least some small possibility that at age 82, with a heart that is still giving him this problem, he might conceivably drop off at any moment? Friend Emily, on the other hand, appears to be young and vigorous. Wouldn’t M&C suppose that it would have been more sensible and prudent for them to have begun their investigation by 1st learning everything that they might learn from a young and healthy person who has come to them behind someone else’s back? Also, wouldn’t it suppose that it might have been considered to be its proper function, to listen to what Friend Austin has to say about our need for a new Testimony, a new Testimony of Objectivity by which fanciful and inventive stories —such as this fabulation about whale songs and slave vessels, or even for that matter the NPR fanciful and inventive story about Philadelphia solitary punishment— might in the future be avoided? —To have sponsored him in his request for the appointment of a Clearness Committee to evaluate his leading?

12. When Friend Emily came to M&C as Austin lay on his back, and filed a formal complaint, saying perhaps that his use of the word “promised” had been offensive or whatever (he’s guessing here, since nobody is telling him anything), did M&C set out to discern this young Friend’s true motivation? The human heart is so mysterious that people sometimes know and sometimes do not know their own motivations. The human heart is so mysterious that people sometimes are telling the truth and sometimes are lying when they inform others about their own motivations. Can we all agree that the 1st obligation of M&C, given such a situation, is to consider alternative possibilities as to a complainant’s motivations? It might well be that this young Friend was being honest, but also, it might be that she was seeking vengeance because Austin had just interposed himself between her and some $9,000 of loosely held Charles Jordan money. If you remember, instead of following established Quaker procedure by going to the Adult Education Committee and standing in line like everybody else and making a case for her adult education project, and letting the committee decide that this was a worthy adult education project and what priority to assign to it and how much money to spend on it and who to hire to teach the class, Friend Emily had come barging directly into our Meeting for Business, putting herself illicitly ahead of everyone else in line for Adult Education funds, and herself choosing who to hire to teach the class rather than the Adult Education Committee making that decision, and herself deciding how much of Charles Jordan’s bequest she needed to have handed to her posthaste. And if you remember, the rest of the Friends who were there were so terrified at the tremendous velocity of her self-righteousness, that they just sat there frozen, pardon me, like deer caught in headlights. It had to be Austin to earn her enmity by stopping her HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES in her tracks right there, obliging her to wait in line like everyone else. Does everyone remember that standing in the center of the floor in our Meeting for Business she had then responded by demeaning Austin with a term that had never before in his 82 years of life been deployed as a descriptor of him? On the basis of nothing she had stood there and characterized him as a disabled person. That’s on the record. It is also on the record that no-one in that meeting spoke up in his defense when he was thus demeaned. He is obviously white and obviously a man, and he had just asserted to her face that although he had already been directly challenged by a member of her racist, sexist cohort with “White man, consider your privilege,” in fact he had as a deformed man never in his life experienced even the slightest degree of privilege. Ever. Nor has anyone ever before considered him disabled: they had certainly not considered him disabled at his draft board at age 18, when he tried to register as a “CO” Conscientious Objector to all war, for they had refused to assign him a classification of “4F” (medical exemption is a privilege allowed to rich men’s sons who allegedly have bone spurs on their heels, or famous singers who allegedly have a perforated eardrum and a disabling fear of crowds, whereas in real life deformed people are never ever under any circumstance privileged over any regularly shaped people). Instead California Draft Board #60 threatened him with “since Indiana Friends do not accept your Quaker Peace Testimony, we are going to put your ugly misshapen body in an orange prison jumpsuit, as having fraudulently applied for a Conscientious Objector “CO” classification: Selective Service fraud, which is a criminal offense.” Then they had certainly not considered Friend Austin disabled at Guantánamo Bay as he engaged with the other jarheads of the 5th Marine Expeditionary Brigade during the 1962 Cuba crisis — these normally shaped Marines had detested his sorry ass for the unsatisfactory appearance his spine produced in their USMC dress whites and dress blues, but this wannabee Conscientious Objector who was evading prison by active duty was plenty good enough to be allowed to die in combat charging up a hill with a .45 pistol in his paw as a Marine Infantry Commander. He may have been deformed and therefore undesirable, but he was most certainly not privileged to be disabled and therefore excused from having several Russian nuke short-range missiles hanging over his head. Then nobody had considered him disabled while he absorbed intense nuclear radiation as a worker at the 1st atomic energy power plant in the United States, radiation to levels 5 times greater than those allowed more recently at Fukushima Daichi. Under the “Americans with Disabilities Act” a person who actually does have disabilities is entitled to be fed and clothed and housed on the tax dollar, to the extent of his or her disabilities, for a disabled person is a privileged person. Under the “Americans with Disabilities Act” a person with disabilities that do not interfere with a job is entitled to employment preference over regular people. However, none of that ever applied to Friend Austin, because nobody prior to Friend Emily had ever demeaned him as disabled either in mind or in body, only noticeably and disgustingly deformed. Ask your attorney: There had never in any state of our federal union ever been any such thing as an “Americans with Deformities Act” to provide any deformed person with any ounce of privilege. A person with a deformity is always the last hired, if ever hired at all. A worker with a deformity is never promoted, never given a raise, because, who encourages a deformed worker to stick around where he or she is not wanted? If the boss gets tired of looking at that deformed worker’s sorry ass, he can come around on any afternoon at 4:30PM and go “I’m tired of seeing your sorry ass around the office so you’re through. Go find a way to feed your children, someplace else, anyplace else, anywhere other that where I have to look at you every day.” Ask your attorney: There’s no law that says the boss has to make up any subterfuge, any excuse, not in any state of our federal union. So standing there blinded by her greed and furious at being thwarted as she had never before been thwarted, it seems this young Friend must have lost the ability to think. She substituted her inaccurate nonce word disabled for the accurate word deformed, so that she would be able to continue her insistence that he is merely one of those unwoke white male racists and sexists whom she detests, who will persist obstinately in holding onto their traditional white male privilege — because they have a self-interested reason to refuse to ever be awakened. Friend Austin must be ignored (and, of course, she must be allowed to walk away with cash in her fist). But now, according to what Friend Diane has said as a representative of Ministry and Council (evidently because Emily is female and females always tell the truth?) Friend Austin allegedly has HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS “frightened” her to the extent that she cannot bring herself to meet with him even in the context of a gathering of Ministry and Counsel — and that is so simply because that’s what she has alleged. It is not that she had disturbed our Meeting for Silent Worship by standing and telling a prearranged tall tale, it is not that she made a promise to Austin and then created a furor while refusing to keep it — this young Friend is just what she says she is, a vulnerable little girl who needs to be defended — and in the current PC climate of opinion, #WeBelieveHer? Query for the clerk of this listening committee meeting, John Hunter, to forward today to Clerk Karen Stewart, Logan Graddy, David Haines, Laura Lipps-Buffum, Diane Wilkinson, and Elizabeth Wintermute of our monthly meeting’s M&C Committee, for their careful consideration: Is this the proper functioning of a M&C Committee in a monthly meeting of the Religious Society of Friends or is it something else? HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2020. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: January 3, 2020 HDT WHAT? INDEX

LIES QUAKERS ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button.

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUAKERS LIES the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.