Social Christianity and the American Friends Service Committee's Pacifist Humanitarianism in Germany and Appalachia, 1919-1941
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Social Christianity and the American Friends Service Committee's Pacifist Humanitarianism in Germany and Appalachia, 1919-1941 Guy Aiken Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Bachelor of Arts, Queens University of Charlotte, 2002 Master of Arts, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2008 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Religious Studies University of Virginia May, 2017 Contents Abbreviations ii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Feeding Germany 25 Chapter 2: Quakerizing Germany 66 Chapter 3: Quakers and Labor 102 Chapter 4: A Quaker New Deal—New Deal Quakers 152 Chapter 5: Mission to the Gestapo 187 Chapter 6: The Totalitarian Claims of Christ 218 Epilogue 255 Bibliography 264 Acknowledgments 272 ii Abbreviations AFSC American Friends Service Committee ARA American Relief Administration ARC American Red Cross DZA Deutscher Zentralauschuss fur Auslandshilfe (German Central office for Foreign Aid) FERA Federal Emergency Relief Administration FOR Fellowship of Reconciliation NRA National Recovery Administration “…we ought to reap what we have been sowing.” Wilbur K. Thomas, AFSC, 1923 1 Introduction “Speak truth to power.” The title of a pamphlet on international relations issued by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in 1955, the phrase has come to mean the bold confrontation of organized injustice and oppression with the truths of essential human equality and every human being’s right to freedom and dignity.1 Among those who know the immediate provenance of the phrase, it is often assumed that the words originate ultimately with an eighteenth-century Quaker or even with the founder of Quakerism himself, the British shoemaker’s apprentice George Fox. Not so. The first person to use the phrase, it seems, was the African-American Quaker civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, who wrote in 1942 that the role of a religious group was to “speak truth to power.” Rustin himself attributed the phrase to a speech he had heard by Patrick Malin, a professor of economics at Swarthmore College who was to head the ACLU from 1950-1962, but it appears that Malin never used that exact phrase.2 A little over a decade later, Rustin helped write the pamphlet Speak Truth to Power. But the AFSC expunged his name from the list of authors because of his arrest on charges of 1 Stephen G. Cary, A. J. Muste, Clarence E. Pickett, Bayard Rustin, et al, Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence. A Study of International Conflict Prepared for the American Friends Service Committee ([no publisher information], 1955). 2 Bayard Rustin to New York Monthly Meeting, August 15, 1942, in Bayard Rustin, I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin’s Life in Letters, ed. Michael G. Long (New York: City Lights Publishers, 2012), 2. 2 committing a homosexual act in 1953. Another co-author claimed the phrase just occurred to him spontaneously.3 The pamphlet’s most prominent co-author, A. J. Muste, coined a less famous but no less influential phrase of his own: “There is no way to peace; peace is the way.” A motto of absolute pacifists in the twentieth century, Muste’s aphorism that only peaceful means can yield a peaceful end sits atop the entrance to the AFSC’s archive in Philadelphia on a large laminated poster like an epigram to the organization’s one- hundred-year history. This dissertation asks whether Muste was right. It provides historical data for humanitarians, pacifists, and even ethicists to ponder as they consider the relationship of means to ends in the pursuit of peace. It argues not that peacefulness in general, but that humanitarianism in particular, did little or nothing to help the AFSC achieve its ultimate goal in any of the interwar crises in which it intervened: to bring peace and banish conflict. This dissertation suggests that the Quakers of the AFSC failed to bring any true and lasting peace to any of the war zones it entered—political or industrial—at least in part because they succeeded so extravagantly as relief workers. Relief required a political and religious neutrality that compromised the AFSC’s ability to work for lasting peace. Speaking truth to power comes with a price. The ease with which the phrase is uttered today conceals the cost of putting it into practice, as well as what it cost the AFSC to be able to utter it in the first place. Between its founding in 1917 and its co-acceptance 3 See https://www.afsc.org/sites/afsc.civicactions.net/files/documents/Speak_Truth_to_ Power.pdf for the “Historical Note about Bayard Rustin” the AFSC appended to Speak Truth to Power in 2012. For the story about the title occurring to one of the other authors, see Paul Lacey, Quakers and the Use of Power, Pendle Hill Pamphlets, Vol. 241 (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications, 1982), 15. 3 of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947 on behalf of Quakers worldwide, the AFSC learned well that the less powerful often need the help or permission of the more powerful in order to minister to the needs of the powerless. To have spoken truth to power would have cost the AFSC its claim to neutrality. The Red Cross, with whose American branch the AFSC collaborated to help rebuild France along the Western Front between 1917 and 1919, had already established the principle of neutrality in relief work well before the AFSC was founded. So the principle was well recognized among those persons and agencies seeking to relieve humanitarian emergencies. But the AFSC in the 1920s and 1930s almost never referred to itself as a strictly humanitarian agency, but instead thought of itself as an agency for the Christianization of the international and social order—that is, as a vehicle of social Christianity and the Social Gospel. It was, after all, a service committee.4 The Social Gospel flourished in the 4 To take just two representative examples of AFSC’s understanding of itself as a Social Gospel agency: in 1923, a report summarizing all of the AFSC’s work since its founding in 1917 stated, “The Friends believe that Jesus taught men how to live and that his teaching is applicable to present day conditions” (“Statement of the Work,” box General Files 1923: Reports to Comms and Orgs (American Committee for Relief of Russian Children), American Friends Service Committee, Philadelphia, PA [herafter AFSC]); and in 1929, in its plan of reorganization, the AFSC stated as its “objective” “the interpretation of the Christian ideal of good-will and understanding as the preventive and corrective of strife between economic, racial, and national groups” (“Report of Reorganization Committee of the AFSC,” AFSC General Meeting Minutes, March 21, 1929, AFSC). See also Hugh Barbour and J. William Frost, The Quakers, Denominations in America, Number 3 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 264-265. The influence of the Social Gospel on the AFSC is, in fact, evident through at least the mid-1950s, thus supporting historian Christopher H. Evans’s stretching of the usual timeframe of the Social Gospel well past the generally accepted ending dates of 1925 or 1930. See Evans’s forthcoming The Social Gospel in America: A History (New York: New York University Press, 2017). For the earlier ending dates of the Social Gospel, see esp. Susan Curtis, A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); and Gary Scott Smith, The Search for Social 4 United States between 1890 and 1920, inspiring progressivism in the political sphere. In response to the demands of industrial immigrant workers in particular, prominent white Protestant ministers and scholars like Washington Gladden, Josiah Strong, Shailer Matthews, Vida Scudder, and Walter Rauschenbusch, together with settlement-house leaders like Jane Addams, African-American ministers like Reverdy Ransom, and businessmen like Arthur “Golden Rule” Nash and Harold Hatch, made it a widely accepted tenet of evangelical Christianity around the turn of the twentieth century that individual salvation was incompletely effectual without social salvation. Converted individuals could still get swept up in the sins of fallen social systems, which were always in the process of placing the hearts and minds of still other individuals beyond the reach of the (individual) gospel.5 The most helpful scheme for understanding the early AFSC’s various shades of social Christianity is that of historian Henry R. May in his Protestant Churches and Industrial America (1949). May divides social Christians into three groups: conservatives, progressives, and radicals. Conservatives distrusted labor unions and rejected state interference in the economy. Most of the AFSC’s early board members and executive staff were of this conservative stripe; many were themselves industrial or financial executives. Progressives were the stereotypical Social Gospelers (May, in fact, restricts his use of the label to this group) in that they supported labor unions and urged Christian capitalists to replace profit and competition with the law of love, welcoming Salvation: Social Christianity and America, 1880-1925 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000). 5 For a comprehensive review of the historiography of social Christianity and the Social Gospel, see Smith, The Search for Social Salvation, 1-49. 5 state intervention to this end. Some of the AFSC’s staff and many of its volunteers in the field were progressives in May’s sense. This dissertation calls them liberals. The story of the AFSC’s first thirty years is in many ways that of liberalism overtaking conservatism within the organization. Almost no one in the early AFSC was a radical, espousing socialism and advocating revolution.6 The organization’s often uneasy collaboration with radicals like fellow Quaker A. J. Muste and the Presbyterian and Socialist Norman Thomas constitutes a minor theme in the following pages.