David L. Hostetter The Anatomy of Truth 4/21/2017 The Anatomy of Truth: Speak Truth to Power, Anatomy of Anti-Communism, and AFSC Strategy to Thaw the Cold War. During the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) gave voice to the vision of a peaceful relationship between the superpowers. The Service Committee asserted its programmatic witness for nuclear disarmament and against war through publications it produced in response to a world riven by clashing ideologies and alliances. Aiming to engage those in power while mobilizing citizen activism, AFSC publications contributed important ideas and arguments to the international debate. AFSC brought together activists and scholars who produced documents aimed at broadening the conversation about how to ameliorate the conflict. Pamphlets such as Speak Truth to Power (1955) and Anatomy of Anticommunism (1969) provided analysis and inspiration to grassroots activists striving to be heard. Published more than a decade apart, the two pamphlets elicit three broad questions. How did the authors envision peacemaking for the nuclear age? What prompted the move from accepting containment to critical solidarity with liberation movements? Did their nonviolent approach influence the Cold War policy debate? Speak Truth and Anatomy represent three relationships connected to how AFSC confronted the Cold War. Two all male committees developed policy analyses that reckoned with applying nonviolent means to international conflict in the nuclear age. Speak Truth and Anatomy reflect the move from a tacit acceptance of the containment of Communism to a stance more sympathetic to the ends of national liberation movements while not endorsing violent means used in prosecuting those struggles. The two pamphlets show the 1 David L. Hostetter The Anatomy of Truth 4/21/2017 evolution of the progressive era ideas of AFSC as some of its best thinkers tried to translate that legacy for an era when activism drew more from existentialism than from the Social Gospel. Through comparison of two key publications AFSC produced in response to the Cold War, this paper will evaluate the unique evolution of a faith-based nongovernmental organization’s attempts to shape public debate about the Cold War. Three years prior to the publication Speak Truth, President-elect Dwight Eisenhower explained that, in his view, “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply-felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is. With us, of course, it is the Judeo-Christian concept, but it must be a religion with (sic) all men are created equal.”1 Eisenhower, of Mennonite heritage and his Vice President Richard Nixon, of Quaker background (Nixon’s uncle Oscar served with AFSC in France during World War I) 2 governed during an era when the assumption that America’s Judeo-Christian traditions provided spiritual protection against godless Communism held sway. In 1954 Congress had added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in response to lobbying by the Knights of Columbus. 3 At the time of Speak Truth’s publication Friend Elton Trueblood, served as Chief of Religious Policy for the United States Information Agency and was profiled in a TIME Magazine article titled “Truth Salesman.”4 The threat of nuclear war gave new relevance to the nonviolent worldview of pacifists who had lived through World War II. The public consensus that the Second World War had been a just war and that pacifism had proved irrelevant in the fight against fascism received some reconsideration under the threat of nuclear holocaust. The charge of cowardice faced by conscientious objectors and war resisters in the face of 2 David L. Hostetter The Anatomy of Truth 4/21/2017 conventional war had changed because in a nuclear war, everyone faced being at the front. Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence appeared at a moment when the role of faithful conscience intertwined with debate over Cold War foreign policy and the threat of nuclear war. The fourteen men who met at Haverford College in 1954, convened by AFSC’s Stephen Cary, brought a wealth of knowledge and experience to their task. All members of the group had some association with Friends, several worked for the Service Committee. Senior members of the group included AFSC’s Clarence Pickett and A.J. Muste, who had recently retired from the leadership of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. In addition to academic expertise, most were veteran activists. Robert Gilmore served as executive director of the Manhattan office of AFSC. Amiya Chakravarty had been an associate of Tagore and Gandhi in India. Milton Mayer and Robert Pickus were Friends of Jewish heritage. Bayard Rustin, a gay African American Quaker who played a pivotal role in the creation of Speak Truth, did not receive acknowledgement in the published product, a result of pressure on Rustin and the committee to erase his contribution due to fear that public reaction to his 1953 conviction for a morals charge would jeopardize the project.5 Arranged in seven chapters, the product of the weeklong Haverford conclave drew upon the insights of the contributors as well as the wisdom of John Woolman, Lucretia Mott, the New Testament as well as contemporary thinkers including George Orwell, Simone Weil, Albert Luthuli, Mohandas Gandhi, and Alan Paton. Truth employed history, the social sciences and theology to make the case that if the US and the 3 David L. Hostetter The Anatomy of Truth 4/21/2017 USSR, in pursuit of geopolitical gain, could endanger the planet through nuclear war, then it was more rational for the US to risk disarmament and nonviolent defense than nuclear annihilation. Further, the pursuit of security through permanent military mobilization was already corroding the democratic and spiritual values that US defense strategy purported to protect. Speak Truth is a statement of faith in the power of nonviolence, bolstered by contemporary examples. Citing Gandhi’s application of nonviolence in the struggle for independence in India as well as the 1952 Defiance Campaign against apartheid in South Africa led by the African National Congress, Truth made the case that proven and practical models already existed and deserved consideration in the planning of national security. Marshaling arguments for the application of nonviolence to de-escalate the superpowers confrontation, Truth called for activism on an individual and global scale, underscored by Gandhi’s maxim that “The best politics is right action.”6 Speak Truth received wide distribution and comment. Published in the spring of 1955, the pamphlet appeared in abridged form in the October 1955 issue of The Progressive magazine, with commentary and rejoinders from George Kennan, Reinhold Niebuhr, Norman Thomas, Dwight MacDonald, and Karl Menninger. On the magazine’s cover the discussion is introduced as “Is There Another Way? A Memorable Debate on the Crisis of Our Time.” The editors described Speak Truth to Power as “the most significant symposium it has been our privilege to publish in many years.” Of the group only Menninger, the psychiatrist, fully endorsed the study’s recommendations. Kennan, while remaining a partisan of military preparedness, asserted that in his proposal for containment of the Soviet Union he had not thought of the policy has primarily military.7 4 David L. Hostetter The Anatomy of Truth 4/21/2017 Robert Pickus authored the summation of the 72 page original pamphlet, under the title “A Revolutionary Approach in the Search for Peace,” into an eight-page article; he and Steve Cary wrote the rejoinders to the replies of the contributors. Pickus had served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner to the CIA, in Sweden and England during WWII. Pickus studied nonviolence in India and did graduate work in political science at the University of Chicago. He served as peace secretary with the AFSC’s Chicago office. Pickus went on to initiate Acts for Peace with the hope that it would inspire individuals to act as agents of change, and move beyond what had become the conventional style of organizing peace-themed educational events. He contended that pacifists should work “not at polarizing, but at permeating the society.”8 When a new wave of peace activism arose in the late 1950s, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) and Nonviolent Action Against Nuclear Weapons, which became the Committee for Nonviolent Action (CNVA), emphasized demands on both the US and USSR to take steps to end the nuclear arms race. In May 1960 Senator Thomas Dodd (D-CT), then chair of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and an advocate of continued nuclear testing, subpoenaed the SANE leadership regarding allegations of Communist infiltration of SANE chapters in New York. Dodd aimed to force SANE to be “openly inhospitable” to Communists. Conflict caused by Dodd’s investigation led to the resignation of key SANE board members including Robert Gilmore, Clarence Pickett, who had participate in the writing of Truth, and Stewart Meacham of the AFSC. The anticommunist political climate created by Congressional investigations and blacklisting of writers, actors and activists, had contained organizing for superpower arms reduction in the early Cold War years.9 5 David L. Hostetter The Anatomy of Truth 4/21/2017 It was in this context that Pickus helped initiate Turn Toward Peace in 1961. Its stated purpose was to be “a joint national effort of over 70 organizations working for a disarmed world under law, in which free societies can flourish.” Staff members included Robert Pickus; initially, Norman Thomas chaired TTP. Subsequently Robert Gilmore held the post. In 1962 author Michael Harrington described TTP as “a politically responsible,” meaning anticommunist, peace movement for the 1960s. In February 1962 co-sponsorship of a series of student activities in Washington, DC, called Student Turn Toward Peace, enabled TTP to influence the incipient student movement.