BIO: Rufus Jones, Quaker mystic and social activist (16 Jun 1948) RUFUS JONES, QUAKER MYSTIC AND SOCIAL ACTIVIST (16 JUN 1948) A list of related biographies follows: MARY DYER, QUAKER MARTYR (1 JUN 1660) ROBERT BARCLAY, QUAKER THEOLOGIAN (3 OCT 1690) GEORGE FOX, FOUNDER OF THE QUAKERS (13 JAN 1691) WILLIAM PENN, QUAKER STATESMAN (30 JUL 1718) JOHN WOOLMAN, QUAKER VOICE OF CONSCIENCE (7 OCT 1772) ELIZABETH GURNEY FRY, QUAKER HELPER OF PRISONERS (12 OCT 1845) JOSEPH JOHN GURNEY, EVANGELICAL QUAKER (4 JAN 1847) STEPHEN GRELLET, QUAKER ARISTOCRAT (16 NOV 1855) KENNETH BOULDING, QUAKER ECONOMIST FOR PEACE (19 MAY 1993) (Many of the biographies have appended sections on aspects of the Quaker mvement.) $$$ RUFUS JONES AND THE AMERICAN FRIENDS SERVICE COMMITTEE One of the best known and most admired Quakers of this century is Rufus Matthew Jones, who died 16 June 1948. He is the author of many books, and the principal author (four and a half volumes) of the seven-volume series that is considered the standard history of Quakerism. Jones exemplifies two sides of the Quaker ideal. On the one hand, he was very much a mystic, upholding the Quaker principle of listening to the Spirit, being guided by the Inner Light of Christ, and disciplining oneself to be always more and more alert to hear that voice and to follow where it leads. He has written extensively (see the Reading List below) on the history of Christian mysticism and spirituality. On the other hand, he was concerned with the practical day-to-day task of doing good to one's neighbor, of working to avoid conflicts in a positive manner, of undertaking to reform the social realm to reflect the love of God for the entire human family. In 1917 he became co-founder and first president of the American Friends Service Committee, a group organized at first for work in France, rebuilding after the destruction of war, by conscientious objectors to the war. The Friends Service Council is a similar but older British group. In 1947, the two groups jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize. Marvin Weisbord (see booklist below) wrote in 1968: It seems impossible to list everything the Service Committee has done or is doing.... The Committee helps migratory farm workers, runs halfway houses for prisoners in California and a community center in East Harlem. For years it has worked on school desegregation, merit employment, and open housing, not just in the South, but in the North, the East, and the West. In half a dozen world capitals it sponsors informal seminars where diplomats and journalists from many countries come to know each other. It is the only group I know that has paid a man to travel back and forth between East and West Germany talking to officials on each side who, trapped in the Cold War, couldn't and wouldn't talk to each other. There are Service Committee people in Algeria, Hong Kong, India, Mexico, Pakistan, Peru, Vietnam, and Zambia, helping others who need help to help themselves. AFSC has work camps in city ghettos and on Indian reservations. It sends American high school students overseas to study and brings foreign students here. All this--and much more--AFSC does, incredibly, on a budget much smaller than that of the school district of Lower Merion Township, where I live. Weisbord then goes on to discuss several past projects at length. In France, in 1917, the Quakers set up a field hospital run by Dr. James Babbitt. He performed more than a thousand operations. In one typical week, according to his log, he operated on patients suffering from a harelip, a club foot, cancer, an abcessed hip, tonsils, adenoids, and several broken bones; and performed a salpingo-oophorectomy (removal of the ovaries and Fallopian tubes), cholecystostomy (removal of the gallbladder), and paracentesis tympani (inserting a fine hollow needle through the eardrum to draw off fluid from the middle ear). He spoke no French and his patients no English, but he communicated by a string of French nouns and a lot of pointing and arm-waving. After the war, the Quakers noticed that the Army had five dumps with hammers, axes, lumber, nails, pipes, cement mixers, and the like, simply piled up. To ship them home would cost more than they were worth. The Quakers bought the lot for $50,000, and began to use it to rebuild. They got permission to recruit volunteers from among German prisoners who were languishing in internment camps. The prison volunteers were fed well, they worked hard, and none attempted to escape. The French would not permit the prisoners to be paid, but the Quakers kept records, and sent a small wage to the men's families. Meanwhile, they sold farm implements and tools at bargain prices, but still made a handsome profit, which they used to build a hospital. They also planted 25,000 fruit trees, and fed more than a million hungry children in Germany. During WWII, many pacifists worked in mental hospitals. One result was the Mental Health Project, which worked with the American Bar Association to draw up legal guidelines for the commitment of patients to mental hospitals. It also took photographs documenting the appalling conditions in many hospitals. The photos were published in a book by Frank Wright, Jr, called OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND. The book roused those who read it, but not many read it. So an AFSC fund-raiser arranged a meeting with LIFE magazine, and LIFE ran an illustrated article that was reprinted by READER'S DIGEST, and there followed far-reaching reforms. In 1921, drought caused severe famines on the Russian steppes, and the Soviet government, suspicious of foreigners, waited a long time to admit the problem and accept help. But they finally let the Quakers in, trusting them not to have ulterior motives. In December 1921, Herbert Hoover (then Secretary of Commerce, having previously been head of the Belgian Relief Fund)) persuaded Congress to appropriate $20,000,000 for food, and the food was distributed on the local level chiefly by AFSC people. Typhus was endemic, and some AFSC people died of it. Many hungry people were saved. Many others were not. Weisbord goes on to describe an attempt to establish a furniture-building industry in West Virginia mining country, when the mines closed down and it appeared that no other jobs were available. It succeeded after a fashion, but was discontinued when World War II began and the men could get better-paying jobs in factories. Nonetheless, while it lasted, it gave the workers a choice other than emigration or the dole, and gave them self-respect and high morale. In a southern location, the AFSC had established a summer camp where volunteer youths paid their own way to construct needed buildings for a school. In the summer of 1951 a black youth was included in the program, and many of the locals resented this, but the tensions were successfully defused. In California, in 1956, an unincorporated community (Teviston) of agricultural workers had no water supply. They had to haul all their water in cans from a source two-and-a-half miles away. An AFSC representative talked with them about their options, and after holding a few meetings, they organized, and slogged their way through the complex business of forming a water district and satisfying state law. They then got permission to sell bonds, and ultimately dug a well, purchased pumps, and installed water mains and water pipes in the individual houses. It took four years, but they got the water supply they wanted. Their AFSC guide exerted no authority--some would say, no leadership. He was there to answer their questions and to point out possibilities. Of the professional staff who run the organizational headquarters of AFSC, fewer than 25 per cent are Quakers. Some persons have expressed concern that the AFSC is in danger of losing its Quaker identity. They point to various Quaker colleges that opened up their boards to non-Quakers and are no longer distinctively Quaker. Swarthmore College, for example, now has only three Quakers on its faculty. (Other denominations have sometimes encountered similar transformations. Most Ivy League colleges were originally founded by churches.) (See, for example, the article in the 19 April 1995 issue of the CHRISTIAN CENTURY by Professor Larry Ingle, member of the 150-member AFSC Corporation that elects the 30-odd members of the Board of Directors.) The severest criticism I know is found in the book PEACE AND REVOLUTION: THE MORAL CRISIS OF AMERICAN PACIFISM, by Guenter Lewy. He discusses four traditional American Pacifist groups: The American Friends Service Committee, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the War Resisters' League, and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. He says that all four once held that all war is bad, and that the right stand is to refuse to participate; but that during the Vietnam War, control of all four organizations passed to those who say that those who are fighting against capitalist oppression must not be criticized. A more nuanced analysis is that found in a book edited by Charles E Fager, QUAKER SERVICE AT THE CROSSROADS. It is a collection of essays by Quaker writers who hold differing views of the AFSC, and offers a look at both sides. The concerned reader might also look at four articles by H Larry Ingle, Professor of History, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and a member of the AFSC Corporation. AFSC is owned, under the laws of Pennsylvania, by a Corporation of about 150 members. They appoint the 30-member (approximately) Board that used to meet monthly but now meets five times a year to set policy and supervise the professional staff. Professor Ingle has written an article in the January 1998 issue of the quarterly PEACE AND CHANGE, "The American Friends Service Committee, 1947-1949: The Cold War's effect." It deals with the decision by the Board in 1947 that it regarded lobbying for its social and political program as its primary activity, rather than feeding the hungry, etc. PEACE AND CHANGE is not cheap to buy or easy to find, but a large college library is a reasonably likely source. Three other articles by the same author are to be found in the CHRISTIAN CENTURY for 14 October 1981, 17 April 1985, and 19 April 1995. [This is the part of the paper that really needs work. Stand by for the next revision.] Gerald Jonas (ON DOING GOOD) writes: Although most of the efforts of the AFSC Peace Education Division are focused on specific issues which also attract a broad range of non-pacifist support, the Service Committee has periodically tried to relate these issues to the traditional Quaker peace testimony. The most ambitious attempt in recent years was the publication in 1967 of a pamphlet entitled "In Place of War: An Inquiry into Nonviolent National Defense." The purpose of the pamphlet, prepared by a ten-man working party under the auspices of the Peace Education Division, is to offer a pacifist alternative to all the usual concepts of disarmament.... Citing a number of widely scattered historical precedents and drawing heavily upon the theoretical work of a group of English pacifists, the authors of the pamphlet propose a course of action known as "transarmament," whereby a major power like the United States gradually junks its war machine while simultaneously creating a system of "civilian defense," based on the thorough grounding of a large part of its population in the techniques of nonviolent resistance.... they contend that a nation with such a ready-made resistance movement would, in fact, be highly immune to invasion, since a potential aggressor would find the logistics of occupation almost prohibitive. Meacham, who was a member of the working party that produced "In Place of War," admits,... "I know I would feel reluctant to sit down and argue nonviolent resistance with the black militants, for instance. They've had more life experience in it than I have. Their most articulate spokesmen were boldly nonviolent a few years ago, and they got their heads beat." $$$ FOR FURTHER READING @@@ JONES, RUFUS M THE FAITH AND PRACTICE OF THE QUAKERS, 181pp (1980) $7 pb, Friends United 0-913408-57-3 RETHINKING QUAKER PRINCIPLES (1940) $3 pb PH -008-1 SPIRITUAL REFORMERS OF THE 16TH AND 17TH CENTURIES (1959) $14.50 0-8446-0161-6 Peter Smith SOURCES OF UNIVERSALISM IN QUAKER THOUGHT (abr. ed. of previous entry) L=0.90pb, 0-948232-20-X Quaker Universalist Group THOU DOST OPEN UP MY LIFE (1963) $3 pb PH -127-4 GEORGE FOX'S JOURNAL (1988) $69 0-913408-24-7 In US: State Mutual; In UK: W Sessions MYSTICISM IN ROBERT BROWNING, $40, 0-8383-1029-X MSG Haskell House NEW STUDIES IN MYSTICAL RELIGION (1973) $250 Gordon Press David Hinshaw, RUFUS JONES, MASTER QUAKER (1977) $24 0-8369-5554-4 Ayer Elizabeth Gray Vining, FRIEND OF LIFE: THE BIOGRAPHY OF RUFUS M JONES, Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1958, LC 58-11131, 315pp+notes+index @@@ AMERICAN FRIENDS SERVICE COMMITTEE Marvin R Weisbord, SOME FORM OF PEACE: TRUE STORIES OF THE AMERICAN FRIENDS SERVICE COMMITTEE AT HOME AND ABROAD. Viking Press, NY, 1968, LC 68-23996. $6, 168pp Gerald Jonas, ON DOING GOOD, Charles Scribner's Sons, NY, 1971, SBN 684-10317-6 Lester M. Jones, QUAKERS IN ACTION, 1929, MacMillan, NY, 226pp John Forbes, THE QUAKER STAR UNDER SEVEN FLAGS, 1917-1927, 1962, U Penn Pr, Philadelphia, LC 61-5539 David Hinshaw, AN EXPERIMENT IN FRIENDSHIP, 1947, G P Putnam's Sons, 147pp, (AFSC in Finland) Guenter Lewy, PEACE AND REVOLUTION: THE MORAL CRISIS OF AMERICAN PACIFISM, Eerdmans, 1987, ISBN 0-8028-3640-2. Charles E Fager, editor, QUAKER SERVICE AT THE CROSSROADS, Kimo Press, 1987, ISBN 0-945117-02-X.