I won’t link to the rightwing Daily Caller website on principle but in a week in which some of their favorite targets are being served with explosives (the homes of the Obamas, Clintons, and George Soros have been targeted with IEDs), an opinion piece by Raheem Kassam, a Breitbart alum and assistant to UKIP leader Nigel Farage, tries to cook up a Quaker conspiracy.
It’s hogwash top to bottom, thinly connected dots meant to look like an evil plot. Apparently some people who were involved in Casa de los Amigos in Mexico City later donated to Democratic campaigns and Casa later rented office space to a migrant rights organization in 2012 and… well, that’s pretty much it. Proof that the “international Quaker movement” is the organizers of the refugee caravans aimed at the “destruction of U.S. borders.”
The language is florid in the manner of rightwing conspiracies. They specifically call out Brigid Moix, a former Casa de los Amigos director and well-respected Quaker peace advocate who Friends Journal published just last month. She was at Casa the same time as some guy who wrote something rather obvious about immigration that sounds like something rather obvious other people have since wrote about immigration. Oh and the one guy is now a Mexican ambassador to Greece. And someone was on a conference call. And there’s a group in San Diego. Seriously, there’s not even an attempt to draw a coherent thread. It’s just one non sequitur after another bridging together randomly Googled trivia, all carelessly run together because the author obviously assumes Daily Caller readers don’t read past the headline.
This would all be laughably obtuse in its overreach except that these conspiracies are getting less and less funny every day. The AFSC regularly gets conspiracy webs spun around its work in Palestine but I haven’t seen much trying to tie Friends to the biannual conspiracies around immigration. Hopefully it will fade away and Kassam will find some other bogeyman. The only stitch of truth can be found in the comments. There, buried near the bottom of all the knee-jerk crap you’d expect, is this, left un-ironically I suspect:
This year’s election feel different than previous years. People are ready to do something besides just voting. Many are running for office in record numbers, for example: Scientists and Women.Another population that is running in, perhaps, record numbers in 2018: Quakers!
He’s added a lot of interesting contextual links to articles about the new types of candidates we’re seeing in the 2018 election.
Back last August, Greg Woods noticed that there were some Quakers running for U.S. Congressional seats. While modern-day Quaker politicians are not unheard of, they’re also not particularly common and it seemed like there was a bumper crop. The idea to interview them took on a momentum, even as we started to learn about more candidates. It’s grown into a Quakers in Politics Live Web Panel set to take place on Thursday, March 22nd at 3pm EDT. There’s six confirmed Quaker candidates and the event is co-sponsored by the Earlham School of Religion and Friends Journal. The moderator will be Earlham College President Alan Price.
The upcoming U.S. Congressional mid-term elections already have at least seven Quaker candidates for office. How does their Quaker faith inform these candidates’ desires to run for Congress? What advice would they have for other Quakers wanting to run for office in the future?
It’s a pretty interesting bunch and I’m looking forward to lots of good questions about the intersection of faith and politics in 2018.
Steve Bacher (Pennsylvania 8th District, @stevebacher)
Adam Coker (North Carolina 13th District, @AdamFromNC)
Frances William Browin from the September 15, 1968 Friends Journal.
When I became an editor at Friends Journal in 2011, I inherited an institution with some rather strong opinions. Some of them are sourced from the predictable wellsprings: William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White’s foundational mid-century style guide and the editorial offices of the Chicago Manual of Style. But some are all our own, logically tested for consistency with Chicago but adapted to Quaker idiosyncrasies.
One of our most invariable (and contested) formats comes from the way we list congregations. Quick aside for non-Quakers: you will often see a Quaker meeting variously named as “Town Monthly Meeting,” “Town Friends Meeting,” “Town Quaker Meeting,” etc. People often have strong opinions about the correct form. Occasionally an author will insist to me that their meeting has an official name (“Springfield Friends Meeting”), used consistently across their publications and business minutes. But after a few minutes with Google I can usually find enough counter-examples (“Springfield Monthly Meeting”) to prove their inconsistency.
To cut through this, Friends Journal uses “Town (State) Meeting” everywhere and always, with specific exceptions only for cases where that doesn’t work — for example, the meeting is named after a street or a tree or isn’t in the town it’s named for (after 300 years identities sometimes get messy). This formatting is unique to Friends Journal—even other Philadelphia-based Quaker stylesheets don’t follow it. We’ve been doing it this distinctively and this consistently for as long as I’ve been reading the magazine. Where does our stubborn naming convention come from?
Fortunately, thanks to Haverford College’s Quaker and Special Collections we have digital archives going back to the mid-1950s. A few months ago I dug into our archives and used keyword searches to see how far back the format goes. Traveling the years back it time it’s held remarkably steady as “Town (State) Meeting” until we get back to the fall of 1962. The October 15 issue doesn’t have consistent meeting listings but it does announce that longtime Friends Journal editor William Hubben was to begin a six-month sabbatical and that Frances Williams Browin was to fill in as acting editor.
It didn’t take her long to make her mark. Friends Journal came out twice a month in the 1960s and the next issue sees a few parentheses unevenly applied to meeting listings. But by the November 15th issue, nineteen meetings are referenced using our familiar format! There’s the “member of Berkeley (Calif.) Meeting” who had just published a pamphlet of Christmas songs for children, an FCNL event featuring skits and a covered-dish supper at “Swarthmore (Pa.) Meeting” and the announcement of a prominent article by “Kenneth E. Boulding, a member of Ann Arbor (Michigan) Meeting.”
I’ve tried to imagine the scene… Browin situated in her new temporary office… going back and forth, forth and back on some listing… then finally surprising herself by shouting “enough!” so loudly she had to apologize to nearby colleagues. At the end of the six months, Hubben came back, but only as a contributing editor, and Browin was named as full editor. Friends Journal board member Elizabeth B Wells wrote a profile of her upon her retirement from that position in 1968:
Her remarks usually made sparks, whether she was expressing an opinion (always positive), exerting pressure (not always gentle), or making a humorous aside (often disturbing). For in her amiable way she can be tart, unexpected, even prejudiced (in the right direction), then as suddenly disarmingly warm and sensitive.
This sounds like the kind of person who would standardize a format with such resolve it would be going strong 55 years later:
She was so entirely committed to putting out the best possible magazine, such a perfectionist, even such a driver, that her closest colleagues often felt that we knew the spirited editor far better than the Quaker lady.
It’s a wonderfully written profile. And today, every time an author rewrites their meeting’s name on a copyedited manuscript I’ve sent them for review, I say a quiet thanks to the driven perfectionist who gives me permission to be “prejudiced in the right direction.” Wells’s profile is a fascinating glimpse into a smart woman of a different era and well worth a read.
And for uber word geeks, yes our Friends Journal style guide is a public document. While parts of its proscriptions go back to the early 1960s, it is very much a living document and we make small changes to it on an almost weekly basis.
Some of my younger friends are freaking out about Trump, wondering how we’ll get through his presidency. For those of us of a certain age though this is deja vu, a return to the days of Ronald Reagan. Though many people lionize him in retrospect, he was a train wreck through and through.
I was young when he came into office and my only memory of his first term is being interrupted in gym class to an announcement he had been shot in an assassination attempt. My first inkling of him as a politician came from a high school social studies teacher Roy Buri who constantly made fun of Reagan’s statements and policies. I laughed at Buri’s characterizations but I also began to internalized them. He was a legend at the school and had reportedly provided a safe haven in the 1970s for students organizing against the Vietnam War. Retro bonus: he even looked a bit like Bernie Sanders!
When I graduated and moved onto a mostly conservative college, I would stay late at nights in a basement lounge talking with friends in about how we could deal with the era we were living. I remember an epiphany that even though the media were telling us to believe certain things because that was the mainstream national discourse, we didn’t have to. We could be independent in our actions and convictions. Yes, that seems obvious now but it was a major realization then.
So what did we do? We protested. We spoke out. We knew government wasn’t on our side. For those losing friends to AIDS, there was deep mourning and righteous anger. There was a melancholy. A lot of my world felt underground and gritty. I started writing, editing a underground weekly paper on campus (really the start of my career). I figured out that the geography department was full of lefties and spent enough time there to earn a minor. Most of all, I worked to de-normalize the Reagan and Bush St Administrations – the deep corruption of many of its officials and the heartlessness of its policies.
My mother’s death notice is in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer.
Here’s another installation of mom stories, originally written for a longer obituary than the one running in today’s paper.
A single parent, she earned an associates degree at Rider College in Trenton and worked as a secretary at a number of Philadelphia-area based organizations, include Women’s Medical College and the Presbyterian Board of Publications. In the mid-1960s she became an executive secretary at the newly-formed Colonial Penn Life Insurance Company. An office feminist, she liked recounting the story of the day in the 1970s when the women of the office united to break the dress code by all wearing pant suits. A senior vice president was on the phone when she walked into his office and is said to have told his caller “My secretary just walked in wearing pants.… and she looks terrific!”
When Colonial Penn later started an in-house computer programmer training program, she signed up immediately and started a second career. She approached programs as puzzles and was especially proud of her ability to take other programmers’ poorly-written code and turn it into efficient, bug-free software.
In the early 1990s, she moved into her own apartment in Jenkintown, Pa. She reclaimed a shortened form of her maiden name and swapped “Betsy” for “Liz.” During this time she became a committed attender at Abington Friends Meeting. As clerk of its peace and justice committee, she worked to build the consensus needed for the meeting to produce a landmark statement on reproductive rights. As soon as it was passed she said, “next up, a minute on same-sex marriage!” In the late 90s, that was still controversial even with LGBTQ circles and I imagine that even the progressive folks at Abington were dreading the thought she might put this on the agenda!
In her late 60s, she bought her first house, in Philadelphia’s Mount Airy neighborhood. She loved fixing it up and babysitting her grandchildren. She never made any strong connections with any of the nearby Quaker Meetings only attending worship sporadically after the move. When she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease in 2010, she took the news with dignity. She moved into an independent living apartment in Atco, N.J. and continued an active lifestyle as long as possible.
I come back from a day off and my office door is uncharacteristically closed, with a sign reading “Wet Paint.” Inside are black velvet cloths acting as drop cloths and… my old walls, unpainted. Have I been punk’d? Are there elves with bad follow-through living in the office?
Friends Journal 
