Civility Can Be Dangerous

August 15, 2018

From the AFSC’s Lucy Dun­can, a look back at Hen­ry Cad­bury’s now-infamous 1934 speech to Amer­i­can rab­bis and a look at the civil­i­ty debate in mod­ern America.

Stand­ing up for peace means stand­ing on the side of the oppressed, not throw­ing them into the lion’s mouth in the name of civil­i­ty. And inter­rupt­ing racist vio­lence takes more than civ­il dis­course: active dis­rup­tion is need­ed in order for racism to be revealed and dis­man­tled. What good is inef­fec­tive paci­fism? My com­mit­ment to non­vi­o­lence is about sav­ing lives.

I gave my take on Cad­bury’s speech back in June. I was a lit­tle eas­i­er on Cad­bury, most­ly because I think we need to under­stand the Quak­er world­view out of which he was speak­ing. It’s nev­er good to lec­ture the oppressed on their oppres­sion, but the clas­sic Quak­er idea of speak­ing truth to all sides still holds val­ue and is some­thing I think we miss some­times nowadays.

Henry Cadbury’s 1934 speech and us

June 28, 2018

In 1934, Philadel­phia Friend and co-founder of the Amer­i­can Friends Ser­vice Com­mit­tee Hen­ry Cad­bury gave a speech to a con­fer­ence of Amer­i­can rab­bis in which he urged them to call off a boy­cott of Nazi Ger­many. A New York Times report about the speech was tweet­ed out last week and has gone viral over the inter­net. The 1930s does­n’t look so far away in an era when author­i­tar­i­ans are on the rise and lib­er­als wor­ry about the lines of civil­i­ty and fairness.

Make no mis­take: Cad­bury’s speech is cringe­wor­thy. Some of the quotes as report­ed by the Times:

You can prove to your oppres­sors that their objec­tives and meth­ods are not only wrong, but unavail­ing in the face of the world’s protests and uni­ver­sal dis­ap­proval of the injus­tices the Hitler pro­gram entails.

By hat­ing Hitler and try­ing to fight back, Jews are only increas­ing the sever­i­ty of his poli­cies against them.

If Jews through­out the world try to instill into the minds of Hitler and his sup­port­ers recog­ni­tion of the ideals for which the race stands, and if Jews appeal to the Ger­man sense of jus­tice and the Ger­man nation­al con­science, I am sure the prob­lem will be solved more effec­tive­ly and ear­li­er than otherwise.

The idea that we might be able to appease Hitler was obvi­ous­ly wrong-headed. To tell Jews that they should do this is patron­iz­ing to the extreme.

But in many ways, all this is also vin­tage Quak­er. It is in line with how many Friends saw them­selves in the world. To under­stand Cad­bury’s reac­tion, you have to know that Quak­ers of the era were very sus­pi­cious of col­lec­tive action. He described any boy­cott of Nazi Ger­many as a kind of war­fare. They felt this way too about union­iza­tion – work­ers get­ting togeth­er on strike were war­ring against the fac­to­ry owners.

When John Wool­man spoke out about slav­ery in the 1700s, he went one-on-one as a min­is­ter to fel­low Quak­ers. Dur­ing the Civ­il War, Friends wrote let­ters one-on-one with Abra­ham Lin­coln urg­ing him to seek peace (they got some return let­ters too!). Cad­bury naive­ly thought that these sorts of per­son­al tac­tics could yield results against author­i­tar­i­an twentieth-century states.

Miss­ing in Cad­bury’s analy­sis is an appre­ci­a­tion of how much the con­cen­tra­tion of pow­er in indus­tri­al­iz­ing soci­eties and the growth of a man­age­r­i­al class between own­ers and work­ers has changed things. Work­ers nego­ti­at­ing one-on-one with an owner/operator in a fac­to­ry with twen­ty work­ers is very dif­fer­ent than nego­ti­at­ing in a fac­to­ry of thou­sands run by a CEO on behalf of hun­dreds of stock­hold­ers. Ger­many as a uni­fied state was only a dozen years old when Cad­bury was born. The era of total war was still rel­a­tive­ly new and many peo­ple naive­ly thought a rule of law could pre­vail after the First World War. The idea of indus­tri­al­iz­ing pogroms and killing Jews by the mil­lions must have seen fantastical.

Some of this world­view also came from the­ol­o­gy: if we have direct access to the divine, then we can appeal to that of God in our adver­sary and win his or her heart and soul with­out resort to coer­cion. It’s a nice sen­ti­ment and it even some­times works.

I won’t claim that all Friends have aban­doned this world­view, but I would say it’s a polit­i­cal minor­i­ty, espe­cial­ly with more activist Friends. We under­stand the world bet­ter and rou­tine­ly use boy­cotts as a strate­gic lever. Cad­bury’s Amer­i­can Friends Ser­vice Com­mit­tee itself piv­ot­ed away from the kind of direct aid work that had exem­pli­fied its ear­ly years. For half a cen­tu­ry it has been work­ing in strate­gic advocacy.

Friends still have prob­lems. We’re still way more stuck on racial issues among our­selves than one would think we would be giv­en our par­tic­i­pa­tion in Civ­il Rights activism. Like many in the U.S., we’re strug­gling with the lim­i­ta­tion of civil­i­ty in a polit­i­cal sys­tem where rules have bro­ken down. No AFSC head would give a lec­ture like Cad­bury’s today. But I think it’s good to know where we come from. Some of Cad­bury’s cau­tions might still hold lessons for us; under­stand­ing his blind spots could help expose ours.

The January issue of +Friends Journal will include an interview with +Robin Mohr.…

November 10, 2011

The Jan­u­ary issue of +Friends Jour­nal will include an inter­view with +Robin Mohr. One of the clas­sic Quak­er tracts that’s inspired her is a 1944 speech that Rufus M Jones gave to young Friends in Bal­ti­more Year­ly Meet­ing. We could­n’t locate a copy online so we scanned, copied and typed it in and will use it as a sup­ple­men­tal link to Robin’s piece.

Embed­ded Link

What Will Get Us Ready | Friends Journal
By Rufus M Jones Web-only fea­ture Rufus M. Jones’ 1944 lec­ture for Bal­ti­more Young Friends Year­ly Meeting. 

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Francis turns two

August 29, 2007

Mar­tin and Theo cel­e­brat­ed Fran­cis’s sec­ond birth­day with an after­noon out­ing to fav spot Bat­sto Lake. 

Francis turns two Francis turns two Francis turns two


Pho­tos: Fran­cis laughs by the lake, Theo mak­ing rip­ples, group shot, video speech.

“The president is pleased that the director of central intelligence acknowledged what needed to be acknowledged. The president has moved on…”

July 13, 2003

Oh good for him.

But wait. The Pres­i­dent also defends CIA direc­tor Tenet who gave him bad infor­ma­tion. So Tenet cov­ered Bush’s bot­tom and now Bush is cov­er­ing Tenet’s so now we can move on. How convenient.

In a TV stu­dio a few blocks away Don­ald Rums­feld has the balls to con­tin­ue defend­ing the inclu­sion of the obvi­ous forgery in the State of the Union address. On a polit­i­cal talk show, he said the Niger ura­ni­um claim was “tech­ni­cal­ly cor­rect” since the Pres­i­dent just said British Intel­li­gence thought it was true. Of course, the Brits have said they said it because Amer­i­can intel­li­gence had told them it was true. Again, how con­ve­nient. I almost expect some­one to say the inclu­sion of the forgery was okay because the Pres­i­dent had his fin­gers crossed behind his back as he read that part of the speech.

I think we could go too far in the who-said-what depart­ment with this speech. It was one speech, grant­ed the most impor­tant of the year, but still the big issue is that Bush repeat­ed­ly fed the Amer­i­can peo­ple dubi­ous claims about Iraq’s pro­grams to build weapons of mass destruc­tion. When­ev­er a reporter asked a hard ques­tion about these claims, the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion essen­tial­ly told us there was more intel­li­gence that they could­n’t share and that we should all trust them. Well it’s turned out the Admin­is­tra­tion was wrong. This is a colos­sal fail­ure and this is the big scan­dal of the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion and the biggest source of shame for the Amer­i­can and British peoples.

“Not that stupid piece of garbage”

July 10, 2003

“My thought was, how did that get into the speech?“This choice quote comes from Greg Thiel­mann, an intel­li­gence expert in the US State Depart­ment (now retired). In today’s papers this Bush Admin­is­tra­tion insid­er has come right out and said that the White House “lied about Sad­dam threat”.
    Mean­while the happy-go-lucky Don­ald Rums­feld has said the occu­pa­tion is cost­ing the US $3.9 bil­lion per month (see side­bar) and Gen­er­al Tom­my Franks pre­dicts high troop lev­els will be need­ed “for the fore­see­able future.”