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.