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.

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As A List Hollywood stars come out to tell their Harvey Weinstein couch harassment stories, I have to wonder about those who didn’t make it through after saying no—actresses who saw their roles evaporate and left acting. The New York Times headlines profiling Weinstein accusers touts Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie but also introduces us a woman who is now a psychology professor in Colorado. How many better actresses and strong-minded women would there be in Hollywood if so many hadn’t been forced out?

I thought of this after reading by a tweet from the actress Rose Marie. She’s best known as one of the jovial sidekicks from the 1960s’ Dick Van Dyke Show. Not to diminish the rest of the cast, but Rose Marie is one of the best reasons to watch the show, especially during those rare moments she’s allowed to step out from her character’s wisecracking spinster persona and sing or act. On Twitter, she shared that she lost a music contract in the 1950s because she wouldn’t sleep with a producer.

What if a talented actress like Rose Marie had been given more opportunities and wasn’t just known for a supporting part in a old sitcom? What if the psychology professor had gotten the Shakespeare in Love lead? (Imagine a world where Paltrow was only known to 800 or so Facebook friends for too-perfect family pics and memes from dubious health sites.)

Disclaimer: This is a minor point compared with any actresses who weren’t able to deal with the harassment and the industry silencing machinery. I’m sure there are tragedies that are more than just career pivots.

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On a recent Tuesday, Friends Journal sponsored me to attend one of Tufte’s one-day workshops. He’s most well-known for his beautiful books on data visualizations but his workshop touched on a number of fascinating topics. “The world is way too interesting to have disciplinary boundaries,” he said at one point as he took us from music to maps to space shuttles to magicians. The range was purposeful. He was teaching us how to think.

I estimated a crowd of maybe 450. A large percentage were low-level corporate types (I overheard one say “I was not expecting that he’d bash PowerPoint so much”; this slacker obviously hadn’t even taken five minutes to skim Tufte’s Wikipedia page). There were smaller mixes of techie, creatives, and design professionals, some of whom were there after fawning over his books for years. Bonus if you go: part of the workshop registration fee is gratis copies of his books!

I have 13 pages of notes. Some highlights for me:

• The heart of much of the workshop was critical thinking. Tufte dissected various news websites to take us through the ways they gave attribution and presented data. He also went through studies and gave various pointers to sniff out when verifying data was being withheld.
• “Producing a good presentation is a moral and ethical act.” (ditto for being an good audience member). There is a form of civic responsibility to inquiry.
• Tufte is a big believer in meetings that begin with reading. The highest-resolution device most of us have is paper. People can read 2–3 times faster than a presenter can talk. By letting people go at their own pace they can tailor the presentation to their own needs.
• Data presentation: A theme throughout the workshop was “documents not decks,” an emphasis on flat, web-like presentations that allow readers to control scrolling. He continually called out “flat surfaces” and material that is “adjacent in space” to give an almost theological argument for their superiority over deck-like presentations (think PowerPoint) that can obscure important data.
• He urged us not to pander to our audience: Consumer sites show that data can be popular: the New York Times’s website has 450 links; ESPN’s has tables atop tables and yet people read these sites every day. Why can’t we have the same level of data-rich accessibility in our work lives? “Have we suddenly becomes stupid just because we’ve comes to work?” He urged the mid-level execs in the audience to demand good presentations. We should push back against the low-expectations of their bosses to ask “Why can’t we live up to ESPN?”
• Data as beauty. From gorgeous maps to graphical music notation (below), Tufte loves design and data that come together in beauty. It is amazing.

One of my favorite parts of the workshop was an afternoon digression from strict data that he introduced by saying, “It’s time for a heart to heart.” It began with a sermonette on credibility: how to make yourself accountable and just other’s arguments.

Then he talked about how to respond when someone challenges your work. I could tell there must be a long list of personal stories informing this part of the workshop–lessons learned, yes, but surely opportunities lost too. Tufte told us it was only natural to respond in defensiveness and anger and counseled us to not be too quick to dismiss critique. You’ve got to do the hard work to see whether your challenger might be correct.

He reminded us that when we’re in a room full of peers, everyone present has been filtered and selected over the years. You should assume the room will be just as smart as you are. “How dare you think your motives are better than those of your colleagues!” he thundered at an emotional crescendo. He admitted that this self-doubt is a hard posture to adopt. He’s polled public figures he respects and even the thickest-skinned are stung by challenge.

He said he had learned to back off, go slow, and contemplate when he’s challenged. Just when I thought he had found some super-human ability to rationally consider things, he told us it could took him three to five years to really accept the validity of dissenting views.

This was a much-needed sermon for me and I nodded along along. As someone who professionally amplifies opinion, I’m often in the middle of people in debate (I’ve been an actor in these conflicts in the past, though these days I generally play a role somewhere between an agent and mediator). It’s good to see intellectual debate as a process and to remember that it can take years. “This concludes the therapeutic portion of today’s course”, he concluded, before going back to visualizations.

He ended by showing us timeless first-editions of beautiful scientific works by Galileo and Euclid. He felt a genuine appreciation of being part of an intellectual tradition. He was a master and for this day we in the audience were his apprentices. “In life we need tools that last forever and give us clear leverage in clear thinking.”

Update: apparently some number of data visualization people have disliked his workshops. What I found fascinatingly wide-ranging they found rambling. Perhaps Tufte has tightened his presentation or I caught him on a good day. More likely, I think they came looking for a more technical discussion of data visualization and was surprised that Tufte focused so much on critical thinking and communication skills. I have a particular soft spot for quirky and opinionated people who don’t follow scripts and Tufte’s detours all made a certain sense to me. But then I’m a philosophy major turned do-gooder writer/publisher. Your mileage may vary.

Although Siebert tempered some of his contemporaries’ hyperbole, he nonetheless took many Underground Railroad stories at face value. Undaunted by a dearth of antebellum documentation — most railroad activists had not kept records in order to protect runaways and themselves — Siebert relied on the reminiscences of “‘old time’ abolitionists” to fill “the gaps in the real history of the Underground Railroad.”

An article in last month’s Times explains that this story got the revisionist treatment in the 1960s:

That view largely held among scholars until 1961, when the historian Larry Gara published “The Liberty Line,” a slashing revisionist study that dismissed the Underground Railroad as a myth and argued that most fugitive slaves escaped at their own initiative, with little help from organized abolitionists. Scholarship on the topic all but dried up, as historians more generally emphasized the agency of African-Americans in claiming their own freedom.

That article focuses on Eric Foner, who’s just come out with a book that you might call a post-revisionist history, based on some recently-uncovered documents by little-known 19th-century abolitionist editor named Sydney Howard Gay. It’s on my to-read list. It’s nice to have some new documentary evidence, as it sometimes seems the Underground Railroad is the proverbial blank slate upon which we project our contemporary politics.

I’m currently reading “Philadelphia Quakers and the Antislavery Movement” by Brian Temple, an amateur South Jersey historian. It’s a useful lens. There are a handful of crazy cool stories of white Quakers, but it’s clear that much of the Quaker involvement is pointing runaways to the nearest African American town. But that’s where it gets interesting for me. So many of these towns seem to be on land sold them by a white Quaker farmer; they’re just a mile or two from a Quaker town, down a quiet secondary road where you can see anyone coming, alongside deep woods or marshes into which runaways can easily disappear.

It seems like one of the most important Quaker contribution to the Underground Railroad in South Jersey was participating in the founding of these towns: places where manumitted and self-freed African Americans could live in a self-governing and self-defensible community.

This raises lots of questions. There was one prominent South Jersey African American Quaker but he was the exception. And it’s often forgotten, but much of the source of Quakers’ wealth (the land they had to sell) was war and previous enslavement. But still, it seems like there might have been something resembling reparations going on here: forty acres and a mule and giving the freed Africans the space to minister their own churches and govern their own town. The historic black towns of South Jersey would make a great thesis for some hardworking grad student.

The racial politics of the twentieth century have not been kind to these towns (Ta-Nehisi Coates could write a new chapter of Case for Reparations based on them). Highways planners looking for routes close to the now-historic Quaker towns drew their lines right through the towns. Since most were never formally incorporated, zoning and school board battles with their surrounding township have taken away much of their autonomy. Many have been swallowed whole by mid-century sprawl and towns in more rural areas have depopulated. An old church is often the only visible remnant and sometimes there’s not even that.

My reading has stalled three-quarters of the way through Temple’s book and I’ve missed a few opportunities to see him present it locally. But I’ll try to finish and give a more comprehensive review in the near future.

The alumnus said he’s upset the principal [Harold Jernigan] has not acknowledged the accusations. But he said he doesn’t regret sending his original message. ‘If you read Quaker literature, they spell ‘Truth’ in the uppercase – the implication of divinity,’ he said, ‘that it is a holy thing to continue that search for truth.’

I’m glad this is getting out now, but I did a double-take as the accused principle is still alive and living a few dozen miles from me. He was a lightning-rod figure as principal of at least two other schools after Carolina. I imagine the behavior continued. Updates below:

• An period article on his tenure at a Friends Seminary, a Manhattan Friends school, talked about the unrest of his two-year tenure there. It sounds like he came in and summarily fired the heads of the lower, middle, and upper schools. This is the kind of thing one would do if they wanted to curtail accountability.
• A memoir by Quaker educator Leonard Kenworthy talks about this period at Friends Seminary: “He moved much too rapidly in bringing about changes, asking for the resignations of the heads of the elementary and middle school, plus several other shifts, within a very short period, even before he took over as principal. Over and over I urged him not to move too fast but he said there were two ways of handling such a situation. One was to move slowly over a period of years. The other was to bring about quick changes and then to begin rapidly to initiate new programs and new personnel. He was determined to use the latter approach.”
• A 1986 New York Times profile of Friends Seminary had this to say of its former head: “After a shake-up of the staff that led to the resignation or dismissal of several teachers, a teacher’s union was formed, and students went on strike. Eventually, the principal, Harold Jernigan, resigned and the school ”rejected muscular Quakerism and returned to its mystical faith,” in the words of the official history.”
• A commenter on one news article writes: “Please also know that Harold Jernigan’s behavior continued on at Atlantic City Friends School, where he was Headmaster. As an Alum of ACFS, I thought that should be made clear.”
• Carolina Friends School wrote an open letter to the community in June.

Update December 2014. I have received emails from a former student who wished to remain anonymous at this time. I have no way to fact check this but it is consistent with the history and I have no reason to think it’s inaccurate. With that caveat, here are some excerpts:

As an Alumni of Atlantic City Friends School I am not surprised at all to hear about Harold Jernigan sexual abuse in the least . Please note this abuse along with more forms of abuse went on at ACFS into the early 80’s

Sexual abuse was not the only abuse. Abuse of the school system in general including drugs , abuse of power , money , teaching so badly that curves were used to grade so curved that the highest grade in a math class Harold Jernigan taught was a 42 yet all were passed . Harold Jernigan also would listen to classrooms and locker rooms with a speaker system in his office even after he promised Teachers he would not . Please note if Harold Jernigan did not want a student to pass he would call a meeting with all Teachers to make sure certain students would not pass no matter what .

I was a victim of his non sexual abuse but still abuse all the same .

I am only telling you this so someone puts a stop to this abuse. Back in the late 70’s early 80’s who would believe a teenager . To see this Finally come out makes me know there is Karma .

As teenagers in school we would talk amongst ourselves . No one would come forward because we knew Harold would hold back our Diplomas or not forward a letter to a college .

You must remember ACFS was attended by either high IQ students , rich kids that were kick out of their other schools or students that wanted to attend a private school . This made the student body Easy Prey .

During my time at ACFS I made friends with some of the Teachers . These Teachers are some of my sources ! They knew but needed their job

It also perhaps signals a cultural shift away from snobbery and into embracing roots. One of the most popular posts on the New York Times’s website last year celebrated regional accents (apparently Philadelphians are allowed to talk like Philadelphians again).

An analogue to this fashion trend has been occuring among Friends for a little while now. The “New Plain” discussion have revolved around reclaiming an attitude, not a uniform.

If you read the old Quaker guide books (called “Books of Discipline” then, now more often called “Faith and Practice”), you’ll see that unlike other plain-dressing American groups like the Amish, Quakers didn’t intend their clothes to be a uniform showing group conformity. Instead, plainness is framed in terms of interior motivations. Avoiding fashion trends helped Friends remember that they were all equal before God. It also spoke to our continuing testimony of integrity, in that Friends were to dress the same way in different contexts and so vouchsafe for a single identity.

When I began feeling the tug of a leading toward plainness it was for what I began calling “Sears Plain,” indicating that I wore clothes that I could find in any box store or mall. I developed a low-maintenance approach to fashion that freed up my time from shopping and the morning dressing ritual. Modern plainness can lessen the temptation to show off in clothes and it can reduce the overall wardrobe size and thus reduce our impact on the environment and with exploited labor. But all this is nothing new and it never really disappeared. If you looked around a room of modern Quakers you’ll often see a trend of sartorial boringness; I was simply naming this and putting it in the context of our tradition.

Over time I found that these motivations were more prevalent in the wider culture, especially in the minimalist techie scene. Steve Jobs famously sported a uniform of black turtleneck, jeans, and New Balance sneakers (explained in 2011). In a 2012 profile, Barack Obama talked about limiting his clothes to two colors of suits so that he could free up his decision-making energies on more important issues (I wrote about his fashion in “Plain like Barack”).

Non-celebrities also seem interested in working out their relationship with fashion. My articles on modern plainness have always been a big draw on my blog. While my fellow Quakers are sometimes mildly embarrassed by our historic peculiarities, outsiders often eat this stuff up. They’re looking for what the techies would call “life hacks” that can help them prioritize life essentials. If we can communicate our values in a real way that isn’t propped by appeals to the authority of tradition, then we can reach these seekers.

So now that “Normcore” is appearing in places like Huffington Post , the New York Times and fashion magazines, will Friends be able to talk more about it? Do we still have a collective witness in regards to the materialism and ego-centricity of fashion marketing?

As a Quaker woman, Jennifer Seif lives a modest and simple life. Breastfeeding is natural to her, and she has nursed her children while in the grocery store, the doctor’s office and during Quaker meetings without a problem. So the Grand Rapids woman was shocked and embarrassed in April when Kent County Clerk Mary Beth Hollinrake approached her while she was breastfeeding her infant son, Micah…“It’s shocking to me that anyone would be offended.” The mother of three said she was wearing a cape dress — a garment designed for discreet nursing…

I learned about this through the blog of Jenn and her husband Scott. Here’s Jenn’s post on the incident. For those wondering about their local protection, the La Leche League has a fabulous state-by-state listing of the nursing laws.