I had a wonderful time playing host for a visit by an old Cropwell Meeting family that was visiting the area this week. The Truitts were a free Black family in Delaware who joined self-emancipating enslaved people in that state and on Maryland’s Eastern Shore to settle among South Jersey Quakers in the early 1800s. The highlight was definitely 103 year old Margaret Adele McGee, who told stories of worshiping at Cropwell in the 1920s!
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ war
Cropwell Quakers U.S, Quaker Colleges Responding to War in the 1940s
July 31, 2026
From Sergei Grushko, a look at the choices of Quaker institutions in a time of war:
World War II presented a severe challenge for American colleges. But perhaps no group faced a more difficult dilemma than the institutions of higher education founded by Quakers. How could they reconcile a centuries-old witness to peace with the need to survive?
I didn’t know much of this history and never thought about the existential threats to higher education in the 1940s when campuses were largely emptied of their male students.
In the New Yorker, an article on atheism leads with a Daniel Seeger’s 1965 Supreme Court case
October 30, 2018
A review of two books on atheism starts with the take of Dan Seeger, who’s landmark Supreme Court case extended the right to conscientious objector status to agnostics and atheists:
Daniel Seeger was twenty-one when he wrote to his local draft board to say, “I have concluded that war, from the practical standpoint, is futile and self-defeating, and from the more important moral standpoint, it is unethical.” Some time later, he received the United States Selective Service System’s Form 150, asking him to detail his objections to military service. It took him a few days to reply, because he had no answer for the form’s first question: “Do you believe in a Supreme Being?” Unsatisfied with the two available options — “Yes” and “No” — Seeger finally decided to draw and check a third box: “See attached pages.”
Seeger’s victory helped mark a turning point for a minority that had once been denied so much as the right to testify in court, even in their own defense. Atheists, long discriminated against by civil authorities and derided by their fellow-citizens, were suddenly eligible for some of the exemptions and protections that had previously been restricted to believers.
Daniel Seeger has written for and been featured in the pages of Friends Journal many times over the ensuing decades but last year he wrote a great feature for us about the court case, An AFSC Defense of the Rights of Conscience. A tip of the hat to Carol Holmes Alpern for sending this New Yorker article way!
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/why-are-americans-still-uncomfortable-with-atheism
What Attracts Newcomers to Quaker Meeting?
September 14, 2018
From QuakerSpeak and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, a look at what attracts newcomers to Friends:
I very much like for example the determination that says somebody believes in peace and has the guts to say in a time of war, “No, I can’t fight. I can’t do that.” I think that takes a lot.
I think it had a lot to do with the people. There wasn’t really that hierarchy, where there was someone talking down to us, but we could really share ideas and we could all learn from each other, and I really appreciated those ideals.
http://quakerspeak.com/what-attracts-newcomers-to-quaker-meeting/
Profiting on empire
April 10, 2018
We think of slavery as issue that tore Friends apart as the consensus on its acceptability shifted in our religious society. A review of a book shows that in the U.K., gun manufacturing underwent this shift: Review: ‘Empire of Guns’ Challenges the Role of War in Industrialization
On its face, the decision by the Society of Friends to censure a flagrant arms merchant in its ranks may not seem surprising. Pacifist principles were central to Quaker ideology, as was opposition to slavery. Guns fueled not just war but the slave trade. Yet Mr. Galton’s father, and his father before him — and indeed many other Quakers who long dominated Birmingham’s arms industry — had been unapologetic gunmakers for 70 years without attracting rebuke. What had changed in the interim, in ways that are deeply interrelated, were society and the guns themselves.
Today the debate on guns in the U.S. is focused on assault weapons being used by individuals but the Galton debate is more about the role of a Quaker-produced product in war. Britain of course was an empire, an empire held together by force of weapons. Some percentage of the industrial revolution in Britain was financed by war and its products often were employed overseas in the maintenance and extension of the empire (I’m thinking for example of trains).
When I first read John Woolman I was struck by his calling slavery a product of war. I usually think of it as a human rights and dignity issue (and of course it was and Woolman was particularly sensitive to the human dimension) but it was also a type of highly organized warfare. Seeing the systemic nature of the trade as a whole let Friends better see the unacceptability of slavery — and imperial weapons manufacturing.
Banishing the demons of war plank by rotten plank
June 23, 2015
In National Geographic, Jane Braxton Little writes about the restoration of one of the most storied protest boats of the twentieth century:
The Golden Rule project is an improbable accomplishment by unlikely volunteers. Members of Veterans For Peace, they are a motley bunch that might have appalled the original crew, all conscientious Quakers. They smoke, drink and swear like the sailors, though most of them are not. Aging and perpetually strapped for money, the mostly retired men sought to banish their war-related demons as they ripped out rotten wood and replaced it plank by purpleheart plank.
Friends Journal ran an article by Jane, Restoring the Golden Rule, back in 2011 when the VFP volunteers first contemplated restoration, and a longer followup by Arnold (Skip) Oliver in 2013, The Golden Rule Shall Sail Again. Of course, the cool thing about working at a established magazine is that it was easy for me to dip into the archives and find and compile our 1958 coverage of the ship’s famous first voyage.
You ca follow more about the restoration work on the VFP Golden Rule website or check out pictures from the re-launch on their Facebook page.
The PTSD of the suburban drone warrior
June 16, 2015
Something I’ve long wondered a lot about, As Stress Drives Off Drone Operators, Air Force Must Cut Flights.:
What had seemed to be a benefit of the job, the novel way that the crews could fly Predator and Reaper drones via satellite links while living safely in the United States with their families, has created new types of stresses as they constantly shift back and forth between war and family activities and become, in effect, perpetually deployed.
I mention this toward the end of my review of The Burglary, the story of the 1971 antiwar activists, and it’s something I’ve been trying to pull from potential authors as we’ve put together an August Friends Journal issue on war. Much of the day-to-day mechanics of war has changed drastically in the past 40 years — at least for American soldiers.
We have stories like this one from the NYTimes: drone operators in suburban U.S. campuses killing people on the other side of the planet. But soldiers in Baghdad have good cell phone coverage, watch Netflix, and live in air conditioned barracks. The rise of contractors means that most of the grunt work of war — fixing trucks, peeling potatoes — is done by nearly invisible non-soldiers who are living in these war zones. It must be nice to have creature comforts but I’d imagine it could make for new problems psychologically integrating a war zone with normalcy.
Remembering Juanita Nelson
March 10, 2015
One of the coolest activists of her (or any) generation is gone. Juanita Nelson’s obituary is up on the national war tax coalition’s site. My favorite Juanita story was when some agents came to arrest her at home and found her dressed only in a bathrobe. They told her it was okay to go into her bedroom to change but she refused. She told them that any shame was theirs. She forced them to carry her out as her clothes fell off. Talk about radical non-cooperation!
Update
Pam McAllister pointed out on her Global Nonviolence: Stories of Creative Action Facebook page that this story is online. Here’s a bit more of Juanita herself telling that bit:
Seven law enforcement officers had stalked in. I sat on the stool beneath the telephone, my back literally to the wall, the seven hemming me about in a semicircle. All of them appeared over six feet tall, and all of them were annoyed.
“Look,” said one, “you’re gonna go anyway. You might as well come peaceful.”
There they stood, ready and able to take me at any moment. But no move was made. The reason was obvious.
“Why don’t you put your clothes on, Mrs. Nelson?” This was a soft spoken plea from the more benign deputy. “You’re not hurting anybody but yourself.” His pained expression belied the assertion.
The essay where that came from is much longer and well worth reading.