War Social Order

"War in the Social Order: The Great War and the Liberalization of American Quakerism," in David Adams and Cornelius van Minnen, eds., Religious and Secular Reform Movements in American History (Edinburgh, 1999), pp. 179-204. Reprinted with minor changes in Quaker Theology 3:2 (Autumn 2001): 98-131.

The Making of:

This essay had its origins in the research for Bloodless Victories and my discovery, via an old friend Tony Badger, of the pleasures of the Easter vacation conferences of the European Association for American Studies at the Roosevelt Study Centre in Middelburg, a beautiful early-modern fortified town in the deep South of the Netherlands. The RSC had plenty of money to provide hospitality to conference participants, and a tie-in with Edinburgh University Press guaranteeing the publication of the better papers; and an invitation to give a paper could easily be parlayed into a conference travel grant from my department, on the back of which my wife and I could have a vacation.

Once I knew the theme of the conference, it was just a matter of seeing what I had that might be made to fit. And, fortunately, there was something that didn't need much editing in order to work. But why was I, an historian of US industrial relations, so fascinated by the history of American Quakerism? Well, it had attracted me for years.

In the late 1970s, when I was at Lampeter, I was introduced by an old walking and canoeing friend from Ithaca, Connie Elson, a maths professor at Ithaca College, to George Clarkson, chaplain at the College and a lecturer in Philosophy and Theology, and his wife Elizabeth. George and Elizabeth were coming to Lampeter so that he could acquire a Ph.D. in Theology. He was pushing sixty (he was born in 1917 and died in 2010), but needed a doctorate because a new President there had decreed that all staff must have the terminal degree in their fields, and George was not ready to retire. Lampeter had nice, easy regulations for part-time, non-resident doctoral students, so it suited him, but he did have to spend some time in residence, and they came for an extended visit, renting a farmhouse in the hills for a whole term. My wife and I found them a delightful couple -- amusing, hospitable, mind-expanding in their interests and conversation and enthusiasms -- and they were my introduction to American Quakerism. I had been to Quaker Meeting when I was an undergraduate at Oxford, mostly for the company and the cheap bread & cheese & soup & salad lunch, and knew a bit about the Society of Friends, but George and Elizabeth showed me its American incarnations. Elizabeth was a birthright Friend from the Welsh Tract along the Philadelphia Main Line; George was Lutheran by upbringing, but his education and career had been restlessly nondenominational -- Haverford College, but also Union Theological Seminary; Paul Tillich, but also Reinhard Niebuhr. He had ministered to a variety of congregations, Methodist, Presbyterian, nothing in particular, and eventually Quaker (it was news to me that some American Quakers did have ministers -- I had always thought the absence of an ordained ministry a defining characteristic of Quakerism, simply assuming that the original British practice was universal). George and Elizabeth were very Anglophile, loving their regular transatlantic voyages on the QE2 and their widely scattered British friends; Kings Cliffe in Northamptonshire, home of the mystic William Law, was almost a second home for them. So we visited one another in Lampeter, and then in Durham, and at their self-built house on a hill high above Ithaca, "Llwyn Onn" (The Ash Grove), until they were no longer able to travel.

My second personal or emotional connection with Quakerism was almost accidental. The early 1980s were grim years for anybody in Britain of a somewhat radical or pacifist inclination, and as a result I had joined (not something I usually do) a local group called Peace Action Durham, which brought me into contact with some active Quakers. Then, in Easter 1982, I was house-sitting in Oxford for my old tutor and his wife, taking advantage of their absence on holiday to get away from Durham and do some reading in my old haunts, the Bodleian and Rhodes House libraries. [t.b.c]