"Ain't Gwine Study War No More"

Abstract

One spring day late in 1990s, I was in reading room of Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College. A visitor was there to discuss donating his father's papers. I had met father as a member of Quaker Meeting I had attended while I was in graduate school, so conversation piqued my interest. I knew father was a lifelong Quaker, a conscientious objector during World War II, and an activist for many liberal causes. But what struck me were speaker's own reflections on growing up after World War II. His parents were committed to communitarianism, pacifism, and simplicity, and so lived for a while in an intentional community. A turning point, however, came when son, in his early teens, rebelled against his parents' counterculturalism. His demand: he wanted to sleep in a bed, with a mattress, like those of his friends, rather than on cots were standard in community. After reading Patricia Appelbaum's Kingdom to Commune, I realized I had had an unexpected glimpse into a distinctive, vibrant subculture flourished between World War I and 1960s. Appelbaum's superb book gives us a better understanding of this alternative to dominant of United States in these years, a movement tried to meld Christianity, cooperative economics, pacifism, and leftist politics. Appelbaum opens by noting several historians have studied twentiethcentury pacifist movements. She argues, however, they uniformly treated pacifism as a moral or ethical commitment and overlooked the ways in which pacifism has evolved and has interacted with various cultures in which it has flourished or struggled (p. 2). She asserts that, in twentieth century, pacifism, or at least pacifists she treats, formed a that exists in a matrix of and lifeways (p. 2). She sees elements of in eight dimensions: social networks, theology, performance, iconography, individual spiritual practice, rituals of identity, narratives, and material culture (p. 2). Her goal is to help reader see pacifism through broader lenses