"These Strange Criminals": An Anthology of Prison Memoirs by Conscientious Objectors from the Great War to the Cold War (review)

Abstract

62Quaker History for the split in Genesee Yearly Meeting when 200 Friends walked out and formed the Congregational Quakers. Their statements sound very much like some Friends today who do not want anything to do with hierarchy, ministers, elders, or select meetings. In the context ofthe heated abolitionist /Free Soil/women's rights arguments of the 1840s, the Quaker leadership seemed to offer very little, particularly in terms of real spiritual nourishment. The question for each generation, it seems, is how to live out the radical call of discipleship in the thorny, controversial issues of the day—and do it under God's guidance, in community. Martha Paxson GrundyCleveland Heights, Ohio "These Strange Criminals ": An Anthology ofPrison Memoirs by Conscientious Objectors from the Great War to the Cold War. Ed. by Peter Brock. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004, xviii + 505 pp. Notes and bibliography. Cloth, $75; paper, $45. This anthology included the prison experiences ofthirty-one war resisters from World War I to the Cold War and in seven different countries. It is edited by the dean of peace historians, Peter Brock, who was himself imprisoned in England during the first World War. Most of the material was mined fromunpublished or privately published memoirs though some, like Donald Wetzel's Pacifist, are excerpts from previously published accounts. Seven of the memoirs are by Quaker pacifists, most from England during the first World War. Others are from a variety of religious and philosophical backgrounds. There is great variety in these accounts, yet their reactions to the prison environment are remarkably similar. The impact ofbeing isolated from society in an institutional setting designed to humiliate and depersonalize inmates seems universal. Though all of these young war resisters were political prisoners, none set themselves apart from their fellow convicts. While there is much discussion ofprison rules and the attitude of prison guards—called "screws" by the British and "hacks" by the Americans—there is very little discussion of sex. Several resisters described their disgust with the foul and sexually-explicit language they confronted for the first time. Two of Brock's authors, Kathleen Lonsdale and Kathleen Wigham, were British women jailed during WWII. Both were Quakers who refused to perform assigned work under compulsion. In prison, unlike many ofthe men, they were concerned about the lack of sanitation and the poor medical care given prisoners. One ofthe most interesting memoirs, which Book Reviews63 appears in the Appendix, was written by Michael Frenzei, an East German resister who served time in a Communist prison. Several authors described the negative impact of prisons on inmantes and insisted that an enlightened society would find creative alternatives to incarceration as they had experienced it. Besides their intrinsic readability, these essays provide a useful reference tool for researchers studying a prison system based on the assumption that increasingly punitive tactics bring desirable results. Despite frequent use of severe punishment, including solitary confinement, only one of the resisters included in this anthology abandoned his pacifism. These Strange Criminals is must reading for any young man or woman considering a moral stand that might lead to a prison sentence. It will also help make visible the absolutist pacifists from past wars, for their stories constitute an important chapter in the much neglected history of active nonviolence. For collecting these memoirs, and contributing one of his own, Peter Brock has earned the thanks of all Friends and others who are working to end the horror ofwar. Larry Gara, EmeritusWilmington College The People of This Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia. By Paul Lyons. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. 288 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $39.95. The story of the New Left in Philadelphia is complex, tangled, ultimately both sad and inspiring. Paul Lyons tells it clearly and sympathetically in seven well-focused chapters. He weaves together a broad overview in the first and final chapters and documents the social activism fueled by the civil rights movement and the Vietnam anti-war movement, first on the Quaker campuses—some ofwhose students had traveled South and worked in predominantly African-American communities like Chester, Pennsylvania; then in the Catholic institutions La Salle, Villanova, and St...