“Truly Radical, Non-violent, Friendly Approaches”: Challenges to the American Friends Service Committee

Abstract

“Truly Radical, Non-violent, Friendly Approaches”1: Challenges to the American Friends Service Committee H. Larry Ingle (bio) Nearly twenty-five years ago, on the occasion of the American Friends Service Committee’s seventy-fifth anniversary, Swarthmore College historian J. William Frost published a scholarly examination of the group’s early history. In his second paragraph, Frost stressed that from the beginning the Committee had had its critics, both from inside and outside the Religious Society of Friends. Looking around in 1992, he took special note of recent Quaker critics, Friends who targeted the Service Committee for what they saw as its tendency to sympathize with one side over the other in wars of national liberation and its staff’s increased professionalization, the small number of Friends among them, and the decline in their explicit religious commitment.2 Because Frost was introducing AFSC’s origins, he did not remark on what was even more astounding about this criticism, that almost all came from inside what might be called the “liberal” wing of Friends, members of meetings within Friends General Conference, the 20th century umbrella group consisting primarily of Hicksites and their descendants.3 Even more confounding—such Friends were often normally among the Committee’s chief allies, some even having worked with it in various ways. Their experiences revealed gaps between the ideals inspiring the Committee’s founding and the reality it embodied, not totally unexpected in a body of that age. The relationship between the Religious Society of Friends and the Service Committee had always been an anomaly, as Frost’s article indicated. The Committee met first on April 30, 1917, less than a month after the United States entered World War I on April 6. Young Friends from both the Philadelphia Hicksite and Orthodox yearly meetings had conferred in February and March about opportunities for relief work in Europe where the war had been stalemated almost since its beginning in the summer of 1914. The Committee’s purpose was at first limited. After the United States joined the Great War, it offered young male Quaker conscientious [End Page 1] objectors a way to serve the nation without joining the military. Its founders were primarily rather affluent Friends from the Philadelphia area; they came together as individuals representing only themselves, but they were very influential—the Quaker term is “weighty.” The Committee ultimately drew support from yearly meetings around the country, including the largest body of non-Hicksite Orthodox Friends, the Five Years’ Meeting headquartered in Richmond, Indiana.4 Its first statement showed that Friends appreciated the conflict’s broad popularity with the general population and were unwilling to repudiate it: “We are united in expressing our love for our country and our desire to serve her loyally.”5 From its origin until 1928, when the AFSC was incorporated,6 a Board of Directors made up of interested and available Friends set policy for the Service Committee; then until the early 1990s the Corporation, which met annually, chose Friends for the Board, but after 1993, non-Friends, if clerks of regional offices, might be named. And through most of that time the overwhelming majority of members of both bodies were Friends from Philadelphia and others within ready traveling distance of the City of Brotherly Love. The legal situation was, as the Service Committee’s longest serving executive secretary (twenty-one years) Clarence Pickett told an executive staff meeting in 1945, that “there is no legal connection between the S[ociety] of F[riends] and the AFSC.” “Theoretically,” he admitted, “the AFSC could become composed of non-Friends entirely.” Yet in his next breath Pickett insisted that one of the AFSC’s concerns was to foster the Society of Friends “in every way.”7 This statement clearly implied that the Service Committee and the Service Committee alone would determine how that fostering would be done and what it would look like. Questions of governance, decision-making, setting policy and priorities, were central to the criticism directed at the American Friends Service Committee through the years: on the one hand, evangelical Quakers insisted that a Friends’ organization’s sole purpose should be proclaiming the gospel of the risen Christ to non...