"Concise" history of AFSC

[Larry Ingle]

A couple of requests for that "consise" history of AFSC have come in, not a
landslide to be sure but enough to merit sending these words from an
article, "The American Friends Service Committee, 1947-1949:  The Cold War's
Effect," that I did for Peace & Change for its January 1998 issue.  I have
cut five or six notes.

    "The American Friends Service Committee came into existence less than a
month after the United States entered the first World War.  Organized by
Quakers in Philadelphia to give young Friends of draft age an opportunity to
serve their country in ways not requiring violence, it continued after the
war as an agency helping to relieve suffering caused by the conflict, both
in France and Germany, as well as in the revolutionary Soviet Union.  Its
early close ties to Herbert Hoover, a Quaker and principal founder of the
Commission for Relief in Belgium in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson¹s Food
Administrator after 1917, Secretary of Commerce in two subsequent
administrations, and then President himself from 1929 to 1933, assured it of
high repute with governmental officials and inevitably colored its future
relief and rehabilitation efforts at home and abroad.  During and after the
Great Depression the transition from relief to reconstruction work in
coal-mining regions and among African-Americans was a natural one.  That it
won the public endorsement of the now-defeated Hoover strongly testified to
AFSC¹s programs¹ appeal even to ostensible conservatives:  ³you are taking
half-starved, discouraged families,² wrote the former President in a
fund-raising letter to purchase land for an experimental community in
Pineville, Kentucky, ³and through developing a self-sustaining economy you
are giving to them a hope in life; and you are solving a most difficult
economic problem in an American way.²

    "To better inform Americans on issues of foreign policy, the Committee
organized ³peace caravans² of young college students to initiate discussions
of pacifism and foreign affairs in local communities more than a decade
before the outbreak of World War II.  It sponsored ³institutes of
international relations² where educational and church leaders convened to
explore with public officials similar concerns.  Eschewing overt politics,
such efforts were, as the AFSC¹s Executive Secretary explained, based on the
Quaker belief that ³peace could [not] be superimposed from above² but had to
³grow out of the hearts of the people,² in much the same way as one¹s
religious conviction might motivate peace work.  Similarly, in European
capitals, Quaker International Centers or ³Embassies² offered Friendly sites
where students and others could meet freely and get to know each other as
individuals; they formed the major part of the Committee¹s foreign program
before 1941.

    "When conscription began prior to Pearl Harbor, AFSC found itself
administering some of the Civilian Public Service camps providing
³alternative service² for conscientious objectors to the draft.  AFSC
enthusiastically supported this concept at first but soured on its
unaccustomed task, which turned the Committee into an agency trying to force
often rigid rules on recalcitrant objectors wanting meaningful work.  Within
months of the liberation of Europe following the Normandy invasion of June
1944, AFSC undertook to send food, clothing, and bedding to the millions of
refugees displaced by marauding armies.  Its cooperation with the United
Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration gave it a semi-official
status, while work under its own red and black star symbol turned out to be
less extensive than the ones it mounted following the first World War."

One of the things my article attempted was to show how the Cold War,
receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, and the 30th anniversary commemoration in
1947 and their effects were so important for the AFSC in moving it in a more
poltically oriented direction.  Since then, the AFSC dropped its workcamp
program, which had attracted hundreds of Quaker and other youth to work with
usually lower class people, increased the numbers of non-Friends in its
service--today less than 15% of the staff is Quaker, an amazing figure--taok
much more overt political stances, and embraced an affirmative action
program that never included Quakers.

During my research in AFSC's archives, I found that AFSC was sending out
workers who knew little or nothing about Quakerism or its roots and hence
gave a different coloring to the entire effort, as compared with previous
staff members.  What its leadership apparently desired was to maintain the
Quaker name as a way of making its cachet appealing to potential
contributors, even as its work was hardly distinguishable from that of more
secular agencies.  But that's getting over into the area of judgments.

As I mentioned, there are lots of specific examples that have given various
commentators pause about the way AFSC has operated in the past 20 years or
so.  But we can leave them aside for the moment.

Larry Ingle