Female Speaker: From the Library of Congress in Washington,
D.C. Carolyn Brown: Well, good afternoon, everyone,
gives me great pleasure to welcome you here
for this wonderful book talk this afternoon.
I should introduce myself.   I'm Carolyn Brown.
I direct the Office of Scholarly Programs
and the John W. Kluge Center here at the Library of Congress.
And this afternoon we welcome back one of our wonderful Kluge Fellows
to talk about his new book which has just been published.
He did some of the work for it here at the Library so we are very proud
of Dr. Joseph Kip Kosek, known as Kip.
And the book that he's managed to complete --
I know how hard it is to do this --
the book is called "Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence
and Modern American Democracy."
Before proceeding, let me just remind you,
if you have a cell phone that's turned on or some other gizmo
that makes noise or might interfere with the recording,
would you please turn it off at this point.
And if you ask a question, you will be recorded,
so that's my official notice.
I'll say just a word about the Office of Scholarly Programs
in the Kluge Center for those of you who may not be aware of it.
The Center was established with a very generous gift
from John W. Kluge in the year 2000 with the goal of promoting
and supporting advanced research in the collections at the Library
of Congress, and also providing a venue on Capitol Hill where some
of the world's most distinguished senior scholars might come
into informal conversations with members of Congress.
The Center also provides opportunities for research
and writing for some of the very most promising junior fellows
from around the world.
Kip fell into that category last year when he was here.
The Center also sponsors book talks such as this one, lectures,
small conferences, and seminars.
You can find more about the programs and the research opportunities
by looking at the Library's Web page, very simple, www.LOC,
for Library of Congress, .gov.
And you can also sign up for a notification
of other Kluge Center events right on the front page
on the lower left hand corner.
Today, though, we get to hear from Kip Kosek about his book.
Kip is an Assistant Professor at George Washington University,
a graduate Ph.D. from Yale University
where his dissertation won a prize.
He was with us, as I said, last year.
And his book explores -- I'm going to quote a sentence
from the publisher's blurb on it --
"Explores how and responds to the massive bloodshed
that define the 20th century,
American religious radicals developed a modern form
of nonviolent protest, one that combined Christian principles
with new uses of mass media."
Most of us, when we think about nonviolent protest,
probably reference the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
Dr. Kosek, in his book, demonstrates that these were preceded
by the determined efforts of a militant nonviolent group
of Christian pacifists who took a strong stand against the use
of deadly force during the 20th century in --
which was, in some people's mind, one of the bloodiest centuries
in human history, and yet there were those
who were very strongly opposing and protesting, a group I think
that probably has been mostly forgotten
and probably underappreciated, and Kip will tell us more
about really how they were viewed.
When I asked him to give me some sense of the flavor of the book
and what I might tell you that might catch your interest,
he suggested a quote from the very beginning that talks of --
sort of sums up the relationship between the ideals and practicality
of the people that he writes about,
and a quote that in many ways summarized at least one
of the main themes of the book.
It comes from one of the key figures,
John Haynes Holmes [spelled phonetically],
and I'm just going to give you the quote.
The quote is, "I believe that in the degree that anyone is any good is
because he has both Don Quixote and Sancho Panza himself,
and somehow affects a creative synthesis of them."
It's a very interesting quote for us to keep in mind as we listen
to Dr. Kosek talk about his book.
Kip? [applause] Joseph Kosek: Thank you, Carolyn, for that introduction.
It's great to be here today.
I was a fellow last year as Carolyn told you, but, of course,
it's really only after I left
that I could appreciate what a privilege it was to be a part
of the wonderful community at the Kluge Center and to be a small part
of the intellectual work here at the Library of Congress,
this center of intellectual life
in the United States and really in the world.
And as a part of the Kluge Center with the range of fellows
that come in, you really realize that this is a global center
and not just for the United States.
So today I want to talk a little bit about my book, "Acts of Conscience,"
and I have a handout which most of you should've gotten.
But if you didn't get it, hopefully there's still some left somewhere
that you can grab.
This is a history of radical pacifism in the United States
from World War I to the 1960s, so focusing on a broader tradition
than just the '60s, or Vietnam War, or Civil Rights, and with a focus
on a radical religious pacifist group called the Fellowship
of Reconciliation, or the FOR as I'll refer
to them in the talk today.
The Fellowship of Reconciliation was formed during World War I,
and it later became involved in the Peace Movement,
but also the Labor Movement, the Civil Rights Movement,
and really what I'm really trying to look at, this broader debate,
this broader kind of discourse about the use of violence,
about the use of violence, the problem of violence,
the role of violence in Democratic societies
and in Democratic politics.
And I think the first question to ask is to stop
and say, "What's the point?"
Right? Why write about a group of people,
about a belief system that's apparently so marginal, right,
so irrelevant, so invisible, in a way, in our political scene?
We don't see a lot of pacifists around today.
Even people -- kind of left-leaning people, right,
it seems to me are more apt to be talking about economic justice
or racial equality or protecting the environment.
To talk about world peace or nonviolence,
it almost seems a little bit, I don't know, a little bit nave,
or a little bit quaint, or something like that.
Even Barack Obama, right, who campaigned
as the anti-war candidate, right, and always was sure
to mention his early and consistent opposition to the Iraq War,
really stressed in the presidential debates -- I mean, I noted this --
that the reason the Iraq War was a bad idea was
because it distracted us from the war in Afghanistan
and possibly things we need to do,
military ventures in Pakistan, right?
So Obama was at pains, right, to say that he favored the use
of military force, right, that he was not pacifist.
Nobody wants to be a pacifist, it seems like today.
So in light of this unpopularity of pacifism and nonviolence --
it may be kind of popular as a kind of general ideal, right, but no,
it's not popular in presidential campaigns
or in our political discourse, right -- in light of this unpopularity,
let me tell you how I got interested in this topic,
how I got myself into this mess.
I was no different than other people.
I wasn't a pacifist.
I still don't consider myself a pacifist.
I came to this project really as an outsider,
as a scholar, and as a historian.
I've met a lot of people now within this tradition,
people who really come out of Quaker traditions or, you know,
upstate New York, these other kinds of pacifist subcultures, right?
And I've been really moved by meeting them and talking to them,
but that wasn't my experience.
I really came at this from the outside.
I was generally interested in how religion had affected politics,
and how religion had affected social reform,
and I especially got interested in how religion had affected kind
of left of center politics, progressive politics,
radical politics, liberal politics, whatever word you want to use.
So that's what actually brought me first to look at these people.
It wasn't really pacifism and nonviolence.
But I discovered that a lot of religious politics
in the 20th century has involved these questions
of violence and nonviolence.
Questions of war and peace, the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement,
right, and other kinds of religious politics have been deeply involved
in thinking about the problem of violence.
And those questions of violence and nonviolence became more urgent soon
after I started this project.
I started this project, really, in early 2001, like the spring of 2001.
So in a really real way, September 11th, and the war in Afghanistan,
and the War in Iraq, the War
on Terror drastically changed the context in which I was writing
at a very early stage, and brought these questions, right, of war,
and violence, and democracy to the fore in a way
that they hadn't necessarily been in the 1990s.
So I eventually came to realize that we actually needed
to hear these voices, that even people
who didn't consider themselves pacifists,
and maybe especially non-pacifists, needed to understand this vision
of the world that these people were putting forth because, of course,
this recent terrorism, 9/11, the war on terror,
this was not the first crisis of violence,
and so far it's not the worst crisis of violence
that the United States has experienced, or the worst crisis
of violence that the world has experienced.
The entire 20th century -- I mean, we sometimes --
this is sort of obvious in one way, but we don't necessarily think
about it in another way -- that the entire 20th century was this kind
of human catastrophe, this catastrophe of violence,
especially the first half of the 20th century.
And estimates of how many people were killed
by this organized violence are almost impossible to figure out,
but some people have put the estimate
at nearly 200 million people killed by organized violence, war,
ethnic cleansing, genocide, and so on.
And you can work this out to several thousand a day,
for so many months, for so many years.
Okay? So this book -- and there's a book by Neil Ferguson called
"The War of the World," which kind of tries to understand --
a recent book by a scholar that kind of influenced me in trying
to understand this crisis of the 20th century.
And Ferguson argues that instead of understanding two world wars
that were pretty short, we should think of this as a kind
of 30-years war in the first half of the 20th century.
There was this incredibly brutal and violent upheaval.
So there's these questions of violence that come
up before the '60s, before Vietnam,
but are really going throughout the entire 20th century.
So this is a book that's really focused
on that problem of organized violence.
It is not so much about kind of personal interaction, like,
"What would you do if somebody punched you in the nose?"
but this is trying to think
about these large-scale crises of violence.
So the pacifists looked at this situation that was occurring
around them, these millions and millions of people being killed,
and they decided that the problem
of the 20th century was the problem of violence.
That wasn't what everyone decided.
And, of course, Du Bois has the famous line,
"The problem of the 20th century is the problem
of the color line," right?
Other people thought the problem of the 20th century was the problem
of communism, or capitalism, or imperialism.
But the pacifists said that the main problem
of the 20th century was the problem of violence, was what to do
about these 200 million people who were being killed by other people.
So they really turned the question
around that people usually asked the pacifists,
"What are you going to do about Hitler?
What are you going to do about Stalin?
What are you going to do about bin Laden?
Didn't we have to have a violent response to people
and movements like this?"
And the pacifists really turned this around and said, "What are we going
to do about this larger crisis of violence,
these 200 million people being killed in the 20th century?
And are the solutions that -- the solution to stopping Hitler,
or Stalin, or whoever it is, merely going to add to this body count
or are there ways that we have to stop this epidemic
of violence from occurring?"   There's a quote by A.J. Muste,
who was one of the major figures in this book.
And it's actually -- he's the one who said the Don Quixote thing.
I found it in the John Haynes Holmes papers.
But it was Muste who said it,
so I think I gave Carolyn a confusing e-mail about that.
But Muste was a major U.S. pacifist.
He was against every war from World War I to Vietnam.
He lived for a long time, and was incredibly active late in his life,
and was a great influence on the Civil Rights Movement, on the '60s,
the Labor Movement, pretty much everything.
But he said something and he wrote something in 1951 that struck me
as kind of a way of crystallizing the pacifist view of the world.
He says, "People in my age group -- " he was born in the 1880s --
he says, "People in my age group have moved since their graduation
from college in pre-World War I days out of what many regarded
as the dawn of the era of permanent peace into what may
with considerable accuracy be described
as an era of permanent war."
In 1951 Muste's writing about a situation of permanent war.
And that struck me because it seemed that this is also --
this idea of permanent war is present
in contemporary discourse, right?   We hear about the war on terror
as being referred to as a war without end.
But there's this sense of the modern world, the 20th century world,
and even 21st century world as being a world of permanent war
that is quite, like, powerful, and really seems
to describe something fundamental about the kind of politics
and global situation in which we live.
So in the end, when pacifists said
that eliminating violence was the most urgent modern project,
I had to take that seriously in light of the historical facts,
in light of those 200 million people killed.
I think we have to take it seriously, whether we're pacifists
or not, if we're honestly going to confront the facts
of the 20th century, the very violent 20th century.
So this isn't exactly a book that's trying
to convert people to pacifism.
It is a book that's saying we ought to listen
to what these folks had to tell us.   They may have been wrong sometimes,
and I think they were wrong sometimes, but what you can't say is
that they're irrelevant, or that they don't matter,
that they were kind of out of touch with the modern world.
It seems to me that if we take the problem of violence seriously,
if we see those couple 100 million people killed as a serious problem
that we have to deal with in thinking about politics and thinking
about democracy, then we have to wrestle with the responses
that these pacifists made,
even if we don't consider ourselves absolute pacifists, right?
So this tradition of Christian nonviolence was something
that I came to appreciate by thinking historically,
by thinking about the 20th century.
I wasn't so much interested in kind of abstract philosophical questions
of love and hate or, you know, categorical imperative or things
like -- I mean, I'm very interested in those,
but in this book I was more interested in how ideas
and practice went together, Muste's quote about Don Quixote
and Sancho Panza, right, how ideas and practice went together,
and how they went together in a crisis.
What did violence and nonviolence mean in a crisis, in an emergency?
This world historical crisis of the 20th century which is defined
by war, and genocide, and ethnic cleansing, and racial terror,
and all those things, but also the kind of personal consequences
of that crisis in the way that these people experienced
that very big crisis or set of crises in their own lives.
So a couple of examples of that, I mean, one is the example
of the cover, which you maybe can't see very well, but it has eight,
it looks like, clean-cut respectable Americans who are
in a police van being taken away to jail.
So it's kind of a jarring or puzzling image.
But these folks are -- were known as the Union Eight and they were people
who were conscientious objectors to World War II.
And when the World War II draft was started in 1940,
they refused to register, and one of the aspects of the kind
of 20th century crisis is the draft.
And the draft is something that's not really a living reality for me
or people of my generation, right?
But some of you will remember this as something
that affected your lives, and your vision of the future,
and your plans, and so on, right?
The draft is a reality for people who are born in, you know --
for much of the 20th century, the draft is a reality,
conscription is a reality, and this choice that you have to make,
this crisis in some ways that you have to confront very personally.
So one of the things I try to do in the book is think our way back
to this different time when we've largely forgotten
about the draft today.
We have to think back to a time when that was a very real thing.
So the Union Eight refused to register for the draft.
They were students at Union Theological Seminary
in New York City.
And what was a little bit strange about their action was
that they were exempt from serving in the military
because they were theological students,
and the government has this kind of interesting separation of religion
and war, right, that ministers and people training
to be ministers are exempt from serving in the military.
So all they had to do was fill out the form and say
that they were conscientious objectors, and they'd be exempt
because they were training to be ministers.
But they wouldn't do it.   They wouldn't fill out the form.
They thought that that was compromising
with the violent government.   And so they went to jail.
And there was a lot of debate, obviously,
over whether this was the right thing to do.
I mean, they're a very small proportion of all the people.
You know, vast majority of the people
who were drafted did fight in World War II.
This becomes a bigger issue in Vietnam when a lot of people refused
to register and burned their draft cards,
and we're all familiar with that.
But back in World War II it was very rare to not just sign
up as a conscientious objector, which people did,
but actually refuse to register at all, right,
take this most extreme position.
And, of course, they met a lot of criticism for that even
within Union Theological Seminary and in wider circles.
And, you know, people said,
"Wouldn't you be better off, you know, registering?
You could do a lot more good on the outside, you know,
rather than just sitting in jail."   But this was the choice, right?
This was the sense of, like, crisis, the sense of an emergency
that I was really interested in, what did you do when you had
to decide right now, right, to make this choice, not kind of abstractly,
"What do I think about, you know, violence,
you know, in an ideal world?"
or whatever, but "What are you going to do right now
when the draft registration form is in front of you?"
Another example, quite different, from the 1930s, a man, you know,
not well-known today at all, Howard Kester, who was working
for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and a pacifist,
and he was working, organizing and supporting unions in the South.
He was based in Nashville.
And he was working in Tennessee and in other places in the South.
And Kester got in a lot of trouble first of all
because he was organizing unions in the South
and the 1930s was very hostile to unions, to workers organizing,
as the South is still today to a certain extent.
And Kester also got in trouble
because he was organizing black workers as well as white workers,
and he really believed in racial equality.
So this was a guy who was kind of a marked man in the South,
organizing unions and promoting racial equality.
So Kester is working in the early 1930s supporting a miners' strike
in Wilder, Tennessee, feeding the miners, and so on.
And there's an interesting exchange between Kester in Tennessee,
and the New York Office of the Fellowship of Reconciliation
where they were based, the kind of head pacifists, interesting exchange
between Kester and this guy named John Nevin Sayre
[spelled phonetically].
And Kester's sending reports about, like,
what he's doing, right, in Tennessee.
So the New York office really likes what he's doing
and this union organizing and so on.
But they have some problems with what he's doing
because Kester mentions something about having bodyguards,
and that some of the people with him are carrying guns.
And so the New York office writes back and says, "You know what,
we are a nonviolent organization.   We don't go around carrying guns.
This is not what Gandhi would do."
And this is in the 1930s, people are just starting to get interested
in Gandhi, if you know about that history.
Gandhi's kind of becoming Gandhi in this period,
and becoming kind of world-famous.
"So this is a bad idea," the New York office says., "that you have --
you need to tell them to get rid of their guns."
And Kester writes back and he says, "You know, this is not India.
This is Tennessee.
And, you know, everyone has a gun and learns how
to shoot guns from a very young age.
And, you know, we're not out there shooting people, you know,
but I can't tell these people to get rid of their guns.
I mean, they're going to think I'm crazy."
Well, okay, so there's another problem.
Kester says he's using -- he mentions that he's using spies
and informants to attend Ku Klux Klan meetings and give him tips
because the Klan is one of the groups that's trying
to intimidate the strikers and opposing this miners' strike.
So the New York office writes back again and says you know what?
We are Christian people.
We're nonviolent people, and we deal with our adversaries, like,
openly, right, and sincerely.
We don't use spies, we don't use deception, we don't do kind
of underhanded things like that, so this is not a good idea.
So Kester writes back again with this great quote about --
he kind of defends his actions and he says,
"You may call this deception, but I call it hard common sense."
So this was a debate, right, over what nonviolence was
and what nonviolence meant in a crisis.
Again, a moment where you have to decide right now what are you going
to do, right, even where people's safety,
where people's lives might be on the line.
This is nonviolence under pressure, right, in an emergency.
And I was really interested in the choices that people made
and interested in actions, right?
And the book is called "Acts of Conscience," and it's a lot
about the ways that action and ideas influence each other, right,
the ways that action actually changes your ideas, right,
when you have to put them into action,
and the way that ideas guide action, right?
So I really came at this or produced this thinking
that there's not exactly a fixed definition of nonviolence,
that it's this dynamic thing, right?
Is it carrying guns but not shooting them?
Is it attending the Ku Klux -- is it spying on the Klan or not?
Okay? So this is really about a debate about an argument --
a series of arguments, a series of discussions,
and a series of actions, and choices, right?
So that's what I was kind of interested in,
is thinking about these broader questions of violence
and nonviolence, and force, and coercion, and things like that,
but also thinking about these very much
in specific historical circumstances and talking about people
who really had these choices to make, right,
these really difficult choices to make, and, "What did they do,
and how did they choose?"
So the book is -- there's kind of two parts.
And on one hand, it's about this very small kind
of vanguard of radical pacifists.
There's not very many of them, these kind of leaders
of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
But, on the other hand, the book kind of opens out to think
about this crisis of the 20th century,
and just to see the 20th century in maybe our own time in a new way
through the lens of these mostly forgotten people.
Okay? A few more specific things that I'm trying to do,
or kind of directions in this book, or larger significances
in this book: First, I think these folks present a kind of alternative
to the traditions of realism, Christian realism, liberal realism,
in thinking about political morality.
I think this is important because realism was prominent
in the Cold War, and it's kind of making a resurgence today.
It's often associated with Reinhold Niebuhr,
the great Christian theologian, right, and the great --
often seen as, like, the founder of Christian realism.
So Obama says that Reinhold Niebuhr is one of his favorite philosophers.
This is a great moment for historians
when the president starts talking about Reinhold Niebuhr and actually,
you know, people in one's book
because this doesn't happen very often.
So Reinhold Niebuhr emphasized that we live in a fallen world, right?
He emphasized kind of sin and evil in the world.
And he said, "Our values need
to inform our politics but there are limits.
We strive for justice, we try to make kind of partial gains,
we try to make the world somewhat better, right?
But we realize that there's limits on our actions,
that we can't be perfect, that we have to compromise in certain ways."
So Reinhold Niebuhr is a leading supporter of U.S. intervention
in World War II because he says, look, I mean,
bad things are going to happen, right?
People are going to be killed if we intervene.
But it's worse not to intervene.
It's worse to let things go on as they are,
so we have to do this kind of imperfect action.
What people don't always realize is
that Reinhold Niebuhr was a pacifist in the 1920s.
He was a leader in the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
He was deeply influenced by pacifism and vice versa.
And there's a lot of crossover between Reinhold Niebuhr
and the people I'm writing about.
So I got to talk to George Houser, who was one of the Union Eight,
and is 91 or 92 years old, and still going strong, by the way.
And he was telling me, "You know Reinhold Niebuhr was my professor
at Union Theological Seminary."
And he had taken a lot from Niebuhr, right, about how --
the necessity of struggle in the world,
about how there's sin and evil in the world.
So there's a lot in this book about Niebuhr and about the relationship
of pacifists and Niebuhr.
But there's fundamental differences between them.
The pacifists argued that Niebuhr's emphasis on pragmatism
and compromise actually kind of thwarted his moral intentions.
A.J. Muste was a particularly harsh critic of Niebuhr.
Muste said that once you start compromising, it's really hard
to stop, and that Niebuhr had kind of started off
as a religious prophet, you know, someone who kind of stood
in judgment of governments and politics,
but that he'd actually ended up kind of being an apologist
for the government, and that Niebuhr's position could kind
of be twisted to support whatever governments wanted to do, right?
We live in an imperfect world, there's sin and evil in the world.
We hate to do it, but we need to go bomb more cities, right?
And so you could carry out all kinds of violent actions
if you felt a little bit bad about it, right?
That's what Muste argued.
And so Muste says, "You have to take a kind of absolute position,
the kind of Don Quixote thing, right, even if it seems ridiculous,
because if you don't, you're going to cave in."
So there's this larger debate here about absolute values
and practical tactics, about the balance between idealism
and realism, and I think, like, given that we have this kind
of public moment when Reinhold Niebuhr is maybe having a little bit
of a renaissance, and it's important to kind of put him in the context
of the historical debate he was having with pacifists.
So that's one thing that I'm trying to do,
is think about traditions of realism and pacifism.
Of course, Muste and Niebuhr agreed on the importance of religion,
and the second focus of this book is on religion.
This is a book that tries to recover the history
of what I sometimes call the religious left.
I didn't use that term for a long time,
and I still don't really -- I don't really like it.
I'm not that comfortable with it
because I think religion doesn't necessarily go
in left-right categories, right?
What were the Union Eight for opposing World War II?
Were they on the far left?
Well, you know, the communist party ends up supporting World War II.
They're pretty far to the left, right?
You can't exactly say what opposing World War II would mean
on a left-right spectrum, right?   But for simplicity's sake, right,
we could say that this is kind of the religious left.
And so it's something different from the dominant religious politics
that we see, which is focused often on the religious right, right,
on abortion, debates over evolution, and so on, right?
Those people tend to get the most press, right?
And it's changing a little bit with the election of Obama
and his campaign drawing attention to kind of religious progressive,
but I think the religious right is still kind of the dominant way
that people think about religion in politics.
And that's why I gave you this cartoon from the book
because I think it's quite interesting to see a different kind
of religious politics and criticism of religious politics.
So this was a cartoon in the "New York Herald Tribune," I think,
which shows clerical pacifists, right, like, pacifist ministers,
and one of them is driving a spike into a cannon, which says,
"National defense," and presumably driving a spike
into the wrong place.
And there's Uncle Sam saying that this religious pacifist needs
to get back to church, needs to get back into the church up on the hill,
the implication being that this is where religion belongs,
that this is where religious people belong is in church, right?
And one shouldn't mix religion and politics in this way, right?
One shouldn't mix religion with the politics of national defense.
So what I think is so interesting here is that this is a criticism
of religious politics, but here it's, like, liberals, right?
It's people on the left who are involved in politics, right,
and being criticized for that, whereas usually it seems to me today
that we have people on the right getting involved in politics,
and liberals are usually the ones saying, you know,
that abortion is not a religious issue, that, you know,
teaching biology is not a religious issue, "Those people need
to get back to church," right?
But this is a time when religious liberals are seen
as overstepping the bounds.
So there's this question about the relationship of religion
and politics I think that actually goes back a long ways
in American history and is not just the post-1980 religious right.
So I'm trying to talk about that a little bit, too.
So this focus on the religious left I think has, you know,
somewhat upsetting things to say for some seculars
and for some religious people.
For secularists, what can be upsetting to them is that I want
to argue that religious people and religious ideals have been
at the heart of what we think of as liberalism,
progressivism, radicalism.
We sometimes consider liberals as being secular, right,
they live on the east coast in big cities,
therefore they must be secular.
But if you look at the liberal ideas of peace, economic equality,
the rights of labor, racial equality, the Fellowship
of Reconciliation is actually really quite central,
not that everyone always stays in it.
Reinhold Niebuhr leaves.
Norman Thomas, who's the socialist candidate for president in the '20s
and '30s, and lots of people actually, who can remember back
that far, come up to me and tell me Norman Thomas is this important
figure, you know, not just for socialists but just as kind
of representative of this position of dissent, right,
that people might not have agreed with but that they respected
in a certain way -- Norman Thomas got his start in the FOR.
And there's a lot of links to the Civil Rights Movement.
Bayard Rustin, who organizes the March on Washington,
gets his start in the FOR in the 1940s.
James Farmer, who's the founder of the Congress of Racial Equality
in the '60s, and kind of one of the most important Civil Rights figures
or sometimes called the Big Six after Martin Luther King,
gets his start in the FOR in the 1940s.
James Lawson, who leads the sit-in movement in 1960 in Nashville,
is a conscientious objector and a Fellowship
of Reconciliation secretary.
And King, too, joins the FOR after the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
So you can't understand, I don't think,
why the Civil Rights Movement happened the way it did
without understanding the radical religion of the FOR.
It's not that the Civil Rights Movement wouldn't have happened
at all, right, or that the FOR -- that radical pacifists created it.
But I think you can't understand the style and the kind of strategy
that the Civil Rights Movement undertook
without understanding this radical religious tradition.
It was a tradition that put the example of Jesus at the center
of its theology, not necessarily a literal belief in the Virgin Birth
and miracles, but kind of the story of Jesus,
and his death on the cross, and the way that violence might be powerful
but it didn't win in the end.
And the pacifists upset some religious people because they said
that to follow the example of Jesus meant to promote racial equality,
promote socialism, promote peace, and these weren't just ideals
but you had to put your body on the line.
You had to go to jail like the Union Eight for these things.
So I want to suggest that this radical religion is a serious
tradition that's not conservative evangelical because I think
that sometimes evangelicals and their opponents have tended to agree
that conservative evangelicals are, like, the most dedicated,
most engaged most intense religious people.
And sometimes liberals will agree with that, right, like,
"We don't want to be that intense and engaged," right?
And liberals are seen as, like, wishy-washy
and kind of lukewarm, right?
But so this tradition I'm writing about was intense, it was strenuous,
it was serious, you know, it was going to jail,
and it was politically and theologically liberal.
So that seems important to me, to kind of recover
that diversity in American religion.
So a kind of critique of realism, something about the religious left,
another aspect that I'm talking about seems directly opposed
to religion, and that's the emphasis of nonviolence on media,
on spectacle, on performance, so I think of this as acts of conscience,
not just religious acts, but actually that these are
in some sense actors, right, performing acts for an audience.
And this is upsetting sometimes to people who think of the pacifists
as saints, right, as purely virtuous religious figures.
But they also had a certain worldliness,
a certain cleverness, I would say.
And the 20th century is the age of not just unspeakable violence,
but also the age of mass media: magazines, newspapers, films,
radio, television, and so on.
And the problem of violence -- I mean, these are, like --
these things are connected, right?
The problem of violence is also really connected to the problem of
or the phenomenon of mass media, right, Abu Ghraib, right?
The photographs are kind of inseparable
from the acts themselves, or 9/11, right?
The pictures are inseparable from the acts themselves, right?
And so the pacifists were some of the first to think about how --
to confront the problem of violence,
you also had to confront mass media, right?
And they tried to create these nonviolent alternatives
that were not only religiously significant,
but also generated sympathy in the mass media and used mass media
as a kind of power, as a kind of force, even as a kind of coercion
that was an alternative to violent force.
And that's a second photo, which is this kind of famous photo,
after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, of Martin Luther King sitting
in the second row, sitting next to a Fellowship
of Reconciliation secretary named Glenn Smiley,
and they're riding the first integrated bus in Montgomery.
So this is in some sense a religious act, right, a kind of victory
for integration and for Christian nonviolence.
But if you read -- it's quite interesting
if you read what King and Smiley wrote.
Both of them comment on how many newspaper reporters,
and television cameras,
and photographers were there on this day.
And so this was really -- and they rode around buses all day.
You know, this was kind of a -- it was a media event,
this first day of integrated buses.
So if you think about -- so I try to think about, you know,
this picture -- you can look one way and see King and Smiley,
but we should also imagine kind of turning around,
and looking the other way, and seeing this group of photographers,
and reporters, and so on,
who are making nonviolence into a media spectacle.
This was not necessarily all to the good either,
but I think it was quite important.   And then the last point, I guess,
is about how nonviolence became a multiracial
and transnational project.
So I think that in some ways the focus on the Civil Rights Movement,
while that's obviously incredibly important
and in some ways the climax of my book, it's somewhat limiting, right,
because nonviolence is not just about the black church
or about Martin Luther King, it's connected to all these other things,
too, to imperialism, colonialism, Labor Movement, war,
things that precede the 1960s.
And I was especially interested in the exchange
between the United States and Gandhi and India.
So I'll give you two examples of people
who made this transnational exchange.
One was Richard Gregg, a Harvard educated person
who started his career as a labor lawyer, and was involved in this --
in early 20th century capital and labor struggles
which were very important, you know, all through the --
I mean, for most of the 20th century, right?
And he kind of got disillusioned with the conflicts
within the Labor Movement and kind of the repression
by government and business.
But he read about Gandhi, and he got very interested in Gandhi,
and he decided he'd go to India and see what this was all about.
So he sailed in 1925 actually before Martin Luther King was born,
and kind of hung out with Gandhi for a long time, you know,
for several months, and went around India to see what was going on,
came back, and wrote about this, wrote a book called
"The Power of Nonviolence" in 1934.
And Martin Luther King talked about "The Power
of Nonviolence" several -- or wrote about it as one
of his most important influences.
I mean, we think of King as being influenced by Thoreau
and other people like that because no one knew who Richard --
no one knows who Richard Gregg is, but King knew who Richard Gregg was.
And Gregg's interpretation of Gandhi, and Gandhi
and nonviolence was very important.
There's another guy who kind of went the other way.
He had a longer name, Krishnalal Shridharani, who was an Indian
who marched with Gandhi in the famous 1930 March to the Sea,
where Gandhi marched for several days, and then picked
up a handful of salt, right.
Shridharani came over to the United States, and studied at Columbia,
and wrote a book about nonviolence called "War Without Violence",
and was a great influence on people like Jim Farmer and other Civil --
or kind of early Civil Rights leaders.
And Farmer has a very interesting account where he talks about going
to see Shridharani and expecting to see someone who looked like Gandhi,
kind of skinny, and short, and emaciated, right?
But Shridharani shows up in a three-piece suit,
and he looks well-fed and he's smoking a cigar and he's quite,
quite different from what Farmer had expected.
And so I'm interested in him and in Gregg
because they show how nonviolence changed, right,
that it was an ongoing process, right, like,
Shridharani was not Gandhi, Richard Gregg was not Gandhi,
they adapted nonviolence, they changed it.
And they also show how there's this very interesting kind of multiracial
and transnational thing going on where Indians, and white Americans,
and African Americans are all kind of influencing each other
in these very complicated ways, right?
So this is a project that's kind of full --
or a story that's kind of full of twists, and turns, and surprises.
And I think that sense of surprise is what I'd leave you with today
because in many ways this is a book about people trapped
by forces larger than themselves, World War I, World War II, you know,
capitalism, these huge things.
It's a book about some pretty discouraging things,
but these people exercised agency
and creativity I think in remarkable ways.
The Union Eight, you know, nobody expected the Union Eight to go
to jail for opposing World War II.
Nobody expected Richard Gregg to kind of drop his career as a lawyer
and sail to India to see what was going on with Gandhi.
And no one expected Martin Luther King, a young black minister
in Montgomery, Alabama, to lead --
you know, in the Deep South to lead a bus boycott in 1956, right?
So there's something here about the surprises of history, right?
And so along with the overwhelming violence that I've tried to stress
to you, I try to convey a sense of possibility.
And I think with that tension between crisis and creativity,
I'll stop and see what you have to say.
So thank you.   Carolyn Brown: Questions?
Male Speaker: I have a question.   I have a lot of [inaudible].
The only folks you seem not to have mentioned
in the American peace tradition comes
from the more conservative Evangelical side,
mainly the Mennonites, the Anabaptist strain.
And I'm wondering if you saw that as contributing in any significant way,
or as that just simply being something off to the side
to the development of what you're talking about.
Joseph Kosek: Right.
No. That's a great question about the kind of conservative --
what I call the sectarian tradition,
the sects of the Mennonites, and Brethren, and so on.
I mean, they're very important to this story
in the history of American pacifism.
They're the ones that set up, for instance,
the alternative service camps in World War II
in working with the government.
It's interesting because there's a certain -- in some ways there's a --
they're not a group that I talk about a lot, they're not my focus --
in some ways they're working together with these people,
and some of these people come out of those traditions.
In some ways there's a certain tension
between those more conservative Mennonites,
and other Christian groups, and the people that I'm talking about.
I'll give you an example, during World War II,
there's a Mennonite named Guy Hershberger who writes a book --
it's "War, Peace, and Nonviolence", I can't quite remember the title,
but it's -- because he actually criticizes the folks
that I'm writing about, because he says,
"This is not really nonviolence, you know.
Nonviolence is, like, not resisting evil.
It's not doing these kind of militant actions
that are coercing people into adopting your position,
like boycotts, sit-ins, and so on."
Right? He says something like, you know, Paul would not have --
the apostle Paul would not have engaged in a hunger strike, right,
in order to try to convince --
try to, you know, convince people to adopt his position.
But in some ways these people in the FOR had gone too far in some ways,
that even though they weren't killing people,
that there was something violent about this kind of militant form
of action that Hershberger and I think a lot
of other Mennonites were uncomfortable with.
And they were a little more -- they were a little more suspicious,
I think, of getting involved in politics at all, right,
that the state was kind of evil and it was important
to kind of keep your distance.
So there's actually really interesting tension
and that's what's important.
This is such a rich tradition with lots
of different accents, I guess, within it.
Yeah. Female Speaker: Yes, I think you -- it has been very interesting.
I wanted to note that there was a lot of mainstream church opposition
to the Iraq war invasion even from Methodists, and Presbyterians,
and others because obviously it was seen
as not a defensive just war by many.
But I also wanted to ask if you would comment on the Berrigans
and the Catholic Worker Movement, and if you thought they were related
at all to the FOR tradition.
Joseph Kosek: Right, about the Berrigans and the Catholic piece
of all this, I discussed them a little bit,
and they're especially important in the 1940s and on.
They come in a little bit later, and a lot of them come
out of Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker Movement, which begins in the 1930s,
and really in remarkable ways creates this Catholic pacifist
subculture within the Catholic Church
that is quite vibrant by the 1960s.
The Berrigans raise, again, these interesting questions
about the definition of nonviolence,
especially in their Catonsville 9 action where they take draft files
out of a draft office, and take them into a field,
and burn them with homemade napalm.
There's actually a great video of this,
which was just discovered a couple years ago,
which I show in my classes of this being done.
So and then beyond that they go, you know, underground, right?
The FBI is chasing Daniel Berrigan, and he's hiding out.
So there's all these complicated questions about, like,
"Does destruction of property count as nonviolence?"
in other words, destroying draft records.
Daniel Berrigan says, you know, famous line,
"We apologize for the burning of paper instead of children," right,
saying that the destruction
of property can still be nonviolent, right?
But other people were less comfortable with that, right?
And also, this was a much more direct defiance, right,
of the federal government, and not even just, like, the government
of Mississippi, which the Civil Rights Movement had done,
but actually defying the FBI, right, hiding out from the FBI.
So and also, it was shocking, right?
I mean, the Union Eight were kind of like -- there was a certain, like,
image of respectability, right, whereas the Berrigans had these kind
of almost, like, blasphemous imagery of, like,
pouring blood on draft files, fire, right?
So I think it's really interesting, again,
the way that nonviolence is not this one thing, but is this category,
this thing that get's argued about, where the limits are, right,
Male Speaker: You spoke about the media in the 20th century.
When it became relatively concentrated
and a few large news organizations controlled, three controlled all
of the television and most of the radio,
and a few large organizations controlled most of the print.
Do you see in the churches and in the media any notion
that concentration of power tends to bring that group down on the side
of opposition to nonviolence, or rather that nonviolence tends
to bloom in organizations that aren't concentrated,
with the exception of the Berrigans who clearly were not agents
of the Catholic Church, and a few others in that period?
The Catholic Church by and large politically has been
on the conservative side, not part
of the religious left you referred to.
And most of the religious left, it seems,
has come from non-concentrated local churches.
Is that generally so, or is it just an anecdotal observation?
Joseph Kosek: Yeah.
So, yeah, so let me -- I mean, there might be two things there, right,
one about the role of mass media, right,
and I think that sometimes the pacifists had a little --
the ones that I'm writing about had a little bit --
sometimes they had a too optimistic view of mass media, right,
and didn't quite realize that the media --
the media seemed promising to them, right,
as this alternative of power, right?
But they didn't quite -- I don't think they entirely took
into account the way that the media itself could be controlled
and manipulated or closed to certain voices.
I mean, one of the things they did was try
to create these alternative media, so in the book I have a picture of,
like, a comic book that they did and distributed in the South,
and tried to do their own kind of forms of communication.
But the other point was about religion, right,
and the fact that most religious groups, churches,
denominations were not pacifists, and that was actually one
of the major things that these folks tried to do was try
to persuade people in the world of religion, right,
and religion is this incredibly powerful force in American life,
right, and so this was something that they took as kind of one
of their special missions was to, you know,
if you could convince actually churches and religious people
of the importance of this, that,
that would actually be a really powerful thing
and they were constantly frustrated because it was, like, you know,
not even Christians were pacifists,
that religion was actually a major obstacle to --
or a major supporter of violence in certain ways.
So there's, like, a debate within religious communities here, too.
Female Speaker: Did American pacifists
on the whole have a view about nationalism?
Joseph Kosek: About nationalism?   They were -- they tended to think --
it's very complicated because they tended to think of themselves as --
they generally saw nationalism as destructive, even though --
or as problematic, even though they --
I mean, they thought of themselves as Americans,
as supporting the best traditions of the United States.
But they were also very committed to internationalism and to thinking
about a kind of global situation, right?
And this also created problems or dilemmas for them because for a lot
of people -- well, in the World War II situation, right,
there's this debate which is often framed as the internationalists
who were in favor of intervention and the isolationists who said,
"America first, we're going to build, you know,
a wall around our country, we're just going to worry about us,"
right, "Let's not get involved."
And the people in my book were kind of like not
in either of those camps, right?
They considered themselves internationalists, right?
It's Richard Gregg going to India, and so on,
all these connections, right?
They weren't really in league with the isolationists who, you know,
wanted to just worry about America and were often involved in, kind of,
conservative, kind of, reactionary causes, right?
So the pacifists were internationalists in that sense,
but they weren't internationalists in the sense
of favoring military action abroad.
So they often got, like -- it wasn't clear where to put them exactly,
and there was always this --
there was always this tension between a real concern
with the wider world that they definitely had, but not with --
undertaking military ventures with the wider world.
So then where did that -- where did that leave you?
But it was a complicated problem for them,
the problem of nationalism, yeah.
Yeah. Male Speaker: Hi, thanks for the talk.
It was really interesting.
I have a kind of complicated question
which I'll do my best to make clear.   Joseph Kosek: I'll get out my pen.
Male Speaker: You talk about the relationship
between what you call absolute values and kind
of concrete practical realities.
And I guess my complicated question is a sort of set of doubts
about whether that's a helpful way to think about these people or life
in general, and that maybe a kind of conceptual practical reason
in which actual people face actual decisions about how to act,
and beliefs about values, beliefs about facts of the matter,
and beliefs about causality all kind of imbricate
into each other are involved, and that this may be --
it seems to me, put to different gloss [spelled phonetically]
on the different strategies for dealing with the, you know,
as you say the terrible violence of the 20th century
that you've outlined, because one key thing for religious people is
that the afterlife might come into it.
And we don't talk about that
in contemporary political deliberation really.
It's not an acceptable rhetorical strategy to say, "Well,
if we do this, the world will be better but we're all going to hell,"
and that it's much easier to prioritize the right over the good
if you've got an afterlife which means that, in fact,
prioritizing right over the good is the thing that leads you
to be best off in the end anyway.
And if we don't have an afterlife, maybe these disagreements are really
about causality in the sense of, the question is,
"How on Earth do we stop this appalling violence?"
And the realists, of course, believe that one of the least plausible ways
to stop it is just to wash your hands of it, and stand back,
and say, "I'm not going to engage in this violence."
And to the extent that that's convincing
at the wealthy [spelled phonetically] level,
or there isn't an alternative causal strategy, I suppose I have doubts
as to whether this kind of pacifism really is relevant to our situation.
I mean, you made me think of another period of appalling violence,
of the religious wars in Europe following the Reformation,
and the political obligation theories that came out of that.
They were sort of all about massive concentrations of coercive power.
They weren't about opting out.
The view of Hobbes or Locke was that the only way to deal
with the permanent war they just experienced was
to have a much greater organization of the [unintelligible]
for violence, that the problem is perhaps disorganized violence,
and that maybe the situation we faced
in the 20th century is a greater technological capacity
for disorganized violence outside the bounds of an effective monopoly
on coercive power, and that to the extent
that all those causal things are involved unless we have an afterlife
to allow us to prioritize doing the right thing
over not leaving the Earth a desert,
then maybe these Christian pacifists really don't have a lot to tell us.
Joseph Kosek: Yeah, that is a complicated question.
[laughter] So let me maybe not answer it,
but say a couple of things.
I mean, I think they're not -- I think the position of --
I think the focus on the afterlife is possibly more of, like,
the conservative Mennonite position.
I'm not sure how much these folks believed in kind
of a literal afterlife in which your personality would --
your soul would live on in Heaven.
And there's actually someone who wrote a book, Cynthia Eller,
about conscientious objectors, and actually argued
that conscientious objectors, even though we think of them as being,
like, "I'm going to do what's right no matter what happens
in the world," right, "because this is what's right,
and this is what God said," and so on, right,
that actually when she interviewed them, she found that they --
or when she read their memoirs -- that they actually --
when we really asked them, they did have this conception
that ultimately this was going to make the world better in some --
you know, in this world, make this world better in some ways, right,
because you couldn't have, like, bad actions.
There's this belief that bad actions will not lead to good results.
So I think actually they --
I think for these folks they actually believe that it's going
to -- that it's going to work -- that it's going to work,
you know, in this world somehow.   But, yeah, I take your point.
I mean, the other thing is, I think that they really wanted to --
that by the 1940s and --
kind of there's this kind of second generation of this in the 1940s
and 1950s, that they were really trying to think about violence
as something -- that they're trying to make distinctions between, like,
violence, and coercion, and things like --
or, like, violence and force, and that there was -- it wasn't that --
it wasn't that you were going to be nice to everyone, right,
or it wasn't that, like -- it wasn't that you weren't --
you weren't going to exercise power, or force, or even coercion,
but that you weren't going to exercise violent power.
So they're really trying to think about how power and violence were
like two separate things, so that there was a kind of, like --
there was a kind of -- the kind of practical part was
that they were still going to use power, right, which you can see
in the Civil Rights Movement in certain ways.
But I agree with you that there are some problems definitely
with their position in the end, yeah.
Male Speaker: We need to comment on the question.
As a conscientious objector for the Vietnam War myself,
when I heard the statement about the significance of the afterlife
in the formulation of all these positions, I couldn't but be amused.
And also as an anthropologist,
there is no Christianity there, just Christianities.
There are hundreds and hundreds of them out there.
And the number of people who are motivated by the notion
of some glistening afterlife in terms
of which all current action is calculated, sorry, folks,
that's just a small portion of the crowd out there.
You can take many, many numbers of quotes from Jesus
that have passed the redline tests of the Jesus scholars
as being most likely true.
And there are numbers of instances where, basically,
he claims what he's working towards is the presence of the kingdom,
and when he's there doing his agape love thing, that's heaven,
that's it, the presence of the kingdom is agape love now,
whoever's practicing it wherever they're practicing it.
It doesn't have to do with pie in the sky when I die.
It has to do with transforming the present by trying
to apply Matthew 5, which no one's ever managed to do anyway.
Male Speaker: Thanks.
I just have a simple question to relate to things.
One is just, in the discourse that you look at,
I just wondered how these pacifists actually articulate --
I mean, this is a silly question,
but how do they articulate what is bad about violence?
I mean, what kind of theory underlies reasons
to be, kind of, nonviolent?
I mean, we could think of psychological theories now
where people say violence is bad because it begets these effects.
So that's just one question.
And the second thing is, given the 200 million body count
that you mentioned, how do people account
for the existence of violence?
I mean, again, what kind of theories did they use
to actually explain its -- the fact of existence.
Joseph Kosek: Oh, yeah, two really good questions, and, I mean,
obviously this is a group that's actually very intent
on being, you know, individual.
So they have all different theories, and ideas, and so on.
You know, I think what I'd say about that is,
yeah, "Why was violence bad?"
You know, one of the things that they talked
about because they were trying to argue --
you know, ultimately their most important
and interesting arguments were not against the equivalent
of Dick Cheney or whatever.
Their most important and interesting arguments were against, kind of,
other people on the left, right, or other liberals, or Marxists,
or whatever, right, who were not like militarists,
but believe that sometimes violence would be okay, right?
And so what they tended to stress was the kind
of uncontrollable nature of violence
or that violence would develop its own, kind of, autonomous logic,
so even granting -- like, even if you could, you know,
kill five people and say, you know --
even if theoretically it was morally okay to, like, kill five people,
and save a country, or whatever, right, that it never worked
like that, right, that there was always this kind
of continuing cycle, and that violence would always kind
of trump whatever noble causes or ideologies were originally --
it was originally supposed to further.
So that was really their argument with Niebuhr because Niebuhr says,
like, you know, if could use, like, a little bit of violence for awhile
to secure justice, like that would be good, right,
like that would be a good tradeoff, right?
And the pacifist's response was, like,
"That's never the way it works," you know?
And Muste is actually someone in the '40s who writes
about what's called -- you know,
what we later called the military-industrial complex,
saying that getting involved in World War II is going
to create this, kind of,
self-perpetuating machine that's both economic and --
and this is not Vietnam, this is World War II,
when he's writing this -- that it's kind of economic, and political,
and going to have its own logic.   So that idea was really important.
And I think for, like, where violence came from, I mean,
they really -- you know, they will make attempts
to talk about human nature.
They generally have a kind of positive view of human nature.
And I think they really focus on,
kind of like modern political imperial government systems, right,
that those are where the worst violence happened, that --
these fairly kind of recent developments.
I mean, they were less -- they were not --
I think they really did differ with Niebuhr
in that Niebuhr had a much more kind of pessimistic view of human nature,
that there was always kind of evil and sin in all of us,
and we could never really overcome that.
I think the pacifists at bottom had a kind of optimistic view of,
you know, kind of, at bottom of human nature which is part of that.
And then this is the period when ideas
about human nature are very important, right,
and people are really thinking about that.
[inaudible]?
Male Speaker: [inaudible] Jacques Ellul fits [spelled phonetically]
very -- Jacque Ellul, the French political scientist, theologian,
philosopher, Mayor of Bordeaux, resistance fighter,
fits into the very theme you're talking about.
He was pretty conservative, he was Catholic --
I'm sorry, he was Protestant Reformed but French --
and came out against violence in his book on violence
after having been in the resistance.
Have you found any of his contributions?
He also wrote "The Technological Society,"
also arguing the same point you say Muste raised.
I'm wondering if there's anything that he wrote
in maybe the dozen books that he put out on the --
several on your topic that you found germane
to the development of your thesis.
Joseph Kosek: I mean, I haven't read his work so much.
I mean, I've been -- so his work --
would he go back -- how far does he go back?
Male Speaker: His first book's from the '40s.
Joseph Kosek: Yeah.
Male Speaker: [inaudible] books, "Propaganda:
The Political Illusion" were heavily used in classrooms
through [spelled phonetically] the '60s.
Joseph Kosek: Okay.
Yeah. I mean, we have the -- and a lot of this develops --
comes to fruition, you know, in the '60s, but there's this interesting,
kind of, prehistory that I'm trying to show
that these issues are really back before the '60s, you know,
throughout the 20th century.
But I should really read more of this because I've only dipped
into it, and I haven't done sustained reading of him, yeah.
Female Speaker: I think we should bring this to a close.
And [inaudible] wonderful presentation
and an excellent really interesting discussion against violence
and peaceable [inaudible], arousal [spelled phonetically],
that's what you got an amazing topic.
And we really appreciate your coming back to do this and the discussion,
and hope you'll stay part of our community.
Joseph Kosek: Thank you.
[applause] Female Speaker: This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at LOC.gov.   [end of transcript]