Blanche Wiesen Cook and World Peace

A key aspect of the colorful and multifaceted life of Blanche Wiesen Cook has been her long-time work as a devoted supporter of world peace.

Little in her childhood prepared her for this role. Growing up in New York City during World War II and its aftermath, she did develop a vague sense that grievances fostered by one conflict ultimately would lead to another. Nevertheless, she had no contact with the peace movement of the era. Nor were her parents pacifists or political activists.¹

Instead, the groundwork for her peace advocacy developed from 1958 to 1962, when, as an undergraduate at Hunter College, she became a student activist. "We protested rigid silly dress codes," Blanche recalled, and also "protested HUAC, defended free speech, freedom of the press—even for students, real democracy. And we went south for freedom" (Cook 2009a, 54ff.).

Indeed, the struggle for racial justice provided the major factor that launched Blanche on her activist career. In the spring of 1960, shortly after the beginning of the student sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, Blanche and other Hunter students "marched, picketed, and sat-in." The following year, when Hunter's student government funded two buses for students to join the North Carolina protests, Blanche was on board. The students were "hosted and educated by the University of North Carolina and other area college faculty, the courageous students of Shaw University, and SNCC activists from all over. We … sat in, were harassed, briefly arrested, and let go." But, she noted, "our lives were changed forever. We had been taken on a tour of local conditions in schools, restaurants, hospitals. We witnessed the routine disrespect, the unimaginable horrors of hospital abuse—two birthing mothers to an unsheeted bed; mattresses on the floor; blood on the walls; agonies of pain" (Cook 2009a, 54ff.).

In the summer of 1961, Blanche was elected student affairs vice president of the National Student Association, and soon thereafter attended an NSA national congress, where she eagerly supported a resolution condemning racial segregation. When it failed to pass, she and other civil rights proponents felt devastated and decided to join a new, more compatible group, Students for a Democratic Society. She recalled: "Our hearts were now fully committed to SNCC activities and SDS organizing" (Cook 2009a; 2009b).

Along with this new activism and these new commitments came a growing belief in pacifism. The civil rights movement, after all, emphasized nonviolence. Furthermore, SDS took a critical view of war—as, increasingly, did Blanche, who felt the early rumblings and dangers of the war in Vietnam (Cook 2009b).

Graduate work in history at Johns Hopkins University, which began in 1962, reinforced her activist and pacifist tendencies. Although Johns Hopkins and the surrounding city of Baltimore were racially segregated, members of the History Department had considerably more avant garde views, and maintained a bail fund for student protesters from Hopkins and Morgan State. Prominent among these historians were Owen Lattimore, Charles Barker, and Frederick Chapin Lane. They and their friends invited John Hope Franklin, the African American historian, to join them at clubs and fancy restaurants for dinner and then sit in until they were served. Barker was also a leader of Baltimore's chapter of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. In 1963, he and Lattimore published Problems of World Disarmament, comprised of lectures they and others gave at Hopkins. Lattimore employed Blanche as his student assistant, and Barker became her Ph.D. advisor. Blanche recalled: "We had the commitment of our mentors to outlaw war, to study wars that did not happen, to create a nuclear-free world, and to integrate our profoundly segregated reality as much as possible" (Cook et al. 2009, 119–20; Cook 2009b).

And that's just what she did. Working to help Norman Thomas, the aging Socialist Party leader, straighten up his cluttered New York City office, she ended up being given the files of the American Union Against Militarism. These files, of one of America's most important peace organizations of the early twentieth century, soon became the research base for Blanche's...