Here on the Edge: How a Small Group of World War II Conscientious Objectors Took Art and Peace from the Margins to the Mainstream

Chapter 7: No Use for War

106 C H A P T E R 7 No Use for War shortly after the fine arts school officially opened in March 1944, they were joined by Waldo Chase, a largely self-taught artist and craftsman from Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, as their first visiting artist-in-residence. Chase, a forty-five-year-old pacifist who followed a simple and cooperative lifestyle, quickly gained popularity with his classes in drawing, color woodblock printing, and weaving with a loom. His beginning drawing class brought in some twenty participants representing every disparate group in the camp. They met three days a week over a two- to three-week period, first drawing simple objects like blocks of wood, chairs, hands, and feet; then they progressed to drawing live models, using pencil and charcoal. The works may not have been particularly accomplished, but the classes were an excellent introduction for those unfamiliar with the arts, and invited at least interest and perhaps participation in the new school.1 Within its first month, the Fine Arts presented an exhibit of paintings and sketches in the dining hall, and also presented their first concert and recital in the chapel. The Friday night show featured Glen Coffield (in apparently his last Waldport performance) chanting a long poem titled “The Chinese Nightingale” by the troubadour poet Vachel Lindsay, a duet of Handel’s “G Minor Sonata” with Warren Downs on cello and Bob Scott on piano, and a dramatic reading by Everson, Hackett, and Jim Harman adapted from Thomas Wolfe’s novel, Look Homeward, Angel. Part of the Fine Arts mission was to treat the work as professionally as possible, no matter when or where it was presented, so they mimeographed a program titled “The Fine Arts at Waldport: First Showing” and included a list of the players and works being performed. They also couldn’t resist taking a swipe at government bureaucracy, offering a short summary of the Fine Arts so far, in which they referred to Washington, DC, as a “Morass” and a “Labyrinth.” It had been a month since the Fine Arts officially opened, yet no transfers had been approved, they said. So the current artists would have to do. “But look,” they asserted, “here no use for war 107 is what we do have: the tongue, the ear, the discerning eye. Let us foster the act that awakes them.”2 Warren Downs noted in his diary the next day, “Concert or recital or exhibition of ‘The Fine Arts at Waldport’ was adequately successful. Glen was fine. His sing-song tremulous voice was hypnotic in its conveyance of the antiquity, patience and wisdom of old China.” Hackett and Harman and Everson were fine, too, he said. “It was rather deep though.”3 A more ambitious show followed in April, with interested campers joining the cast. Norman Haskell gave a reading from iconic Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, followed by Art Snell’s vocal performance of works by Debussy and Verdi accompanied by Downs and Scott on cello and piano. The final act was a synthesis of readings from John Dos Passos’s U.S.A., a trilogy of novels published throughout the 1930s that employ a combination of cinematic description, internal monologue, biography, and multiple-plot narrative to convey the increasingly complex and contradictory elements of life in America during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Edwa Everson, on a recent visit to the camp, had designed a backdrop for the show—a collage of bold images featuring an American flag pennant, the British Union Jack, a portrait of Woodrow Wilson, a hand holding a giant bag of money, an airplane dropping bombs, Christian crosses, a burning candle, and a heavily muscled working man—all connected by abstract ribbons of color, like a river—or maybe blood—flowing behind the symbols. Jim Harman, Everson, and Bill Eshelman sat in simple chairs before the scene, portraying different An early Fine Arts show: dramatic reading from U.S.A. by John Dos Passos. L-R: Harold Hackett, Jim Harman, Bill Everson, Bill Eshelman. 108 here on the edge characters—sometimes reading slowly and deliberately, and other times jumping up and shouting their lines—as Hackett narrated from a podium to the side.4 Downs duly reported in his diary that Haskell gave a “sensitive reading” of Pushkin, and that the U.S.A. presentation was a “smoother performance” than the previous month’s...