Kingdom to Commune: Protestant Pacifist Culture between World War I and the Vietnam Era

6. Swords and Plowshares: PACIFIST ICONOGRAPHY

6 They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. —Isaiah 2:4 (KJV) Swords and Plowshares PACIFIST ICONOGRAPHY In an Armistice Day poster from about 1920, headed “Let Us Have Peace,” a motherand child sit enthroned in front of a semicircular border reminiscent of a halo, with a city skyline in the background. On one side of them stands a man holding a book; on the other, a man with a hoe. A dove hovers overhead. In the left foreground is a pile of the implements of progress, such as books and a telescope. The right foreground is dominated by a plow.1 An iconography of peace—a vocabulary of peace imagery—grew up with the interwar peace movement . In this poster we see many elements of that vocabulary : the dove; peace as a mother; the plow, perhaps “beaten” out of swords (Is 2:4); the allusion to familiar Christian iconography, here the Virgin Mary and the Christ child.We also see elements more characteristic of 1920 than of 1960: the city, which would have suggested to its viewers both the kingdom of God and the locus of human civilization; and the tools of scientific progress, symbols of peace for a modern era that had not yet encountered the atomic bomb. PACIFIST ICONOGRAPHY 90 Peace iconography was Christian insofar as it drew from the history of Christian art. It was Protestant insofar as it drew from existing Protestant cultural practices, such as the designing of church buildings, the display of artifacts from the mission field, or the use of familiar biblical references.2 Much of this iconography, however, also appeared in “secular” contexts. It was shared by pacifists and nonabsolutist peace workers and maintained continuity after World War II, even while a more distinctively pacifist iconography emerged alongside it. David Morgan, a historian of Protestant visual art, has argued that Protestant art has generally been tied closely to text. He notes that those ties began to loosen around the middle of the nineteenth century, as Protestants began not only to recognize but also to embrace the power of images alone. Protestant thinking did not undergo a complete reversal, however; Protestants remained ambivalent and often inarticulate about the power of images presented without verbal explanation. Morgan has also described the late-nineteenth-century “sacralization of art,” in which educated people began to attribute to art the powers of civilization, truth, and spiritual enlightenment. Art came to be seen as necessary food for the cultured soul and mind.The cultivation of taste and Armistice Day poster, source unknown, ca. 1920. Image courtesy of Swarthmore College Peace Collection; photograph by the author. Image Not Available PACIFIST ICONOGRAPHY 91 the transmission of an educated aesthetic sensibility became part of selfdefinition within the social class of which many mainline Protestants—including pacifists—were a part.3 So it is not surprising that the idea of beauty, the study of “high” art, and the use of visual symbolism were part of the lives and activities of many Protestant pacifists. Kirby Page strongly urged social activists to make “beauty” a part of their spiritual self-culture. Educated CPS men read Shakespeare or listened to classical music. Harold Gray went to the opera and eschewed jazz. In another sense, however, Protestant pacifism was thoroughlyaniconic. The pages of The World Tomorrow, for example, give no indication of a unifying visual language. There are sketches of important people, pictures of buildings, cartoons, and the like, but no overall pattern of visual references. The essays The World Tomorrow published on art were primarily concerned with fine or high art and its spiritual qualities, not with ways of developing art forms integral to social activism. Like Protestant culture generally, the culture of Protestant pacifism was strongly verbal. And yet, once one begins to pay attention, one sees Protestant uses of imagery everywhere. Stained-glass windows and neo-Gothic statuary developed iconographic languages for progress and peace. Mainliners produced greeting cards and postcards devoted to peace. Bruce Barton, son of a Congregationalist clergyman and author of The Man Nobody Knows, initiated the use of advertising techniques in peace activism—and the result wasWorld Peace Posters, later an influential organization called World Peaceways. This Protestant iconography remained, as Morgan suggests, closely tied to words—the biblical Word, explanatory words, liturgical words, and stories...