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Book Reviews63 appears in the Appendix, was written by Michael Frenzei, an East German resister who served time in a Communist prison. Several authors described the negative impact of prisons on inmantes and insisted that an enlightened society would find creative alternatives to incarceration as they had experienced it. Besides their intrinsic readability, these essays provide a useful reference tool for researchers studying a prison system based on the assumption that increasingly punitive tactics bring desirable results. Despite frequent use of severe punishment, including solitary confinement, only one of the resisters included in this anthology abandoned his pacifism. These Strange Criminals is must reading for any young man or woman considering a moral stand that might lead to a prison sentence. It will also help make visible the absolutist pacifists from past wars, for their stories constitute an important chapter in the much neglected history of active nonviolence. For collecting these memoirs, and contributing one of his own, Peter Brock has earned the thanks of all Friends and others who are working to end the horror ofwar. Larry Gara, EmeritusWilmington College The People of This Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia. By Paul Lyons. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. 288 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $39.95. The story of the New Left in Philadelphia is complex, tangled, ultimately both sad and inspiring. Paul Lyons tells it clearly and sympathetically in seven well-focused chapters. He weaves together a broad overview in the first and final chapters and documents the social activism fueled by the civil rights movement and the Vietnam anti-war movement, first on the Quaker campuses—some ofwhose students had traveled South and worked in predominantly African-American communities like Chester, Pennsylvania; then in the Catholic institutions La Salle, Villanova, and St. Joseph's; and in the commuter school Temple University and the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania. This leads on to his account of the emergence of two dominant organizations, the Philadelphia Resistance and People Against Racism. A large part of this story is Philadelphia itself, not only Quaker Philadelphia but also the city of small industries, homeowners, and neighborhoods spread over an extensive area. Lyons draws the sharp contrast between Quaker pacifism and patrician liberalism. . . .and Frank Rizzo, the high school dropout who becomes Police Commissioner and is twice 64Quaker History elected mayor. Rizzo is the urban populist and avenger, hero of the row house people and the ethnic communities who were convinced that they were getting nothing. Where was the war on their poverty? Readers of Quaker History will be especially interested in how Lyons assesses the impact ofQuaker activists and organizations on Philadelphia's New Left. The Philadelphia Resistance exemplifies a "prefigurative politics " of personal authenticity, living one's revolutionary values as one engages in revolutionary struggle, by establishing "the beloved community " and practicing participatory democracy. The Quaker organizations were "the backbone ofmuch ofthe movement," providing and subsidizing office space, equipment, and paid jobs. They were the ongoing, stable institutional that the New Left activists ridiculed, denigrated, exploited, but finally depended on. Readers will recognize many familiar names of organizations and individuals in the story: WILPF, SANE, AFSC, Friends Peace Committee, AQAG, FOR, CCCO, Stuart Meacham, Larry Scott, Robert Gilmore, Lillian and George Willoughby, Lynne Shivers, Charles Walker, Robert Eaton, Norval Reece, George Lakey, David Gracie, and many others who helped create a morally consistent, pragmatically grounded antiwar movement which avoided many of the ideological conflicts of SDS and other activist groups. Many factors contribute to the fall ofthe Philadelphia Left, among them an uncritical support of Maoism and Third World violent revolutionary movements, a readiness to romanticize any deviant behavior as resistance to bourgeois forms of social control, and an obliviousness, if not a contempt , for the suburbs and their mostly middle-class residents. The New Left could not connect with the row house and ethnic constituencies for whom Frank Rizzo spoke. But as Lyons tells it, this fall is also a fertile scattering of activists into new movements—feminism, gay rights, ecological concerns—and into social work, public health, law, medicine, teaching, and not least into careers in Quaker schools and the AFSC, where we...

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