Some Form of Peace: True Stories of the American Friends Service Committee at Home and Abroad (review)

Book Reviews119 Some Form of Peace: True Stories of tL· American Friends Service Committee at Home and Abroad. By Marvin R. Weisbord. New York: Viking Press. 1968. 168 pages. $5.95. This is a realistic and dramatic presentation of the range of the labors of the American Friends Service Committee since its founding. It is written by a nonpacifist admirer who has painstakingly sought out background data and the vivid day-to-day events in the lives of selected participants in seven different chapters of the Committee's fifty-year history. Weisbord writes well, selects colorful yet representative persons as his dramatis personae, catches the human misery or desolation or prejudices which prompted a given AFSC venture, and makes the most of the occasional striking break-throughs in achievement, after long labor and against frustrating odds. The first twenty pages are devoted to the initial work of the AFSC in France from 1917 to 1920. Focusing on the attitudes, experiences, and accomplishments of Edward Webster, young Quaker engineer from Frankford, Pennsylvania, the author presents a masterful sketch of the medical work, house construction, and agricultural reconstruction carried on in the region around Sermaize, which had been pulverized by the German offensive. Memorable glimpses are given of surgeon James Babbitt; of the heroic Quaker evacuation of the helpless as the Germans reconquered the area in 1918; and of the efficient, large-scale post-war distribution, under Leslie Heath's canny management, of United States dumps of lumber, wire, tools, and farm implements. Subsequent chapters tell of the birth of the influential national Mental Hygiene Program out of the Civilian Public Service work in mental hospitals during World War II; of famine relief in Russia in 1921 and 1922 (AFSC distributing food provided by Hoover's American Relief Administration); of the development of the Mountaineer Craftsman's Cooperative Association and the Arthurdale Subsistence Homestead out of William and Ruth Simkins' work in 1932 with unemployed miners near Morgantown, West Virginia; of the Pine Mountain, Kentucky, work camp in the summer of 1951, thefirstinterracialAFSC camp in the South; of Bard McAllister's labors to help a desolate California community of Negro farm workers secure water rights, health services, and projects to augment their incomes; and of VISA (Volunteer International Service Assignments) workers Werner Müller and Helen Tyson, who eventually made something significant out of frustrating assignments in Tanzania. One considerable virtue in this book lies in the fact that the claims made for the Quaker way are restrained. To be sure, the immense caring for individual persons, suffering or benighted, and the practical ingenuity, and the persistence in devilishly discouraging circumstances are all made clear. Yet Weisbord never falls into the trap of implying that the projects and methods of the AFSC, if only extended, would solve the world's ills. Rather, at certain moments and places, AFSC volunteers have merited the tribute paid them by an officer in the American Red Cross in World War I1 and quoted by Weisbord, "They did the thing needed and did it with unusual intelligence. And they all fell to with their hands as well as their heads." This is the ideal, but would-be AFSC volunteers would do well 120Quaker History to read this whole book; for it makes clear the confusions, the casting about, the tensions and hostilities, and above all the ambiguities as to long-term accomplishment which attend most Quaker programs. Some readers may feel that the book does not affirm the Quaker peace testimony strongly enough. There is, after all, only a modest claim in the title, taken from Joseph Conrad's statement, "What all men are really after is some form, or perhaps only some formula, of peace." But in a time when many persons and groups, private and public, are seeking to put beliefs into action, and when most programs and much motivation are having to be radically re-examined, Weisbord's tone of restrained affirmation seems to be the right one. Wesleyan University, Middletown, ConnecticutDavid E. Swift Quakers and Politics. Pennsylvania, 1681-1726. By Gary B. Nash. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. 1968. 362 pages. $8.50. In the last twenty years a substantial number of...