PHA 2016 Conference Poster Session

The Pennsylvania Historical Association sponsors a poster session at its annual meeting for undergraduate and graduate students to present their research as emerging scholars in the field of Pennsylvania and Mid-Atlantic history. Posters are divided between graduate and undergraduate levels with one prize for graduate students and first, second and third places at the undergraduate level.

At the Fall 2016 meeting, held October 6–8 in Shippensburg, the poster session was sponsored by the Shippensburg University MA in Applied History Program. The winning posters are reproduced on the following pages, along with their abstracts. A list of all entries and winners follows (see fig. 1).

Figure 1.

Viewing the posters on display at the Shippensburg Conference Center, October 8. Photograph by Karen Guenther.

Graduate

Amber Noecker, Shippensburg University, “The I-W Alternative Service Program: A Snapshot of Religious Conscientious Objection in Cold War America”

During the World War II–era Civilian Public Service program, nearly 12,000 draftees performed nonmilitary public service “work of national importance.” While the CPS program has received quite a bit of attention from historians, its successor program, which came to be known as the “I-W” program (pronounced “one-w,” which was its draft classification) has been largely overlooked. Against a national backdrop of increasing militarism and nationalism in the early days of the Cold War, Pennsylvania emerged early on as a successful model for alternative service in comparison with other states during the same period. I argue in my poster that a significant factor in that success was the long history of religious objectors in Pennsylvania that was not similarly present in other states (fig. 2).

Despite the lengthy history of religious conscientious objection in the United States, World War II represented the first good-faith effort by the US government to ensure that conscientious objectors had a nonpenal alternative to military service. During the six-year run of the Civilian Public Service program, 52,000 of the 34.5 million drafted men claimed CO (Conscientious Objector) status. For all but 12,000 of those, noncombatant military service, wherein objectors served in the military but in support roles rather than combat ones, was an acceptable alternative. The remaining 12,000 were largely members of historic peace churches (Amish, Mennonites, Brethren, and Quakers) for whom service in the US military was unacceptable due to their particular religious beliefs; those men were the residents of the Civilian Public Service camps scattered across the United States. Although the CPS program was an improvement upon the imprisonment and ill treatment suffered by many objectors during World War I, it was never exactly popular, and with the post–World War II militaristic turn of American culture, that lack of popularity deepened.

The I-W program was created in legislation enacted in 1951 and began official operation in July 1952. Though it was a national program, it was administrated on the state level, falling under the purview of the individual state Selective Service directors. Sentiments expressed during the periodic meetings of these directors reflect feelings about conscientious objectors that range from antipathy to outright antagonism nearly from the start of

Figure 2.

Poster by Amber Noecker (winning graduate student).

the program in almost every state. In many, this antagonism seems to have originated with the directors themselves.

Against this backdrop of relatively steady opposition to conscientious objectors, Pennsylvania emerged as unique in terms of the number of COs it handled, the way it treated and responded to them, and the overall effectiveness of its I-W program. Between 1952 and 1962, a little over 7,500 religious conscientious objectors across the United States served in nonmilitary service positions as an alternative to compulsory military service. Of those 7,500 COs, about one-fifth were from Pennsylvania. This single state, which only accounted for 7 percent of the total registrants with the Selective Service nationally, contributed a full 20 percent of registered conscientious objectors across the entire United States.

While there were occasional minor instances of concern in Pennsylvania...