Quaker Brotherhood: Interracial Activism and the American Friends Service Committee, 1917-1950

4. Refugees from Abroad and at Home: The Hostel Method and Victims of War

4. Refugees from Abroad and at Home The Hostel Method and Victims of War In the aftermath of World War II and the sudden and unexpected catastrophes it wrought, Henry Cadbury answered a question about “the philosophy underlying [AFSC] service.” In his response, he argued that the question had the causal relationship backward. “The Quaker service,” Cadbury argued, “tends to precede the philosophy.” In his reflections on the AFSC’s first three decades of work, Cadbury felt that instead of a clearly thought-out plan of action, “what precedes the experience is a sensitive conscience. The noblesse oblige of inner conscientiousness provides the motive, the methods, and, if you like, the pattern of the observable phenomena of thirty or three hundred years of Quaker social pioneering.”1 The AFSC’s responses to World War II exemplified Cadbury’s observations as the organization confronted war-induced emergencies that compelled immediate action. This activism, in turn, helped staffers continue to develop a philosophy for interracial work. Although the war split Quakers, dividing those who chose to enlist from others (including many in the AFSC) who refused military service as pacifists, historian Margaret Hope Bacon has noted that the war “helped to sharpen Quaker consciences on matters of race,”2 especially with regard to Jewish refugees from abroad and Japanese American (or Nikkei) refugees at home, who experienced a profound sense of loss. As Alice Uchiyama explained, “The uprooting of people from their homes always works great hardship. You can imagine the upheaval, sorrow and heartbreak that would come to your neighbors and friends . . . if they were suddenly told they must leave their homes in a few days, take practically nothing with them—except what they could carry themselves—and dispose of their businesses, household goods and prop- Refugees from Abroad and at Home 113 erty at once.”3 Uchiyama’s description of the plight of Japanese Americans certainly resonated with the European refugees who had begun arriving in the United States by the late 1930s. Both groups presented the AFSC with emergencies that challenged and profoundly shaped Service Committee beliefs and activism. In responding to wartime disasters, AFSC staff members found some past techniques useful, but they also moved to new understandings of and approaches to race relations in response to the refugee crises. They continued, for instance, to employ methods developed in the 1920s and 1930s that emphasized engineering intercultural contacts designed to help European newcomers and Japanese Americans find welcoming places within mainstream society. Although many Quakers, like most liberals of the time, saw Americanization as the best solution for these uprooted people, at least some staff believed that their methods promised additional benefits for white Americans, too, who would grow in understanding of and appreciation for these victims of war. But the war also altered AFSC thinking and programming. Pressure for wartime unity, for example, curtailed broader societal and economic critiques of race relations that had been developed at the Institute of Race Relations. In addition, the war made it harder to rely on the carefully planned, almost scripted interactions that the Interracial Section had developed in the 1920s. Instead, Quakers now improvised in the face of unexpected problems. Wartime emergencies also expanded the interracialism of the AFSC. The committee encouraged Friends to see a broader range of groups to help and suggested less direct approaches through housing and employment. It also prompted Friends to expand their work geographically, important trends that would continue after the war. Helping Those “Standing before the Naught”: The AFSC and European Refugees As Europe stood on the brink of war, refugees fleeing Nazi persecution presented a crisis by late 1938, the year that Rufus Jones, George Walton, and Robert Yarnall crossed the Atlantic to explore the possibilities of working for Germany’s Jewish refugees, an idea first suggested by Cadbury in 1933. As supervised relief began overseas in January 1939, AFSC staff members also worked to help refugees gain admission to and flourish in the United States. By February, Mary M. Rogers, acting director of the AFSC’s Refugee Section, reported that the section had 746 cases on file, a number that grew by 279 cases over the next three weeks. Rogers 114 chapter 4 and her staff received guidance from Hertha Kraus, who urged them to develop programs focused on job counseling and retraining that were flexible enough to help newcomers ranging from university professors to domestic workers.4 The...