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Denise Levertov: A Poet’s Life by Dana Greene

Though Mitt Romney and his supporters invoke J.F.K.’s 1960 talk, most Mormons do not believe in the America of which Kennedy spoke. He described a nation “where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from” any “ecclesiastical source.” By contrast, L.D.S. politicians (both Democrats and Republicans) have sought instructions from their church’s leaders for more than a century. Republican officeholders have been most susceptible to such political “counsel,” while L.D.S. Democrats have often objected to it—sometimes stridently.

Q: What is the American Friends Service Committee?

Austin:  The AFSC was created by Quakers after the United States entered World War I in 1917.  Its founders initially saw the AFSC as a way for Friends to cooperate in finding alternatives to military service for conscientious objectors.  The AFSC, however, pretty quickly began to diversify its work, expanding well beyond its initial objectives within its first few years.  Evolving into one of the leading service organization for Friends, the AFSC took on any number of social issues, including humanitarian service (at home and abroad) and pacifism in addition to the interracial activism explored in Quaker Brotherhood.  The AFSC (and the Friends Service Committee of Great Britain) received, on behalf of Quakers worldwide, the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1947, and it has remained an active organization in the years since.

Q: Why do you think, up until now, there has been a gap in scholarship on the
Friends’ post-Civil War period?

Austin:  I suppose many factors contribute to this gap.  The abolitionist crusade is obviously a big story, full of drama and situated at the fault line of the Civil War, which forever altered the course of United States history.  Abolitionism and the Civil War remain popular topics today, too, because these stories, it seems to me, translate neatly into (admittedly oversimplified) narratives of a heroic crusade against an evil institution and racism. For some Friends, focusing on memories of their past interracial heroism has from time to time provided an escape from confronting vexing interracial problems in their contemporary world.

In addition, the absence of Quakers in our memories of post-Civil War American history reflects the broader absence of an appreciation on the part of historians for the influence of religion after the Civil War.  As we move forward into the history of “modern” America, religion often fades away, no longer considered a serious motivating force in the twentieth century and beyond.  Despite this tendency among scholars, for Friends, religion did still matter dearly and motivated some to act to address racism and inequality.

Finally, the dwindling number of Quakers in the United States over the past one hundred-plus years has removed Friends a bit from more contemporary historical memories.  Quakers loomed a bit larger in the story of early American history, but seem a less prominent force today.

Q: What sort of “complicated connections” between Quakers and race were there during this time period?

Austin:  Because Quakers have often been painted as either crusading, flawless heroes who attacked racism or (in counterpoint to such valorous images) as hypocrites who talked about the evils of racism while succumbing to it within their own institutions at the very same time, nuance is often missing in popular memories of Friendly interracialism. While many people have thus focused on a simplistic story of good versus evil, the relationship between Quakers and race actually reveals tremendous complexity. Some individuals, for instance, risked a good deal to stand against racial inequality, but their battles often pitted them against fellow Friends who were less progressive on such matters as well as the broader society.  Furthermore, even those Quakers who felt moved at times to act against racism adopted programs that were hardly untainted by racialized attitudes.  While this is true of any number of organizations and individuals throughout American history, we often don’t see Quakers in this same and very complex way.

Q: How did Quaker connections and relationships vary across different ethnic
groups?

Austin:  The relationships did not vary as much as one might suppose, although AFSC staffers at times tended to view different groups from different perspectives.  Thus, to cite one example, while the key ideas motivating their work with African Americans and Japanese Americans remained fairly consistent, Quakers in the AFSC tended to see African Americans as a “domestic” and Japanese Americans as an “international” problem.  Thus, they tended to present programs to better understand African Americans—through “tours of understanding” in 1920s Philadelphia or post-WWII employment programs—in the context of improving internal race relations.

Work with Japanese Americans, alternatively, always weighted the outside world a bit more, whether that be through inviting Japanese students to study at institutions of higher learning in the 1920s United States or in helping Japanese Americans resettle from government-run concentration camps during World War II.

Q: In what ways were these interactions religious?

Austin:  These were religious interactions in several ways.  The Friendly belief in the Inner Light—or that of God within—lay at the center of much of the Quakers’ activism on race (as well as other programs, too).  This fundamental belief has long moved
Quakers to support egalitarian movements.

Maybe just as importantly, many Friends have emphasized a fundamental connection between faith and practice, stressing the importance of acting on spiritual leadings to
change the world around them.  From their earliest beginnings, in fact, Friends have emphasized the importance of acting on their faith.  Many leading Quakers in the early twentieth century, including key founders of the AFSC, were particularly interested in shaping the world around them, and they attempted to do so in any number of ways.

Sikh practice emphasizes reading and meditating on the teachings of the gurus, service to those around us, and sharing our blessings with others. One of the interesting practices with regards to the emphasis on social equality is that following a Sikh religious service a community meal is typically prepared by volunteers and then shared. Everyone, regardless of belief, social status, or gender, eats together. This is particularly significant within the Indian context where taboos around food play an important social role.

Read the full interview here.

*****

Anything you had to leave out [of the book]?

The biggest—and most painful—surrender I had to make was on direct citations of songs.

I always knew this would be a problem, but not for the reasons it turned out to be. I thought there’d be resistance from traditional quarters of southern gospel when I asked for the rights to reprint lyrics. But I was refreshingly wrong; I had little trouble in this regard.

Instead, the difficulties came elsewhere. Some songs were just too administratively complicated to access. The chain of custody on many copyrighted but forgotten or unfashionable songs that no one sings or records any more can go cold easily, since no real money is at stake to keep a legal custodian’s attention.

And the rights to even more songs were just too expensive. For this, we can thank hydra-headed corporations that have bought up thousands of songs and catalogs of songs and then turn around and charge licensing fees on comparatively obscure gospel music as if it were “I Will Always Love You” being licensed for The Bodyguard… Ok, I’m exaggerating a little, but the corporatization of cultural productions is not just frustrating; it potentially poses a serious challenge to a more comprehensive cultural studies.

“Hardy’s thoughtful ‘reader’s edition’ eliminates the current official text’s knotty versification, clarifies the cast of characters, includes a useful introduction and provides signposts through the sometimes dense prose. . . . Essential for the full comprehension of Mormonism.”

“Beal . . . expertly contextualizes Bley’s career within the landscapes of emergent avant-garde, free jazz, and experimental music while also exploring her creative relationships with the legendary Steve Swallow, Charlie Haden, and others. . . . Readers and researchers interested in women composers, American music history, music theory, or jazz from 1950 to the present will find this book invaluable.”–Library Journal

“Beal could have easily written a biography three or four times longer than the present volume. But it would be a mistake to consider Carla Bley something of a half-loaf, as it is more than enough to set the record straight.”–The Wire

“Beal’s prose is often lyrical and always dynamic, she instantly finds the appropriate pacing for the narrative and, just as quickly, demonstrates deep knowledge of and affection for her subject.”–Popmatters

“Carla Bley is a marvel of concision, packing biography, musicology and cogent, descriptive analysis of her major work in barely 100 pages.”–Shepherd Express

“Roll and Gellman’s book is in part a dual biography of Claude Williams, a white Presbyterian self-described redneck from Tennessee, and Owen Whitfield, a black Baptist native of Mississippi and a Garveyite with deep-rooted (and well-founded) distrust of whites for much of his early life. The fact that these two came to work together during a time when mean things were happening throughout the Southland during the Depression is remarkable; the fact that it was these particular two individuals, whose backgrounds could not have been more dissimilar in some ways, is even more interesting.”

Spirit of Rebellion reveals how ordinary rural citizens in the South used available resources and their shared faith to defend their agrarian livelihoods amid the political and economic upheaval of the first half of the twentieth century. Choice wrote, “Roll illuminates the socialist traditions of the region as well as the impact of Pentecostal religious movements of the farmers’ worldview. Recommended.”

The award will be presented at WCSA’s Conference in Chicago, June 22-25.

Congratulations, Jarod!

The last and only time the Corps of Engineers flooded the spillway–January 1937–it displaced thousands of people, most of whom were poor tenant farmers and sharecroppers, about two-thirds of whom were African American. They were among the poorest people in state, even the nation, at the time and were given refuge in camps set up by the American Red Cross and assisted by the federal Resettlement Administration. Rather than glumly accept their fate, however, those who were displaced transformed their experience of loss and hardship into a protest movement that demanded that the federal government help them rebuild by giving them access to decent housing and health care. One of the most remarkable things about this poor people’s movement, born of federal dynamite in the dead of winter, was that it brought together in common cause poor whites and blacks, many of whom had recently been white supremacists or followers of black nationalist Marcus Garvey.

The movement they built, first in the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and then the Congress of Industrial Organizations, resulted in the dramatic January 1939 roadside demonstration in southeast Missouri that ultimately forced the federal government to build rural public housing projects, called the Delmo Homes, and start a government-backed universal health service in the area. As unbelievable as it sounds today, that health service was intended to serve as a model for a national health service. Some of the same family homes in the original Delmo projects built by the government in the early 1940s are presently being swept away by the latest flood.

That’s perhaps a fitting coda to the plight of the rural poor in the Missouri cotton country. The 1937 spillway flood also sped up the restructuring of the local agricultural economy away from tenant farming and toward mechanized plantations worked by small numbers of casual wage workers. Some of the people displaced in 1937 never returned to the spillway. By the mid-1940s, most of them had moved on elsewhere and were replaced by tractors, cultivators and mechanical cotton pickers.

Although impossible to predict, the effects of the 2011 flood will probably not be as dramatic as those that followed the inundation of 1937. It would be difficult to imagine renewed protests for federal housing projects, especially in a section of Missouri that once routinely voted Democratic, but is now a Republican stronghold. It is perhaps even more difficult to imagine protestors using the flood to not only call for but actually receive a government health service. Much of the online commentary in response to the flooding of Bird’s Point-New Madrid Spillway has expressed dismay that people who knowingly lived there should complain about having their homes destroyed. They knew it could happen, the argument goes, and so deserve what they got. Many say ‘good riddance’, now as in 1937.

But before we accept the displacement of these people as the just consequence of a moral hazard, let us first remember that many of the problems that affected the flood refugees in 1937—poor housing, bad health and grim struggles to make a living—have not gone away. Rest assured that while the farmland now being flooded is some of the richest in America, the vast majority of the people displaced from it over the past few days are not. Perhaps they, like their predecessors in 1937, will not glumly accept their fate and instead demand something more from their government.

*****

Jarod Roll was born in Missouri and now teaches American history at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. He is the author of Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South and the co-author of The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor’s Southern Prophets in New Deal America, both published by the University of Illinois Press.