Browsing by Subject "American Friends Service Committee"

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    American Friends Service Committee
    (1963) Cadbury, Henry J. (Henry Joel), 1883-1974
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    The Fighting Quakers: A New Vision for the Peace Testimony During World War I
    (2019) Bowen, Christina G.; Ghosh, Pika
    The success of the American Quaker response to World War I through the creation of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) facilitated a shift in the Quaker peace testimony from a passive anti-war stance to an active, peace-building, reform-minded, religious duty. The institution of a draft when the United States entered WWI in 1917 had created an immediate crisis for the historically antiwar Society of Friends. In light of these circumstances, the Quakers were forced to reexamine their peace testimony. Under the auspices of the AFSC, the Quakers worked to overcome the tensions remaining from a 19th century schism and sought to negotiate with the government in order to allow conscientious objectors (COs) an alternative to combatant service. The extraordinary access of certain Friends allowed the AFSC to communicate with high-level government officials in pleading their case for alternative service programs. The dangerous conditions of the military camps in which COs were held and intense public support for the war created a great deal of urgency for the AFSC. The American Quakers also had to navigate disunity within their own community in working to preserve their values. The ethos of the AFSC mission was largely formed by prominent Quakers like Rufus M. Jones. His writings on the Inner Light and the peace testimony called for Friends to remain actively engaged in peace-building work. The robust, active obligation to eliminate war was articulated on an institutional level in the postwar period. World War I changed how many Friends defined what it meant to be a Quaker, a development which allowed for the creation of the AFSC and the use of the peace testimony as an active form of advocacy in imbuing its work with meaning relevant to the time.
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    The Perils of Potsdam: American Quaker Relief Workers and the Post-World War II Expulsions of Germans
    (2015) Rothschild, Daniel; Gerstein, Linda; Friedman, Andrew, 1974-
    Between the final months of World War II and the end of the 1940s, about 13 million ethnic Germans fled and were expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Although the expulsions had already begun, at the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945, the Big Three sanctioned further “population transfers” of Germans from Eastern Europe, provided they were carried out in an “orderly and humane manner.” Helping to aid the expellees’ integration into Germany were relief workers of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). These American Quaker relief workers were strong critics of the expulsions, not only because they were not, in fact, “orderly and humane”—the American government agreed on that point by the end of 1947—but because, according to the AFSC workers, of the dangerous ethnic nationalist tendencies behind them. As both critics of the United States and, through their role in America’s postwar reconstruction of Europe, agents of its global reach, the Quaker relief workers developed a critique of nationalism that was deeply imbedded in the American expansionist imagination and a vision of a world structured by international organizations and reconciled by transnational encounters. Relying on research in Quaker archives in the Philadelphia area, this thesis shows that for AFSC relief workers, the word “Potsdam”—by which they meant the United States’ sanctioning of the expulsions at the Potsdam Conference—encapsulated both this critique and this vision.