Kirstin Munro
18 January, 2023
2022 Eva Koch Scholar Lecture, Woodbrooke Quaker Center
R.W. Tucker wrote in his essay Revolutionary Faithfulness that “Quakerism properly
understood is inherently more revolutionary than anything the new or old left has come up
with...Our revolutionary inheritance, our truer instinct, leads us to seek out a revolutionary
viewpoint. Yet we are estranged from our own revolutionary origin, even as we are influenced
by it.” (1967, 16). I think this remains a provocative but valuable insight over 55 years after
Tucker wrote this essay, and gets at the heart of what I hope to consider during our brief time
together this evening: first, what the revolutionary inheritance of Friends might mean for how we
should respond to state violence, racism, and environmental catastrophes today, and second, how
we should respond when others take actions in support of peace and justice that we might not
choose ourselves.
American anarchist theorist Volterine de Cleyre wrote in her 1912 essay “Direct Action” that
17th century American Quakers had been accused of “troubling the world by preaching peace to
it.” I’ve been struck by this phrase since I first read it... There are two portions of this phrase that
I think are worth considering separately, “preaching peace” and “troubling the world.”
First, Quakers were “preaching peace”: Preaching might usually imply, especially to a non-
Quaker audience, a religious message conveyed in words, but de Cleyre immediately follows this
phrase with a list of actions (or rather refusals to take particular actions, which are in themselves
actions): that Quakers refused to bear arms, refused to swear allegiance to any government, and
refused to pay church taxes.
There is an action-orientation in Quaker theology that is expressed in the tendency in Quaker
lingo for terms that might usually describe words or feelings to be repurposed by Friends to
mean actions: I am thinking in particular of terms like witness, testimony, and concern. We see
this action-orientation on both what might be called (incorrectly!?) the political right and left of
the Quaker movement in America. For example, D. Elton Trueblood, an advisor to President
Richard Nixon and a supporter of the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, wrote in 1966 that
“The the central Quaker idea... [unites] in an indissoluble bond, the inner and outer aspects of
our faith. The experience is inner and spiritual, because it is God who calls, but the experience
cannot be genuine unless it eventuates in work.” (Trueblood 1966, 270). Similarly, in his legal
testimony for a 1973 civil court case, Henry J. Cadbury, who was fired from his job at Haverford
College in 1918 for his public stance on the first World War, stated that “Bearing witness means
primarily, I suppose, a vocal expression of your belief in certain ideals, but beyond that in the
consistent expression in your actions of those ideals,” (Bacon 1987, p. 2).
So it seems that de Cleyre is onto something when she classifies 17th century American Quakers
as “direct actionists” drawing a parallel to the anarchists who were being persecuted in her day.
Second, Quakers were “troubling the world”: De Cleyre lists a number of punishments imposed
on early Quakers in America by those in power: laws were passed to keep them out, fine them,
imprison them, mutilate them, and finally to hang them. The actions of Quakers had so troubled
the world—in other words, these Quakers’ peace-preaching refusals threatened powerful people
and the very underpinnings of the society in which they lived to such an extent—that the state
found it necessary to try to stop them through violence.
Henry J. Cadbury also wrote of Quakers troubling the world in his 1959 Pendle Hill Pamphlet,
The Character of a Quaker, in which he asserts that “Our criterion for a good Quaker in the last
half of the 17th Century was whether he was in trouble with the authorities, which means of
course whether he acted in such a way as would get him into trouble with the authorities.” So it
is not enough, after being moved to do so by the Inner Light, to take an action that is in line with
your conscience, but the action must threaten a sick society enough to place the Friend into
conflict with the State.
Black, Gay, Quaker, and one-time Communist Party member Bayard Rustin said, “Our power is
in our ability to make things unworkable. The only weapon we have is our bodies. And we need
to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn.” This is an explicit call to direct action and
disruptive civil disobedience by Rustin. When faced with a sick and immoral society, Friends are
compelled by their faith to stop the wheels of that society from turning by any number of non-
violent means available to them, including by using their physical bodies to interrupt business as
usual. If Frederick Douglass was correct that “power concedes nothing without a demand,” then
“Speaking truth to power” doesn’t mean asking nicely. It means disruption. So Douglass
counsels us that “It is not light we need, but fire. It is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We
need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”
De Cleyre asserts that, “real non-resistants can believe in direct action only, never in political
action. For the basis of all political action is coercion; even when the State does good things, it
finally rests on a club, a gun, or a prison, for its power to carry them through.” But she ends her
discussion of Quakers on a positive note: “Quaker persistence and Quaker non-resistance” even
in the face of brutal state violence “won the day”—Quakers wearied out their persecutors
through their consistently disruptive direct action.
Returning now to the entire phrase “troubling the world by preaching peace to it”: preaching
peace is an action, this action will be provoked by the Inner Light, and this action will threaten to
tear the fabric of a sick and immoral society, leading to persecution by the authorities with power
in that society.
It seems to me that these Quaker “angelic troublemakers”—who are angering the authorities via
lawbreaking and disruptive direct action and as a result who are dealing with horrible
consequences at the hands of the State—are so often framed as being far in the past, early
Friends protesting against issues with little similarity to the problems we face today. Some may
believe that there was something unique about the tumultuous time and place of early Friends, so
we can understand early Friends as engaging in a degree of confrontational troublemaking and
law-breaking that is no longer necessary today. Similar lines of thinking may be applied to the
disruptive and illegal actions of abolitionists or conscientious objectors to the world wars, or the
direct action tactics used more recently during the Civil Rights Movement, or protests against
American military involvement in Vietnam. And the passage of time can make it difficult to
appreciate just how disruptive and threatening a particular law-breaking direct action was in its
own cultural and historical context, or just how hated a particular historical figure was. This can
lead Friends to mistakenly denounce disruptive and illegal actions taken in support of racial and
environmental justice today, rather than supporting others in their leadings.
Take for example the American Quaker abolitionist Lucretia Mott. She is best known today for
helping to organize the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, and more
frequently cited for her relationship to the women’s suffrage movement than for her more radical
activities. As an aside, I think it is worth emphasizing that she explicitly opposed the resolution
on women’s suffrage at Seneca Falls, as she believed voting or holding elected office would
make a person complicit with slavery. Her troublemaking included supporting cooperative labor
unions as a solution to economic inequality, giving refuge in her home to fugitive slaves, for
secretly housing abolitionist John Brown’s widow while Brown awaited execution for his raid on
a federal armory, and for hosting some of the first racially integrated political meetings in U.S.
history. She was harassed by the police, targeted by violent mobs, and risked imprisonment for
her actions, to say nothing of the blacklash against her from within the Religious Society of
Friends and other abolitionists—she was barred from speaking at an anti-Slavery convention in
London on account of her gender, and was called ‘the most belligerent Non-Resisant he ever
saw’ by the abolitionist Robert Purvis. In response to Purvis, Mott, said:
I accept the character he gives me; and I glory in it. I have no idea, because I am a Non-
Resisant, of submitting tamely to injustice inflicted either on me or on the slave. I will
oppose it with all the moral powers with which I am endowed. I am no advocate of
passivity. Quakerism, as I understand it, does not mean quietism. The early Friends were
agitators; disturbers of the peace; and were more obnoxious in their day to charges which
are now so freely made than we are.” —(1860 in The Anti-Slavery Standard).
Mott’s work as an abolitionist threatened the continued existence of the economy and society in
which she lived, an economy which, even in the North, was dependent on the exploitation of
enslaved Black people. It is somewhat ironic, then, that the U.S. Treasury has announced that she
will be featured on a redesigned $10 bill. Mid-20th century books about her have hagiographic
titles like “The Greatest American Woman.” According to Wikipedia, her likeness appears in a
1921monument in the U.S. Capital rotunda, she was featured on a U.S. postage stamp in 1948,
and inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1983. There is even a room at Friends
House in London named after her. History has stripped away the controversy, turning the
disruptive, controversial, belligerent, law-breaking Mott into a non-threatening heroic cartoon,
even as she was seen as too revolutionary by other abolitionists of her day. And though most
Friends today share her concerns for peace and justice, I suspect many would not approve of
many of her direct action tactics. But even Lucretia Mott, “The Greatest American Woman” who
is held up as an example and hero by Friends today, did not denounce John Brown’s bloody raid
on the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, an action he took with hopes that it would incite a
violent uprising against slavery. Instead of denouncing him, Mott called for Brown to be
“honored as a martyr.”
I think it is worth exploring a second more recent example. Norman Morrison was an American
Quaker who died in 1965 after setting himself on fire outside the Pentagon in protest of U.S.
military involvement in Vietnam. But it isn’t Norman Morrison himself who I would like us to
consider, but rather the reactions his sacrifice provoked, starting with one Friend from his
meeting and that Friend’s extended family. The car that Morrison drove to the Pentagon that day
was owned by Henry E. Niles, my partner’s great-grandfather and a member of Stony Run
Meeting in Baltimore, Maryland. Niles, the recently retired chairman of Baltimore Life
Insurance Company, had loaned his car to Morrison while Niles was traveling in India.
Morrison’s self-immolation was shocking, violent, brutal, difficult for many people who had
been close to him to understand, and generated hardship for his young family. But at the same
time, these Friends did not denounce his action. Instead, Morrison’s sacrifice spurred others to
take their own actions in support of peace. Niles wrote in a 1966 Christmas letter to friends and
family that Morrison’s “act for peace on earth is a challenge to us—especially to those of us who
are Quakers—to do with our lives what he did with his, that is, to give them for the highest
service to God and our fellowmen as each looks for and finds for himself what that service
should be.” Niles went on to found the organization Business Executives Move for Vietnam
Peace, an action that landed him on President Richard Nixon’s enemies list. Niles’ son-in-law,
Staughton Lynd, cites Morrison as inspiring his own decision to travel to North Vietnam, an
action which resulted in the seizure of Lynd’s passport by the U.S. government and—at least in
part—his denial of tenure and loss of his job as a university professor. Henry E. Niles spoke the
following at Norman Morrison’s memorial service: “It is a Quaker tradition to follow the Inner
Light and do what one truly believes is right for him to do even in the face of misunderstanding.
... Quakers ... should devote their lives to challenging the immorality of the American
government.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that “large segments of white society are more concerned about
tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.” R.W. Tucker similarly criticizes
Friends for adopting a genteel form of cultish pacifism that is tied to middle-class values and fear
of confrontation. But George Fox, he reminds us, was not a nice guy. Yet I have heard Friends
condemning, for example, the burning of a police precinct in Minneapolis during protests for
racial justice or the blocking of roads in central London in protests against environmental
devastation, concerned that such property damage or disruptions might harm these movements.
So I understand that some Friends may object to my remarks this evening by saying we should
primarily be concerned with the immediate efficacy of our actions... how successful is a
particular action at promoting peace and justice? What is the “theory of change”? What if a
particular direct action offends middle class sensibilities, or alienates working class people who
might otherwise support a cause? Henry and Mary Cushing Niles’ Christmas letter from 1966
has an answer: “One may never know.” One may never know what impact a particular action
may have, what changes it helped put into motion, or who may be inspired by it.
In his book Accompanying, Staughton Lynd writes about an American peace activist who was,
like Lynd, inspired by Norman Morrison’s self-immolation. Brian Wilson was an American
soldier stationed in South Vietnam in the 1960s, who was invited to the home of the army base’s
Vietnamese librarian for a meal. During that meal, a Vietnamese song was sung and translated
into English for Wilson, about Norman Morrison’s self-immolation. This moving experience set
Wilson on a peace activist’s path that resulted in his own sacrifice in 1987, when he suffered 19
broken bones, and lost both his legs and part of his brain when the munitions train he and two
other veterans were blockading as part of a Veterans Peace Action Team action did not stop.
This was not an accident. Daniel Ellsberg writes of the event that “The authorities at the base”
ordered the train crew “not to obey regulations requiring the train to stop if there was anything in
front of it on the tracks. They gave secret orders to the train crew not to stop if there were human
bodies ahead.” Wilson was inspired by Norman Morrison to tuck his body in places so the
wheels of the war machine couldn’t turn, and the state decided this was an act of domestic
terrorism and that Wilson should be assassinated for it. In a 2011 interview on Democracy Now,
Wilson explains the what happened the day he woke up:
“9,000 people showed up at the tracks and ripped up 300 feet of the tracks. And from that
day, for 28 consecutive months... there was a permanent occupation of the tracks of
sometimes 200 people... blocking every train and every truck.”
R.W. Tucker writes in Revolutionary Faithfulness that “We can no longer realistically hope to
influence government by love and by Friendly persuasion. ... [I]f social dislocation through
protest can make the power structure uncomfortable enough, the power structure may make
changes in order to regain its comfort. This is outright revolutionary theory.” We live today in a
society whose continued existence necessitates racism, state violence, and environmental
devastation—things that are, in my view, inexorably linked. If we oppose them, I believe we are
obliged to listen to the Inner Light when it calls us to “make things unworkable” in Rustin’s
words, by tucking our bodies in places so wheels don’t turn. The thing we need to make
unworkable is society. And if we aren’t called individually to engage in disruptive non-violent
direct action, then I believe Friends are at the very least obliged to support those angelic
troublemakers who face consequences when they do engage in actions for racial and
environmental justice, even when they use tactics that we find shocking or might not choose
ourselves. “Troubling the world by preaching peace to it.” This is the revolutionary inheritance
of Friends.
