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Soldiers of Peace Symposium Highlights War Resisters' Role in WWII Legacy A virtually unknown part of the World War II story is that of the war resisters whose pacifist convictions resulted in their incarceration while the world witnessed the horrors of a global conflagration. Larry Gara, Wilmington College's emeritus professor of history, was one of those men whose nonviolent, pacifist convictions prohibited him from participating in any manner with the United States' war effort in response to German and Japanese aggression. There were others. Indeed, some 6,000 avowed war resisters were imprisoned during the Second World War. A microcosm of their plight can be found in the stories of 10 resisters featured in the newly published book, A Few Small Candles: War Resisters of World War II Tell Their Stories (Kent State University Press). A Few Small Candles, which was edited by Gara and his wife, Lenna Mae, chronicles: the circumstances that led to the resisters' resistence of military service, their terms in prison during the war years and how those experiences have shaped the subsequent 50 - plus years of their lives. Seven of the men featured in the book attended a reunion in Wilmington in April, the featured event of which was a Global Issues Symposium before an attentive, standing - room - only audience in the McCoy Room. The event was covered by C - SPAN Network, which plans to broadcast it May 29 and 30 on C - SPAN IPs Book TV program. The seven book contributors who participated in the symposium were: Gara, 4 SPRING 1999 David Dellenger (also a defendant in the celebrated Chicago Seven trial), Ralph DiGia, Arthur A. Dole, John Harvey Griffith, George M. Houser and Lawrence H. Templin. Gara said the war resisters are all dedicated to nonviolence as an "active force" in resisting violence—and that concept goes well beyond the flash point that was World War II. "It's not only a question of being opposed to war, but being opposed to injustice," said Houser, a white man who was a founder of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in the early 1940s. The group engaged in nonviolent, direct action—sit - ins, protests and boycotts—as it demanded justice and civil rights for black Americans. "It was long before Martin Luther King and the Montgomery bus boycott," he said. "We inaugurated the first freedom rides and we began to shake the foundations of Jim Crow (laws)." Even in prison during the war, many of the resisters were fighting for social change. DiGia recalled he and other war resisters in federal prison held a hunger strike protesting segregation of the prisons' dining halls. The strike was a success and inmates of all races became more integrated. "There weren't many victories in prison, but this was one," DiGia said. "At that time, everything in the federal government was segregated, including prisons and the army," added Gara, who also was active in promoting equal treatment for incarcerated African - Americans. "We tried to do something about it in our own way." "Social change will not come unless you live it," Dellenger said. "Who will be the Rosa Parks of this generation? I think there is more hope than people realize." Templin said seeking to change minds and laws by nonviolent means is a "revolution," and he cites the examples Gandhi and the American Civil Rights Movement. "Fighting back is the whole point of nonviolence." Griffith looked at the history of violent conflict from a perspective as old as time and as vast as the universe. "From the Big Bang to the present, there is nothing disconnected—we're all connected. "If A hurts B, then B is apt to return hurt to A or C," he said. "The good news is the reverse—compassion—also works. I will try to not pass on hurt. I will try to pass on compassion." That poses the question: Can nonviolence work in a world with people like Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein and Milosevic? What would have happened if the United States had not entered World War II? Their answers were philosophical and spiritual in nature. "I don't think a pacifist has to have an answer for every war situation," Houser said. "Hurting does not cure hurting; healing does." As a start, he said people have to believe in the "possibility" of peace, freedom and justice even in the most impossible circumstances. If that belief is manifested by the masses into nonviolent action, the hope is it will spread throughout the world and eventually prohibit tyrants from coming to power in the first place. As Gara said, "Our message is one of hope—that there are alternatives to violence!" — Randy Sarvis
Too Good a Town? Prof Writes Book on Myth of Small Town America Wilmington College's Edward G. Agran published a book earlier this year on how the virtues of small - town America have been packaged and re - packaged to almost mythical proportions. In "Too Good a Town ": William Allen White, Community, and the Emerging Rheto ric of Middle America (University of Arkansas Press), he examines the life of White, whom he describes as the "Walter Cronkite of print media in the first half of the 20th century." White was the popular editor/publisher of the Emporia (111.) Gazette who praised the virtues of small town America in syndicated editorials and articles in popular magazines at a time when the Industrial Revolution was fueling the rapid growth of urban areas. Agran, associate professor of history, said White professed the best of small town America—security, friendliness, sense of community, strong family structure—should be incorporated into the urbanization of America. "He saw America in small town images and believed all Americans could relate to those images," Agran said. "Can we take the best of small town values and transpose them upon an urban environment?" Indeed, Ronald Reagan did a masterful job of evoking those images throughout the country and, in turn, endearing himself to the American people, Agran claims. "Reagan spent eight years in the White House stressing the need to reassert 'old community values,' emphasizing such qualities as thrift, charity, neighborliness and trust," he said. "The president implied these values were rooted in the nation's past, in the more close - knit communities of yesterday, as in his own hometown of Dixon, Illinois." In spite of his perceived fondness for Dixon, Reagan only returned to his hometown once during his presidency, that for a campaign photo shoot. "At Thanksgiving, the cameras rolled as he and Nancy sat down to homespun fixings on the Santa Barbara ranch; while at New Year's, the shutters were closed as the first couple partied in star - studded Palm Springs," he said. To the former president's credit, the American people could relate to both the "Hollywood Reagan and the Dixon, 111., Reagan," Agran said, noting he came to represent both Americas: he was a champion of the rhetoric promoting traditional family values, yet, at the same time, he was divorced, a member of a dysfunctional family and had kids with drug problems. "Ronald Reagan sang the swan song: a B actor could play one last sentimental, small - town scenario in Washington," Agran said, "while Bob Dole, a real American hero, was pilloried in the (1996) presidential campaign for harking back to his smalltown roots—it didn't sell!" Bill Clinton's claims of a poor boy' s past in a town called Hope were shrugged off by a cynical populace, but he was elected anyway. "We really do seem today to be moving far away from a small - town idyll that most Americans could genuinely in some fashion relate to not so long ago," Agran said. "We live in another world. Rural America had its day and the small town had its century." But Agran is not that quick in disposing of the small - town myth. Like Norman Rockwell's paintings, White's vision of America was true, if only for an instant in fragmented pieces strewn across the national landscape. Andy Griffith's Mayberry lives in moments, albeit ones often shrouded by those more unseemly ones that often define modern America. "We all are, in some fashion, middle class at our core; and we all are, as we have been for the past century, in search of community," said Agran, noting he is telling not only White's story but his own. "My own understanding of place, my own values and where I have placed myself over the years clearly inform and influence this story," he said. Agran grew up in the 1950s and 60s in Studio City, Calif., but he yearned for a place that possessed White's "conceptual sense" of community. "When I was a child, I daydreamed, strangely enough in retrospect, about an idyllic life in an Ohio small town," he said. "My idea of the good life rested in a Middle Western idyll: large elms, front porch, very green, comfortably old, pleasantly shaded, with neighboring homes not too close, and certainly not too distant." Via Aspen and Boulder, Colo.; Madison, Wise; and Danville, Ky.; he wound up in Wilmington and currently Madiera, an old Cincinnati suburb that consciously retains a small - town identity, he said. "When I was a child, I day dreamed, strangely enough in retrospect, about an idyllic life in an Ohio small town. My idea of the good life rest ed in a Middle Western idyll: large elms, front porch, very green, comfortably old, pleasantly shaded, with neighboring homes not too close, and certainly not too distant." —Edward Agran Over the years, Agran has realized it's not the "place" as such that counts, but how it is situated within one's idea of what matters. "For me, this small town (Madiera), assuages my interest in the simple life," he said. "And oddly enough, it strongly resembles the small town I, in fact, inhabited in Studio City, smack in the middle of Los Angeles' suburban expanse." — Randy Sarvis The LINK 5
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Page 23 and 24: Wilmington College Charitable Gift
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