Quaker Theology - Issue #5 - Autumn 2001
War in the Social Order: the Great War
and the Liberalization of American Quakerism -- 6
Yearly Meeting responded by setting up a "Committee on Social and Industrial Problems" (soon shortened to Social Order Committee), whose active membership and that of the AFSC overlapped, and which was full of the usual suspects from the Military Intelligence ‘enemies lists.’ Bernard Waring was its chair, Morris Leeds its secretary. They were charged "to weightily consider the part which the religious Society of Friends should take in the present day application of efforts to promote the Kingdom of God on earth, particularly as it relates to social, political and industrial conditions." Their agenda was quite explicit: the critical analysis of the competitive and wage systems, that is, of basic capitalist institutions which were at variance with Friends’ beliefs42. But what did this mean in practice?
Two members, moved by the millenarian spirit common on the secular as well as the religious left, argued that fundamental social change was possible because of the war, and that it was "surely more necessary to avert war between classes than between nations." Others were not so radical: agricultural machinery manufacturer Samuel Leeds Allen suggested that they should explore possibilities for change within the existing social order. It was "impossible to eliminate all troubles, but let us commence by hoping they may be alleviated." The patriarchal Allen recommended a mix of state and private action–legislation for minimum wages and maximum hours; provision of public work when the market economy could not sustain full employment; and welfare work conducted in a Christian spirit by employers. Haverford’s president Sharpless responded to the group’s evident uncertainty by advising Leeds to pursue open-ended investigation of "the various efforts that have been made in the past to correct [capitalism’s] evils, or replace it entirely with a better order of society," aided by "lectures on the subject by people who know more about the subject than you do, if that supposition is possible." 43
The Committee accepted Sharpless’s suggestion. It divided its work among several different interest groups which discussed matters most directly concerning them. The groups in turn organized programs of lectures by a roll-call of social reformers, enlightened businessmen, trade union leaders, educators, and others from the progressive center and non-revolutionary left, which became a regular feature of the social and intellectual life of Philadelphia Quakerism thereafter. But it would be wrong to dismiss the Social Order Committee as having resulted in little more than the creation of a series of talking-shops. This was a voluntary and quite effective program of political re-education, which produced (for example) a renewed, active, and thereafter unbroken commitment to the cause of racial equality, and a somewhat less full-blooded commitment to ‘industrial democracy’ which was of immediate practical significance. For one of the Social Order Committee’s largest, most active groups of supporters, whose wealth and generosity under-pinned the rest of its work, was its Business Problems (originally Managing Employers) Group, set up in October 1917. 44
The creation of the Business Problems Group was a natural response to the class backgrounds of the Philadelphia Orthodox, and to the social criticism in which some of them were so deeply engaged. In 1920 87 percent of those in paid work, and whose occupations were known, were professionals (39 percent), in salaried employment (24 percent), proprietors and senior executives of businesses (15 percent), or professors and teachers (9 percent). Of those not in paid work, about half were non-wage earning homemakers, and most of the remainder were rentiers. The community was overwhelmingly composed of members of the comfortable middle class, doing rather well out of the very social order of which some of them were so critical. The uneasiness this caused many of them rarely resulted in political radicalization, but there was a more moderate response possible, which their leaders pointed out. As the Committee summed it up,
When [the Society of Friends] has perceived wrongs in institutions in which it has been involved it has tried first of all to clear itself of complicity in those wrongs. It has believed that permanent good to society can best be brought about by the influence of conviction and example which spreads from the individual to the group and from the group to the community. This was Jesus’ teaching and method of work. 45
The Son of God’s method of social change–with which who could disagree?– was "an appeal to the conscience and the arousing of a sense of duty in the favored class, not a call to rebellion or to an assertion of their rights on the part of the poor." And, Henry J. Cadbury pointed out, "As the membership of the Friends lies almost wholly in the favored class it is all the more important that we observe this technique of Jesus." The employing capitalists among them bore a specially heavy responsibility to "stir our own consciences and appeal to our own sense of duty." Out of this stern self-examination and inner-direction concrete results could follow, because they owned and controlled the firms they ran. Leeds, Samuel Allen, Bob Yarnall and Bernard Waring, the Scattergood brothers, Charles Evans, Arthur Jackson, and other AFSC activists were the Business Problems Group’s leaders or among its founder members46.
What did they do? Over the next several years, and indeed throughout the 1920s, as the prospects for large-scale social reconstruction receded, some of them (notably Leeds) turned their companies into nationally-renowned examples of welfare capitalism combined with a growing measure of employer-inspired industrial democracy. They lobbied within the business organizations they joined, like the MMA and its national counterparts, to win them round, too, to some less troublesome progressive causes, notably the crusade against insecurity and unemployment. In general, they helped keep alive the flickering flame of liberal optimism through a bleak time. Morris Leeds and his fellows enjoyed great prestige in the New Era, and even erstwhile labor-liberals and future New Dealers attached their realistically-limited hopes for social progress to them and their projects. In John Fitch’s words, progressive employers "constitute[d] merely an oasis in a great desert. But it is an oasis that is very cheering and full of promise. I have faith to believe that it will grow." 47
Conclusion
In fact, it did not: the Depression destroyed welfare capitalism and business progressivism, whether their inspiration had been religious or secular, and ushered in a new and uncomfortable era of class politics and government intervention. Leeds and his friends’ day was past, but they played their part in easing the tensions of change, acting as conciliators in labor disputes who enjoyed both sides’ trust, helping to smooth the transition from welfare capitalism to welfare state. As war clouds gathered over Europe, they also attempted to capitalize on the goodwill they hoped the Kinderspeisung had won them by trying to intercede with the Nazis and buy the privilege of emigration for more Jews. Within the United States, they worked to ease the immigration and assimilation of these refugees, and joined themselves to a variety of liberal groups for whom the challenge of totalitarianism had increased their sensitivity to civil liberties and race relations issues, where the AFSC and associated ‘Quakerly’ organizations like the Fellowship of Reconciliation had taken a leading role since the War.
In all these ways, they helped complete the process, begun in the 1890s, whereby American Quakerism transformed itself from a marginal, declining collection of mutually-hostile sects, into a religious movement with broad social purposes, a continuing this-worldly meaning for its members, and prestige and influence far outweighing its small (but no longer shrinking) size. Curiously, given the divisive immediate effects of the Great War, one of the lasting benefits of the shared pride in, and identification with, the AFSC’s continuing work, was the healing of the Hicksite/Orthodox schism. As a result, the combined influence of the seaboard Quaker communities was enhanced, and they, not the more numerous but less distinctive conservative evangelicals of the mid- and far West, came to stand and speak for the whole diverse Religious Society of Friends in the minds of outsiders. It was their kind of Quakerism which exerted powerful attractions on a stream of new adherents. These ‘Quakers by convincement’ were gathered from co-workers in the variety of civil liberties, social justice, and pacifist causes to which seaboard, metropolitan, and college town Quakers have continued to devote their efforts ever since the Great War brought them out of their sectarian shells, and thereby, perhaps, saved them from ordinariness and oblivion.
This paper has gone some of the way towards explaining this outcome. Clearly, the Great War was the catalyst for change rather than its underlying cause. The basic forces for change were generated by the transatlantic modernizers’ response to the spiritual crisis of the Gilded Age, and their identification of social activism as a way of making their religion once again meaningful. Much of the argument and programmatic content of the Quaker social gospel was scarcely distinguishable, and largely derived, from their liberal Protestant and secular Progressive contemporaries. And yet Quakers’ distinctive religious convictions did make a difference: in particular, the commitments to equality, community, and peace made them peculiarly sensitive to issues of domestic social injustice, and exposed them to public hostility during times of international conflict. 1917-1919 was the first such major war in the American Century; ironically, one might argue that the resulting lasting revitalizing of (parts of) American Quakerism, with its incalculable benefits for the subsequent course of American liberalism, has been a significant positive byproduct of the fact that injustice and conflict have never since been absent, for those with eyes to see.
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