September/October 2005

Featured Story

Seeing Ourselves Through the Eyes of the Opposition

By Jerry Elmer

In July 1994, the Fellowship of Reconciliation made a re-quest under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for all FBI files on our organization and our work. It may be of interest to readers of Fellowship to know that FOIA gives the FBI ten business days to respond to such requests. In fact, it took approximately ten years and hundreds of hours of pro bono attorney time to wrench all the records from the FBI.

Over the past three years, FOR has received a treasure trove of government surveillance files. The bare statistics alone are impressive. We now have seventeen volumes of material from the New York FBI office and forty-six volumes from FBI headquarters in Washington, DC. There are another eight volumes of what FBI lingo calls “Enclosures Behind Files” (they were literally stored behind the main files on FBI shelves); these are mostly reprints of FOR publications. In addition, we have eight volumes on FOR from other agencies, including Army Intelligence, Naval Intelligence, and the old War Department. In all, there are eighty-four volumes, totaling well over 10,000 pages and dating back to 1923.

Reading through all this, one comes to see something of the ebb and flow of FOR’s work over the decades. In the 1920s, FOR was campaigning for US diplomatic recognition for the USSR. In the 1930s and 1940s, there was extensive work in support of Gandhi’s independence movement in India, together with domestic organizing against segregation and war. In the 1950s, there were the twin efforts against the Cold War, internationally, and segregation and racial injustice at home. In the 1960s and 1970s, of course, efforts started turning to opposition to US in-volvement in Indochina.

One sees some progress over time. As George Houser makes clear in his article (p. 7), supporting racial integration was once dangerous work—yet today we have a national holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. Although George is too modest to say so, his and other pioneering FOR efforts were among the reasons that the civil rights movement was able to accomplish what it did.

The United States did not get around to outlawing dis-crimination in public accommodations until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but the files show FOR picketing to desegregate the New York YMCA in 1947. (The FBI even has a copy of the leaflet we used!) The US Supreme Court did not outlaw the poll tax—an especially pernicious way to prevent blacks from voting—until 1966, but there was FOR in 1944, organizing opposition to the poll tax in Congress. In fact, an important theme that emerges from the FBI files is how important FOR’s early advocacy has been, on issue after issue.

Inevitably, some of the FBI files are amusing in an ironic way. There is a memo from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover fulminating because a meeting FOR organized in a Washington, DC, church seated “colored” men in pews so close to white women that they could almost touch! And an agent in California was puzzled by an FOR member who was sincere in her belief that the Japanese-Americans in internment camps were human beings, just like white people.

Some things, alas, don’t change. The mood in the US after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 resembled the mood here af-ter 9/11/01. Then, as now, the US had been attacked. Then, as now, the attackers (gasp!) were not white Christians. Then, as now, American racism, xenophobia, and war sentiment were running high. Fortunately, then, as now, FOR was a voice of san-ity, reason, and peace. When I compared contemporary FOR statements in the wake of 9/11 with the FBI file report of our statement issued in the wake of Pearl Harbor, I was struck by the similarity of tone.

This material will doubtless have tremendous value to professional historians, and one complete set will be housed at the Swarthmore Peace Collection. Most of the files have been stamped with consecutive page numbers for ease of reference, and the entire trove is being entered into a database to facilitate the work of future researchers. According to Wendy Chmielewski, curator of the Swarthmore Collection, this is the first time that such an extensive collection has ever been catalogued in this manner. But valuable as the files will be to scholars, I believe that they will be of particular interest to peace activists.

It is a sad and terrible thing that we live in a world beset by violence and injustice. But it is a very good thing that - given the kind of world we have - there remains an organization like FOR. The story of FOR that emerges from these eighty-four volumes of government files is, of course, truncated, expurgated, and cockeyed in many respects. It is still a remarkable story of the courage, wisdom, and stick-to-it-iveness of generations of workers for peace.

Jerry Elmer is legal counsel to the Fellowship of Reconciliation. A commercial litigator based in Providence, Rhode Island, he was a draft resister to the Vietnam War and has remained active in the peace movement ever since. His new book, Felon for Peace, is reviewed in this issue of Fellowship.