Jeffrey Kovac. Refusing War, Affirming Peace: A History of Civilian Public Service Camp #21 at Cascade Locks. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2009. Pp. 192.

During World War II, about 12,000 young men, in face of the military draft, availed themselves of the option to serve their country with “work of national importance” in non-military settings.

Part of the U.S. government’s purpose with what was known as the Civilian Public Service (CPS) program was to keep these conscientious objectors (COs) out of the public eye.  The government largely succeeded—and in the years since the history of this program has not received much attention.  Now that participants in the CPS program are passing from the scene, the living memory of the witness of World War II COs is fading fast.

However, those events had (and continue to have) importance beyond the small number of lives directly affected by them.  So, this book by Jeffrey Kovac, the first in-depth study to focus on just one particular CPS camp, deserves our attention and appreciation.  Kovac, an ethicist of science at the University of Tennessee, has a personal interest in this topic due to his own pacifist convictions and the role his CO father-in-law, Charles Davis, played in the story.  His research is thorough, and he tells the tale in a clear, straightforward manner.

The camp whose story Kovac tells was operated by the Church of the Brethren and located east of Portland, Oregon, in the Columbia gorge near the small town of Cascade Locks.  The main work that campers in this camp (“Camp No. 21”) performed was forestry work in the mountains south of Cascade Locks.

Kovac’s choice of this particular camp was a sound one.  This camp endured for the entirety of the war and ended up being the scene for more than its share of drama. A key step early on that greatly contributed to the success of the camp was the choice of Brethren pastor Mark Schrock as the camp director.  Kovac portrays Schrock as a crucial player in providing wise guidance for camp operations.

Kovac tells of several of the key events in the five-year history of the camp that gained outside attention.  The most famous CPSer was the actor Lew Ayres—who for the first several months of the War was stationed at Camp No. 21.  In facing the draft, Ayres had sought to serve as a non-combatant in the medical corps.  The military would not guarantee such a position, so Ayres then successfully sought CO status and joined CPS.  However, the publicity his situation gained helped persuade the government to change their policies.  When Ayres was guaranteed a position in the medical corps, he left CPS and served as a non-combatant in the military.  He remained close friends with Mark Schrock and always spoke favorably of his experience at Cascade Locks.

Camp No. 21 next made the news when a CPSer of Japanese extraction, George Yamada, was ordered to leave CPS and enter one of the concentration camps that had been established to imprison Japanese-Americans.  Yamada, with strong support from his fellow campers, refused these orders.  This actually turned out to be one of few direct acts of resistance to the relocation efforts, and ended somewhat successfully as Yamada was permitted to stay in CPS when he accepted transfer to a CPS camp away from the West Coast.

This controversy pitted Camp No. 21, including director Schrock, against the Selective Service—and exposed the ambiguous nature of the arrangement wherein the Peace Churches acted as agents of the warring government.

A third notable story that Kovac tells is of a confrontation between campers and the U.S. Forest Service when campers discerned that one of the projects the Forest Service was asking them to participate in would too directly contribute to the war effort.  The campers stood strong and ended up being excused from the project.

Kovac also tells of an ambitious, and only partly realized, effort at education for campers, called the “School of Pacifist Living.” When the program began, Brethren leader, Dan West, agreed to help it start.  While the school did cover some important ground, it was difficult to sustain.  Participants were asked to invest at least eight hours a week to intense discussion plus significant time in study on top of their 51-hour workweek.  West had to leave after the first segment of the school, and in time the program petered out.

Kovac, along with covering these various high points, also gives the reader a good sense of the challenges facing the program.  Probably the most difficult challenge stemmed simply from the interminable nature of the service.  CPSers were required to stay in CPS for the “duration of the war.”  In time, most of them sought other assignments, especially more challenging and exotic possibilities such as working in mental hospitals and fighting forest fires. Towards the end of the War, director Schrock left to return to his home and the last year or so of the life of Camp No. 21 drug by, ending more with a whimper than a bang.

Refusing War, Affirming Peace is an interesting and important book.  This close-grained look at the experience of World War II COs comes at an important time for present-day pacifists.  As we lose the living connection with those who witnessed to the ways of peace, Kovac has given us a perceptive reminder of their motivations and experiences.

It is mostly an asset that the book focuses directly on the story of Camp No. 21.  We do have a few other books that give us the broader picture of the CPS story—though most of these are long out of print and hard to find (the most thorough treatment is Mulford Q. Sibly and Philip E. Jacob, Conscription of Conscience [Cornell University Press, 1952]).  We have nothing else quite like Kovac’s treatment; it would be great if this book could stimulate some other similar studies.

I did wish for a bit more information in a few cases.  Several times Kovac gives us some tidbits about the future of some of the Camp No. 21 members (e.g., George Brown, who went on to serve 18 terms in the U.S. House of Representatives).  However, after learning a great deal about camp director Mark Schrock’s background and effective time of service at Camp No. 21, we don’t learn about his post-CPS life.

We also don’t learn much about the actual forestry work the CPSers did as part of their service.  Certainly, many (most?) campers found this work to be less than fully engaging and fulfilling, especially in comparison with their social transformative ideals.  Nonetheless, they spent most of their time and energy out in the woods performing “work of national importance.”  It would have been nice to learn a bit more about this work and what the CPSers did accomplish (or not) with it.

Jeffrey Kovac deserves our gratitude for completing this fascinating book, obviously a labor of love.  We now have an accessible portrait of one particular example of life in service of vital and costly ideals.  May it be widely read and serve as a stimulus for better understanding and applying those ideals.

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Lawrence McK. Miller. Witness for Humanity: The Biography of Clarence E. Pickett. Pendle Hill Publications, 1999.

Clarence Pickett, who died in 1964, was a giant among the great humanitarians of the 20th century.  For many years, Pickett served as the executive secretary of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). He oversaw the AFSC’s wide-ranging efforts to meet human needs and witness for peace in some of the most turbulent and violent years of recent human history.

Pickett and the AFSC received the ultimate accolade when the AFSC was awared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947, most especially for their work in saving millions of lives of post-World War II displaced persons.

This biography by Lawrence Miller, himself a longtime worker with the AFSC and other Quaker organizations, gives a comprehensive portrayal of the life of a man who helps us see just how important able and visionary administrators are for the concetizing of high ideals.  He tells of Pickett’s lifelong profound commitment to the Quaker expression of Christian faith and commitment to minister to human needs and to witness for peace in a warring world.

Clarence Pickett, once he was able to leave his parents’ Kansas farm and attend college, moved on a fast track toward leadership. He served as a pastor in Friends’ congregations and spent time as a Bible professor at Earlham College. In 1929, when he was in his mid-40s, Pickett was chosen to head the AFSC. He stayed in that position until his retirement in 1950.

Several of the dramatic events recounted by Miller include Pickett’s involvement with Depression-era miners and mill workers, Pickett’s rather amazing and fruitful friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt, and the desperate and prescient work of Pickett and other Quaker leaders to raise awareness of and bring aid to besieged Jews and other minorities in Nazi Germany in the late 1930s.

This is an inspiring story—in a century of total war and rapacious ec0nomic forces, to see such a powerful witness for peace and human solidarity. Pickett’s story also fascinates in its combination of idealism and pragmatism.

Unfortunately, though this book was published ten years ago, it received little attention and is very difficult to find. Miller notes in the preface that he had a hard time finding a publisher, finally settling for the Quaker-run Pendle Hill, a publisher mostly of excellent pamphlets on peace and various other important themes, but with minimal distribution capabilities.

One reason for lack of interest on the part of publishers is probably the sense that Clarence Pickett is by now too obscure a figure to warrant the investment in a new biography. It also doesn’t help that the book is not written in a particularly engaging fashion. It doesn’t have much narrative force, ending up mainly as simply a cataloguing of one event in Pickett’s life following another.

However, Miller does tell an important story.  Since we are not likely to get another biography of Pickett, we may be thankful that we do have this record.  The writing may not be particularly dynamic, but the record is here—and the account Miller gives gets the point across. This book is recommended for all who would seek to understand more about important counter-currents to the 20th century’s tragic embrace of the myth of redemptive violence.

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Michael Bess. Choices Under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II. Knopf, 2006.

Reviewed by Ted Grimsrud

An extraordinarily strong cultural assumption most Americans hold—to a large extent across the political spectrum—is that World War II stands as one of the highest moral achievements in our entire history.  It’s obvious that the patriotic Right affirms the “goodness” of the War, but strong similar feelings are held by those on the opposite side of the political spectrum, too (witness, for example, Leftist pundit Katha Pollitt’s scathing response to Nicholson Baker’s attempt to question the “goodness” of the War in his book, Human Smoke, in The Nation [April 21, 2008]).

One of the main virtues of Michael Bess’s Choices Under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II, is how Bess, a professor of history at Vanderbilt University, complexifies the easy assumption that World War II was mostly a morally unambiguous success story for American virtue.

While Bess pays respectful attention to pacifists who question the validity of all wars (see especially his highly sympathetic treatment of French pacifist pastor André Trocmé’s work to save Jews during the war years in chapter six), he is no pacifist himself.  He even states that, of course, we have no reason to question whether this was ultimately a necessary and just war.  And in the end, in fact, he treats even the use of the atomic bomb against Hiroshima, Japan, as a morally justifiable (if barely) act (he’s less positive about the dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki).

However, the ultimate justifiability of the war does not release its participants nor those now seeking to take account of what happened from moral analysis.  Bess works hard, and mostly with admirable success, at offering an objective moral analysis that scrutinizes “our side” as much as “their side.”  So he criticizes the bombing of civilian populations by the Allies as a case of “moral slippage.”  And in one of his more important, though frustratingly brief, chapters he examines the “moral awkwardness” of the Allies’ alliance with Stalin and totalitarian Soviet Russia.  He also critically discusses the “victors’ justice” of the post-war war crimes’ trials.

I found the positive impression Bess’s careful analyses made on me lessening as the book continues, however.  The first half of the book, showing the dynamics of racism shaping all sides of the conflict, the policies of the victorious World War I nations that surely played a major role in making Germany “safe for the Nazis,” American imperialism in the Far East, and the morally problematic war tactics the “good guys” used, indeed effectively challenges American mythology about the “goodness” of the “Good War.”

However, right in the middle of the book, Bess offers a curious chapter on the Battle of Midway that turns out simply to be a celebration of the bold American tactics that turned a likely defeat into a war-changing victory.  Admirable and interesting as those tactics and their execution may be, it was unclear what the role of this particular story played in relation to Bess’s overall argument in the book—and Bess’s account here adds a note of triumphalism that actually seems to diminish the overall objective tone of the book.

It was with his thorough and thoughtful account of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan that Bess challenges my thinking the most.  He raises important questions and makes a strong case for the complexity of the American decision to introduce the world to this most devastating of weapons.  However, since he doesn’t convince me that this decision was not an unqualified moral disaster for this country, I ended up finishing this part of the book with a bad taste in my mouth.  Any moral account of the War that leaves the door as open as Bess’s does to the moral legitimacy of nuclear weapons fails its most important test.

Bess, at the end of the day, seems to treat morality as a series of quandaries without any overarching anchor points.  With his assumption that, of course, this was a necessary and just war, he ends up mostly making the case for the inevitability of “dirty hands.”  He does give the reader a lot to appreciate in his treatment of the various elements of World War II—his rigor in raising moral questions marks this as a highly unusual work.  And this distinctiveness is certainly commendable, even if in many ways I am left with the feeling that the fact that I am as impressed as I am with this book mostly reflects the utter failure of other historians and ethicists in our country to use stable moral criteria in their evaluation of the War.

Ultimately, though, Bess gives us only a little help in our struggle to counter the American version of the myth of redemptive violence that uses World War II as one of its paradigmatic cases of how violence does indeed defeat evil and make good win out.  If indeed, as Bess helps us see at a number of places, the actual war that was fought from 1939 to 1945 did violate fundamental moral principles, perhaps we should allow those violations to push us to ask even more fundamental moral questions about World War II than Bess seems willing to ask.

Maybe the War was actually a moral failure—and as such more serves as a cautionary tale.  Is it possible that even when there is a “good cause,” even when democratic and “Christian” nations take up the sword in “justifiable” resistance to tyranny, even then war corrupts absolutely?

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