Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History. - book reviews

Progressive, The, Oct, 1995 by Colman McCarthy

By Staughton Lynd and Alice Lynd Orbis Books. 530 pages. $45.00 cloth; $25.00 paper.

In the courses on nonviolence that I've been teaching since the early 1980s, I start off with a spot quiz: "Raise your hands if you can identify these six people: Robert E. Lee, U.S. Grant, Paul Revere, Jane Addams, Jeanette Rankin, and Dorothy Day."

Out of 5,000 students over the years, not one has named all six. Nearly all hands go up on the first three, with rarely a raised hand on the last three. Everyone knows the peacebreakers but not the peacemakers.

Students aren't to blame. They weren't taught. Their teachers weren't taught. We graduate our kids--from our 78,000 elementary schools, 28,000 high schools, and 3,000 colleges and universities--as peace illiterates, and then wonder why we are sunk in violence: Pentagon violence, family violence, corporate violence, crime violence, media violence, abortion violence, killing-animals-for-food-and-clothing violence, environmental violence, verbal violence, military violence, religious violence.

If a vastness is found in all that, an equal breadth--larger, in fact--is to be found in the literature of nonviolence. As competently as any editors have, Staughton Lynd and Alice Lynd--lawyers who work for the Northeast Ohio Legal Services--have compiled essays and excerpts that are the core of America's peace literature. The sampling is diverse and deep, ranging from the known to the obscure, from the dead of past centuries to the living of today. Ninety-seven of what the authors call "documents" are included. They are arranged historically, beginning with William Penn's first letter to the Delawares and John Woolman's "A Plea for the Poor," and ending with some antinuclear statements from tribal members, including the Western Shoshones.

As the Lynds are aware, nonviolence is not easily defined. Gandhi of India never liked the word. He said it's a negative, defining what it isn't. Gandhi preferred satyagraha, a Hindi word roughly translated as truth force. This is the most difficult notion to explain to those who are unread in the literature and history of peacemaking. Every conflict, whether in families, workplaces, neighborhoods, or among governments, has been, and always will be, solved through the use of force: violent force or nonviolent force. Either fists, gulas, armies, bombs and nukes, or the force of justice, the force of shared wealth, the force of organized resistance to Caesar or the Pharaohs, the force of noncooperation with injustice, and the strongest force of all, love.

To my skeptical students, the idea of stopping a mugger or a Hitler through the force of love evokes guffaws and cries of yeah, right." That's a natural reaction, the same they might give to a complicated mathematical solution to an algebraic problem. Which is why we teach math in first grade and every grade after. We don't teach methods, skills, history, practitioners, and successes of nonviolence. This is the supreme value of the Lynds' collection. It provides the intellectual material to build a moral structure in which the mind and heart can live with inner peace and begin to work for outer peace--in the community and among governments.

In their thirty-six-page introduction, the Lynds rightly emphasize that nonviolence is both a personal and a political philosophy. The varicolored methods of how it is applied--ranging from the individual seeking inner peace to the larger groupings of organizations or governments pursuing global peace--create an equal diversity of definitions of nonviolence.

Within the broadness of the meaning of nonviolence, the Lynds identify several overlapping but distinct elements: 1) refusal to retaliate (pacifism, nonresistance); 2) acting out of conviction by demonstrative action (direct action); 3) deliberate lawbreaking for conscience's sake (civil disobedience).... Nonviolence means all these things and something more: the vision of love as an agent for fundamental social change."

Throughout the text, one author or another has a go at defining this vision.

Shelley Douglass: "One of the guidelines for nonviolence is that, if you want to go someplace, you have to go by getting there. If you want the world to be one way, you have to live that way, and that helps the world to become that way."

Cesar Chavez: "I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness, is to sacrifice ourselves for others in totally nonviolent struggle for others."

David Dellinger: "Nonviolent defense requires not only willingness to risk one's life (as any good soldier, rich or poor, will do). It requires renunciation of all claims to special privileges and power at the expense of other people. Surrender of special privilege is certainly foreign to the psychology of those who supply, command, and rely on the military. Nonviolence is supremely the weapon of the dispossessed, the underprivileged, and the egalitarian, not of those who are still addicted to private profit, commercial values, and great wealth."