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Reaching Out Thanks for your efforts at the Nonviolent Activist. If your readers are interested in doing some outreach to the “unconverted,” they may want to consider calling into this country’s vast network of talk radio programs. A few moments of listening to the AM airwave discussion will help explain why people are so confused about American foreign policy. Fortunately, I’ve found it to be surprisingly easy to call into both local and national talk shows and challenge the right-wing hosts. There are even some progressive hosts who would love to hear from more peace people, like Thom Hartmann on www.Radio Power.org, Enid Goldstein on KNRC, and Randi Rhodes on WJNO. I’m afraid the left is largely ignoring this participatory forum, and establishment propagandists are having a field day in our absence. Also, I have a collection of audiotaped lectures by people like Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and Medea Benjamin that I’ve been donating to libraries in many countries. If any of your readers would be interested in a donation of tapes for their library, they can contact me at publicmind@ msn.com, or drop me a line at What’s Left, PO Box 18070, Denver, CO, 80218. —Preston Enright Radical Pacifist History I am pleased that the NVA (Nov.-Dec. 2003) chose to review Radical Pacifism: The War Resisters League and Gandhian Nonviolence in America, 1915-1963, the first published history of WRL. I am disappointed, however, that reviewer Wendy Schwartz—herself an important WRL member—ignored the most significant topics in the book: nothing on the book’s central arguments; nothing on Jessie Wallace Hughan and WRL’s ideological and organizational origins; nothing on the Spanish Civil War; nothing on the dramatic CO protests in CPS and prison during WWII; and nothing on the key role that WRL played in the postwar civil rights, anti-civil defense and anti-nuclear movements. Also, Schwartz writes that, in the book’s “one significant error,” I underrate the role of Tracy Mygatt and Frances Witherspoon in the founding of WRL. I agree with Schwartz that Mygatt and Witherspoon (who I discuss), along with other women and the female peace societies, played an important role in the birth of WRL, but archival evidence has led me to conclude that Hughan alone founded the WRL. Finally, I will leave it to readers to decide whether Radical Pacifism contains sufficient “color” and “humor,” but it certainly contains “humanity”—not least in its sympathetic portraits of three generations of WRL activists. —Scott H. Bennett I am glad that Scott Bennett’s newly published Radical Pacifism: The War Resisters League and Gandhian Nonviolence in America 1915-1963 is featured prominently among the books on the first page of the League’s new Literature List, thereby alerting WRLers and others to the fact that this book is, indeed, one of those “books that make a difference.” Having read this thrilling and comprehensive account of the founding and history of the WRL, I believe Bennett’s work to be essential reading for those who’d like a detailed overview of the organization’s past. Unlike certain scholars elsewhere, Bennett’s approach is scholarly without being pedantic. He has mined the papers at the Swarthmore College Peace collection and other sources to rewarding effect and meaning; those who’ve deposited their papers in such collections can only react with positive delight when a researcher with Bennett’s skill and talent arrives to make use of such legacies. Readers and activists such as myself respond with deep appreciation. I hope that others will leap at the opportunity to delve into the pages of this important book, despite the faint praise in the November-December issue of the Nonviolent Activist. —Robert Reiss |
WRL Homepage • WRL Programs • WRL Literature • WRL Actions • WRL Employment • About WRL
