After leaving 5 Beekman Street with a very light load—courtesy of the FBI theft—WRL and its peace group mates moved to 339 Lafayette Street at the western edge of the East Village. (For the story of WRL’s pre-Lafayette Street homes, see Home Is Where WRL Is: A History of WRL’s Offices, Part I: From a…
In our 100 year history, the WRL national office, surprisingly, has had only a few locations in New York City. Each was unique in its own way. WRL was first located in Jessie Wallace Hughan’s apartment. The founder of WRL, she brought into the fold activists from a variety of progressive organizations. Soon there were…
During the Vietnam War era, between 1964 and 1973, the U.S. military drafted 2.2 million men out of an eligible pool of 27 million. Of those, 16.3 percent were Black. Of Vietnam combat troops, 23 percent were Black. Indeed, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. referred to the Vietnam War as a white man’s war, a…
In Spring 1972 People’s Blockades sprang up around the country. Their goal was to prevent munitions from leaving U.S. ports for Vietnam. One target of the blockade was Earle Naval Ammunitions Depot, located in New Jersey on Sandy Hook Bay, with multiple types of actions involving several pacifist organizations and more than a hundred activists….
I write this overview of the WRL peace calendars focused on young people as tens of thousands of them are now facing the horrors of war. Thus, some of the children’s personal statements in the calendars have a heartbreaking immediacy. Still, through descriptions of support, service, resistance projects, and individual actions undertaken by an impressive…
WRL never had enough staff to accomplish all its work, so volunteers regularly contributed time and skills. When it was founded in 1923, the volunteers were mainly well-educated and financially-comfortable women who had known each other previously from peace activities to end World War I. In the World War II era, when men involved with…
With the second wave of feminism gaining wide acceptance by social change organizations, WRL leaders decided that it, at last, needed to codify the accomplishments of pacifist women. Thus the organization’s 1972 peace calendar, In Woman’s Soul, whose title was taken from Emma Goldman’s pronouncement that women’s emancipation begins in their soul, was devoted to the writings and artwork of…
For 58 years WRL members and friends could count on having a pacifist touchstone at their fingertips: The War Resisters League Peace Calendar. It was a spiral-bound 5½ by 8½ inch datebook, with a page for each week of the year that allowed owners to record appointments and such. And a cover that consisted of beautiful…
In accord with Jessie Wallace Hughan’s belief that WRL would likely be more effective if led by men, the role of women, and certainly their authority, decreased substantially post WW II. Indeed, for the next several decades WRL women primarily served as adjuncts to men: doing office work so men could organize demonstrations or resist…
In founding and then leading WRL for nearly 20 years, Jessie Wallace Hughan was supported by an impressive group of women, many having previously headed other women’s pacifist, suffragist, anti-conscription, and socialist organizations. Unusually independent for their time, most had graduated from prestigious universities, supported themselves with careers, and were engaged in romantic relationships with like-minded women. Among these colleagues…
Norma Becker 1930-2006 Born in 1930, Norma Lee Pliskin Becker, the woman who grew up to be the peace movement’s organizer-in-chief, first wanted to be a ballet dancer. As a girl, traveling from her home in the Bronx to ballet classes in Manhattan, she expected to have a future in toe shoes. But she…
This collection of short pieces is like an extravagant smorgasbord: a large number of disparate items, many of them fabulous and leaving readers hungry for more similar morsels but others well past their prime and too many of them insufficiently described for the novice grazer. The pieces seem to be three years’ worth of…
WWI, the Picture of Futility To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918 By Adam Hochschild Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011, 448 pages, $28 Although non-pacifists might attempt to justify some wars because their intent is to save lives or protect freedoms, no reasonable person could justify the carnage produced by World War…
The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama By David Remnick Alfred A. Knopf, 2010, 656 pages, $29.95 hardcover The Promise: President Obama, Year One By Jonathan Alter Simon & Schuster, 2010, 458 pages, $28.00 hardcover By the People: The Election of Barack Obama Directed by Amy Rice and Alicia Sams 2009, Class 5…
The Politics of Positivity Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape Edited by Jacklyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti Seal Press, 2009, 361 pages, $16.95 Four decades ago, when I was pretty young, a WRL member for whom I worked attempted to rape me. There was a good possibility that…
Karl Bissinger: Hope, No Matter What A shorter version of this article was printed in the winter issue of WIN as a memorial to Karl, who died on November 19, 2008, shortly after his 94th birthday. For Karl Bissinger, the road to the War Resisters League and the Peace Pentagon was a long and winding…
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