to the attention of the authorities. Ready to arrest her at the slightest provocation, they took action against her in 1917 when she blasted the war in a speech delivered in Bowman, North Dakota. She was quickly convicted of violating the Espionage Act and sentenced to five years in prison, despite the fact that she was a mother of four. While serving her time in Missouri State Penitentiary, she wrote two books. One of them, In Prison, was a stark exposé of the conditions women prisoners endured behind bars. O’Hare’s graphic descriptions of guard brutality and lesbian sex between prisoners shocked the nation.
Although she didn’t lose a son in battle, O’Hare’s incarceration made her one of the women who pay the price for war. By the time her sentence was commuted by President Warren Harding in 1920, she had served close to four years. Upon her release, she worked hard for prison reform, especially for women inmates.
27 March
Wally and Juanita Nelson
27 March 1909—23 May 2002
1923—
War Tax Resisters
A chance meeting, when she was a journalist and he was serving a jail term for participating in the Journey of Reconciliation, an effort to end segregation in the South, brought Wally Nelson and Juanita Morrow together. That was in 1948. For the next half-century, the two were life partners and collaborators in active nonviolence.
Both had been involved in civil rights actions before they met; both were members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). In addition, Wally had spent nearly four years in a federal penitentiary for refusing to serve in World War II. As African-Americans, they were dedicated to securing civil rights for blacks. As advocates of nonviolence, they were equally devoted to resisting what they saw as the American war machine.
In the same year they met, the couple collaborated in the founding of Peacemakers, a national organization dedicated to “revolutionary pacifist activity.” Members of Peacemakers pledged to live radically countercultural lives by refusing to serve in wartime, participate in the production or transportation of weapons, or pay war taxes. They also promised to spread the good news of pacifism in word and deed. The Nelsons were two of the first members to take the plunge into war tax resistance. It’s a form of protest that, then and now, can have severe consequences, including seizure of property by the government and even imprisonment.
The basic purpose of war tax resistance is a refusal to fund military spending through tax dollars. There are several strategies that resisters have adopted over the years. Some refuse to pay any taxes, whereas others deduct the percentage of their tax that goes to the Pentagon but pay the rest. Some donate to charities the amount of money they would otherwise pay in taxes, and others don’t. And some avoid the whole problem of paying taxes by adopting a lifestyle of voluntary simplicity in order to keep their income below taxable levels.
This last option was the one chosen by the Nelsons. They built their own home out of salvaged supplies and grew most of their food in a half-acre organic garden. They refused to buy insurance or automobiles, and earned what little cash they needed through odd jobs that deducted no social security tax from their wages. Their decision to live on a drastically reduced income and to forgo conventional insurance or governmental benefits, difficult as it was at times, was sustained by their conviction, as Wally put it, that “our entire economic life is tied into violence. It seemed logical that the less we participated, the less we’d be giving to that system.”
But the Nelsons weren’t just refuseniks. They continued their work with CORE through the 1950s, actively supported César Chávez’s United Farm Workers campaign, and helped build tax resistance as a national movement. Wally died in 2002, advocating active nonviolence to the end. Juanita continues to live in their hand-built Massachusetts home, still refusing to pay taxes.
28 March
Pelagius
ca. 354—ca. 430
Wealth and Violence
Pelagius, who may have been born somewhere in the British Isles, is quite possibly the earliest Christian humanist. A monk and theologian of the Celtic Johannine Christian Order, he argued against the doctrine of original sin and defended the position that humans, made in the likeness of a good God, are capable of willing and performing good works on their own. In saying this, he placed himself squarely on the side of those who taught that humans possess inherent dignity and a native attunement to virtue. This humanistic and hopeful position was blasted by Augustine, Pelagius was excommunicated in 417, and his writings were condemned as heretical by the Council of Carthage a year later.
Because of the Church’s suppression of his works, not many of Pelagius’s writings survive. But one of them, On Riches, is a thoughtful analysis of why, in his estimation, the acquisition of wealth is incompatible with a commitment to Christ. The heart of his argument is that there is an inseparable connection between wealth and violence, and violence is antithetical to Christian discipleship.
Pelagius argues for the connection between wealth and violence in three ways. First, he says, the temperament of a person who possesses wealth is prone to moods and responses that corrode his character, potentially harm others, and certainly fail to reflect Christ’s example. The rich man is haughty, proud, full of fury and anger, boastful, and disdainful of the poor. Christ and his disciples, on the other hand, are downcast, humble, gentle, long-suffering, self-effacing, and compassionate of the poor. In the second place, wealth breeds violence because of the lengths the rich will go to in order to protect what they own. They will “oppress, rob, torture, and finally kill” to make sure that no one threatens their possessions. Finally, given the way the world is, it’s entirely likely that the wealthy acquired their riches in the first place by force of arms or some kind of skulduggery. “It is difficult,” writes Pelagius, “to acquire riches without committing every kind of evil. They are procured by calculated lies or clever theft or fraudulent deceit or robbery with violence or barefaced falsification. They are frequently accumulated by plunder of widows or oppression of orphans or bribery or, much crueler still, by the shedding of innocent blood.”
It’s clear from what Pelagius says that he doesn’t think material possessions are wicked in themselves, but rather that their owners are tempted by violence in their pursuit or their protection and eventually succumb to greed, the foundation of all human sin. It’s not accidental, he says, that Jesus embraced poverty, knowing as he did that ownership leads to greed and greed leads to violence. People who “profess themselves as Christ’s disciples,” concludes Pelagius, “should follow their teacher’s example” and avoid falling into the spiral of wealth and violence.
29 March
R. S. Thomas
29 March 1913—25 September 2000
Troubler of the Welsh Conscience
Most people have heard of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, but fewer are familiar with the poetry of his fellow countryman R. S. Thomas. This is a pity, because the “other” Thomas is reckoned by many critics to be one of the finest poets of the twentieth century. He narrowly lost the 1996 Nobel Prize in literature to the Irish poet Seamus Heaney.
One of the reasons R. S. Thomas is relatively unknown is that he chose to live remotely and obscurely. An Anglican priest, he intentionally served rural parishes in western Wales far away from bustling town and city centers. He disliked giving interviews and discouraged visitors. He also had a somewhat curmudgeonly reputation for his distrust of modern technology, living for most of his life without central heating, refrigerators, or television. He
