After the war, Burton was barred for a time from teaching because he refused to sign an oath to the Crown that would have obliged him to fight if war broke out again. He finally secured a job in a remote district of New Zealand. In the 1930s, he began training for ordination in the Methodist Church. Upon completion, he took a run-down church in one of Wellington’s worst slums and quickly revitalized it by dint of hard and dedicated work. He also cofounded the Christian Pacifist Society of New Zealand. When war erupted again in 1939, he spoke out against it and was promptly arrested, released, and arrested again. Sentenced to a year in prison, he spent his time behind bars writing an anti-war tract, Testament of Peace, for which the Methodist Church expelled him. He would not be reinstated or given another church until 1952.
Although Burton continued as a peace activist for the rest of his life, he steadfastly refused to cooperate with non-Christian peacemakers. When the Christian Pacifist Society he helped found voted to offer membership to non-Christians, he resigned in protest. He justified his position by arguing that without a strong commitment to the Prince of Peace, pacifism was merely an abstract philosophy. Of course he was mistaken. But he can be forgiven for the sake of his lifelong dedication to nonviolence.
17 January
William Stafford
17 January 1914—28 August 1993
Show Me a Good War
Some ten million men were conscripted into the U.S. military during World War II. Fifty thousand of them requested and received conscientious objector status. Some served as noncombatant medics. Others chose to go to prison. Twelve thousand opted to serve in labor camps scattered across the nation. The poet William Stafford was one of the latter.
Born in Kansas shortly before World War I erupted, Stafford grew up hearing elders—teachers, relatives, neighbors—talk about how horrible the conflict had been. So he arrived at his pacifist convictions while still quite young. When drafted in 1942 during World War II, it was only natural that he petitioned for conscientious objector status. For the next four years he performed hard manual labor in the camps—first in Arkansas, then in Illinois, and finally in California—for $2.50 a month. In Arkansas he was nearly lynched by a mob infuriated by his pacifism. After his release from the camps and his return home, a childhood friend threated to kill him for his “treasonous” opposition to the war. His first book, Down in My Heart, was a semi-autobiographical novel about life in the camps.
Stafford didn’t begin publishing poetry until nearly twenty years after the war ended. But his verse attests to his continuing opposition to it and to all wars. (Once asked whether he believed he could fight in a “good” war, he replied, “Show me a good war.”) In “These Mornings,” Stafford meditates on what happens when warplanes bomb cities. Both buildings and people are blown up into the sky or down into the earth, he writes, leaving nothing but hideous scars on the land. In “Ground Zero,” he reflects on the uncanny sidewalk photographs of victims created by the flash of the atomic blast at Hiroshima. Their shadows, he muses, are now ours. Our condoning of such an unimaginable mass killing leaves us spiritually anemic, shadow-like. And in “For the Unknown Soldier,” Stafford fleshes out the abstract word enemy by reminding readers that the “unknown enemy soldier” is a person who, just like us, marvels at a beautiful sky or carries a laughing baby to a park. He challenges the patriotic blindness that darkens our awareness of the “enemy’s” humanness.
Stafford’s lifelong opposition to war wasn’t strident. Although he understood and sympathized with the motives behind loud anti-war demonstrations, he neither approved of them nor participated in them. His style was quiet conversation, poetic evocation, and “living a life of witness by seeing the good in the enemy.” As he once said about his conscientious objection to World War II, “I can’t stop war, Jesus couldn’t stop war, Eisenhower couldn’t stop it. [But] I could decide there would be one person not in it.”
18 January
Kenneth Boulding
18 January 1910—18 March 1993
Economist of Peace
Born in England, the son of a Liverpool plumber, Kenneth Boulding was the first in his family to go beyond elementary school. In his early years, the memory of the horrors of World War I made him a pacifist and led him to reject his family’s Methodism (British Methodists had endorsed the war) and to join the Society of Friends. Boulding’s commitment to nonviolence exerted a profound influence on his life’s work.
Boulding was a brilliant student, earning an Oxford scholarship and later a fellowship at the University of Chicago. After settling in the United States, he began his scholarly life as an economist. But his interests ranged far beyond the boundaries of his specific discipline to include philosophy, religion, poetry, and systems analysis. He was convinced that “in any applied field one had to use all the social sciences . . . as all the social sciences were essentially studying the same thing, which was the social system.”
In 1937, Boulding joined the faculty of Colgate University where he stayed for thirty years before moving to the University of Colorado. Collaborating with his wife, Elise Boulding, whom he married in 1941 and with whom he raised five children, Boulding’s theories on peace and conflict resolution, explored in over thirty books, mirrored his pacifism. His Quaker background especially drew him to explore self-interested modes of exchange, the relationship between warfare and fear, and the importance of social and cultural interdependence to individual flourishing. In his 1963 book Conflict and Defense, he argued that understanding the dynamics of conflict is essential in the struggle for peace. Contrary to the opinions of many of his fellow economists, Boulding denied that economic growth was effectively fueled by warfare. Instead, he argued, it rested on cooperation and collaboration.
Boulding was more than a scholar of peace; he was also a peace activist. In 1942 he authored a circular that denounced World War II. Twenty-three years later, he helped organize the first teach-in against the Vietnam War. Boulding was also one of the first economists to decry what he called the “cowboy” mentality of wasteful and nonsustainable consumption, and he coined the term “spaceship earth” (later made famous by Buckminster Fuller) to draw attention to the need for more ecologically minded lifestyles and public policies.
Boulding died in Colorado in his eighty-fourth year. In a tribute to him, futurist and economist Hazel Henderson called Boulding “a towering intellectual figure of the twentieth century who did more than most to open windows to the twenty-first century.”
19 January
Helen Mack Chang
19 January 1952—
Rationality in Justice
Before the death of her sister, Helen Mack Chang described her life as conventional and comfortable. An ethnic Chinese whose family lived in Guatemala, Chang was in her late thirties when her younger sister Myrna was stabbed twenty-seven times by a young sergeant from the Estado Mayor Presidencial, the much-feared presidential guard.
Myrna’s murder was an effort on the part of Guatemala’s oppressive junta to stop her investigations into the deaths and displacements of thousands of indigenous Mayans. Killed or driven from their mountain homes over the course of Guatemala’s thirty-five-year civil war, the Mayans were forced into squalid refugee camps. The Guatemalan government refused to acknowledge or take responsibility for their plight. Myrna, an anthropologist, traveled to a number of camps to document personal accounts of persecution and genocide. She had already published some of the material and planned to release more. That’s why she was murdered.
