Pacifism and Bugle Calls |
In time of war, Swarthmore has wrestled with its Quaker heritage. |
By Paul Wachter ’97 |
A few years ago, during the first week of classes, a Swarthmore professor interrupted her lecture when she saw what one of the students was wearing.
“What are you trying to communicate?” asked the professor, now standing over Diana Kinker '06.
The professor looked Kinker up and down, taking in her crisp blue uniform.
“I have ROTC [Reserve Officers' Training Corps] training after class,” Kinker replied.
There was an awkward silence.
At least once a year, during “Dash for Cash,” naked rugby players run through Parrish Hall to raise money for the team. And an annual gender-bender party makes for some strange sartorial flourishes. But a military uniform at Swarthmore? Worn not as satire but in earnest?
“We haven't had someone do that for a long time,” the professor said finally, turning away to resume her lecture.
At a College founded by Quakers and once famously described by Vice President Spiro Agnew as “the Kremlin on the Crum” for its leftist politics, Air Force Cadet Major Diana Kinker is an anomaly. Currently, she is Swarthmore's only Reserve Officer Training Corps student. Kinker grew up on a military base in Seoul. She was influenced by her father, a civilian who does intelligence work for the Defense Department from South Korea. And although they can't really discuss his work—“I don't have the security clearance”—Kinker’s future Air Force assignment will be in intelligence.
Today's ROTC programs can be traced back to the College Land Grant Act of 1862, which allowed for the transfer of public land to state colleges that offered military instruction. A century later, scholarships were created for students willing to commit to military service after graduation. (The Air Force pays 80 percent of Kinker's tuition and sends her a monthly stipend.) Unlike many Ivy League universities, Swarthmore does not have an ROTC program, although students are free to join at nearby schools, including Drexel, Villanova, St. Joseph's, and the University of Pennsylvania.
The College's founders made plain their distaste for war, knowing well the ravages of Gettysburg and Antietam. It's this Quaker heritage that administrators point to in explaining the absence of an ROTC program as well as military and intelligence-agency recruiting on campus. But there was a time when being a military student on campus was not so lonely. During World Wars I and II, the campus hosted hundreds of uniformed students, who balanced their classes with training for warfare in Europe and the Far East. As much a novelty as Kinker's uniform is today, it is also a link to a significant chapter in Swarthmore's history.
The idea of Swarthmore College was first seriously broached at various Quaker meetings in the 1850s. The slow work of raising funds unfolded as the nation was imploding. While Quakers wrestled with their increasingly dueling commitments to abolitionism and pacifism, it was clear that Swarthmore's founders objected to war for any reason. (Indeed, Swarthmore's pacifist roots predate the Civil War: One founder, Benjamin Hallowell, was a conscientious objector during the War of 1812.)
“The disposition to introduce military drill into the course of instruction in our public schools ... is especially objectionable to Friends,” was the opinion expressed by the College's champions at the Philadelphia yearly meeting of 1862, as reported by the Friends' Intelligencer. “[A]nd its true remedy lies in providing schools under our own care.”
Swarthmore was incorporated on May 4, 1864, just as Grant's army began its march on Richmond to engage Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. That same year, the Friends' Social Lyceum of Philadelphia convened the first Quaker meeting on Swarthmore's still-barren campus. At the assembly, a poem was read that spoke to the Quakers' hopes for the school:
And let us build a temple here,
Sacred to peace and love;
The warlike eagle must not be
Its emblem, but the dove. Today, as U.S. and Iraqi casualties mount, it is inconceivable that Swarthmore would tap Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or Vice President Dick Cheney to deliver a Commencement speech. Nor did the College founders ever invite William Tecumseh Sherman. But on Sunday, June 25, 1944, a Sunday, Navy Secretary James Forrestal stood before Swarthmore's graduating class to praise the College's contribution to the war effort.
“[Swarthmore] was founded under the aegis of the Society of Friends, an organization whose faith and beliefs are founded on the opposite conception of war,” Forrestal said. “Today, it contributes its equipment, its resources, and of its human talents to train men for war.”
In fall 1944, only 75 of Swarthmore's male students were civilians. Two hundred fifty were in the Navy's V-12 officer training program that produced 60,000 Navy and Marine Corps officers at 131 U.S. colleges. The College also hosted 49 Chinese naval officers, who came to improve their English. The campus was a sea of uniforms and military drills. Had the founders been able to visit, they would have had difficulty recognizing their college. Was this a Quaker school or the Naval Academy?
Actually, Swarthmore had not been a Quaker school since 1909, when President Joseph Swain persuaded the Board of Managers to drop its requirement that its members be Quakers. It was a financial decision: Potential donors, including the Carnegie Foundation, would not fund sectarian schools.
Even with the outbreak of World War I, the College hoped to maintain its long-standing commitment to pacifism. But when the United States joined the fight in 1917, most Swarthmore students favored an active role in the war effort. The Men's Student Government demanded the Board institute a mandatory military training program. Swain and the Board stopped short of that, but as Swain wrote in an August 1918 letter to parents, “Swarthmore men students who desire it, with the approval of their parents, may secure military training during the coming year” by joining a unit of the Student Army Training Corps.
Swarthmore's enlisted students divided their time between classes and military drill in preparation for the trenches of Europe. More than 230 Swarthmore men—including 175 officers—served in some capacity. Four were killed in action.
Swarthmore was the only Quaker-founded school to introduce military training, and the decision was unpopular with many Quakers. “The Government is aware that Friends abhor war and are opposed to military training and has given us the privilege of serving our country in other and more Christian ways,” wrote A.R. Benson in the Oct. 12, 1918, issue of the Intelligencer. “[C]onsequently I see no excuse for Swarthmore to fail to hold up the ideals of our Society at this time of great spiritual need.”
Speaking for many who favored the Allied cause, Morris Clothier (Class of 1890) responded: “And what is this letter? It is simply an indictment brought against Swarthmore College for her loyalty to the country and the cause of the Allies in this terrible hour of peril.... For ourselves, we find in such a letter simply another of those covert attacks that ultrapacifists seem to delight in making against the holy cause in which our country is engaged.”
During World War II, the same moral orthopedics was on display. “Swarthmore is a Quaker college,” President John Nason emphasized in a Board-approved policy statement in January 1942. “It should make every possible effort to avoid direct participation in military activities.” Swain wanted the College to train students for postwar reconstruction work rather than combat.
But a year later, it became clear that Washington expected more. The draft age had been lowered to 18, and preparations were under way for the V-12 Program. Anticipating Swarthmore's increased contribution to the war effort, Nason (echoing Swain) wrestled with the school's Quaker heritage.
“It is a fine tradition, a clean tradition, but is it any longer tenable?” Nason pondered in his annual report, published in January 1943. Modern warfare had blurred the line between combatant and civilian, Nason argued. Few of the College's students, faculty members, and alumni were conscientious objectors to war. And no matter Swarthmore's stance, Washington needed its scientific and technical facilities and would seize them if necessary. He was not prepared to shut down the College in protest, Nason concluded. “I feel bound to recommend that policy which will enable us to do positive good rather than merely to refrain from evil.”
Diana Kinker is in a class with 13 other cadets at St. Joseph's. The class is split evenly between men and women, but, nonetheless, Kinker said she and two Bryn Mawr cadets stand out. “St. Joe's is a conservative school, and the [other] cadets tease us sometimes, calling us ‘little hippies.'”
Although she wouldn't describe herself as a hippie, Kinker's political views are not conservative. Like most Swarthmore students, she opposes the war in Iraq. But she doubts most of her classmates know this. “It's been difficult, sometimes, wearing fatigues around campus, because you know people are assuming certain things about you,” she said. “There is a tendency to confuse support for the military with support for the war.”
Although Swarthmore has always been a “liberal” campus, the atmosphere has changed since the days of the world wars, when most students supported the aims of the military. “I think Vietnam was the turning point at campuses throughout the country,” said Philip Green '54, who was drafted into the Army just after the Korean War ended and is currently a visiting professor of political science at the New School in New York. “Korea, for instance, didn't breed a lot of dissent on campus. Students were more concerned with civil liberties and eliminating nuclear weapons.”
A 1967 poll, reported in The Phoenix, found that of 604 Swarthmore students and faculty, 85 percent did not think the Vietnam War was worth it. During the Vietnam years, thousands of students nationwide were involved in demonstrations against the war and the draft. Antiwar agitation shut down the ROTC programs at Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Columbia, and Brown; at Swarthmore, there was never any question of reintroducing military training to campus.
That level of antiwar agitation would never return to Swarthmore after the end of the Vietnam War and the draft. With an all-volunteer military, Swarthmore's students would never have to don a uniform unless—as in Kinker's case—they chose to. Nevertheless, Vietnam continues to haunt the campus's (and the nation's) view of war, which today seems closer to those of the College's founders. “The idea of killing, the idea of being an aggressor in a war, the idea of invading a country and imposing a new order on a country are all unappealing and dangerous,” a Phoenix editorial intoned on the eve of the Iraq invasion.
Aside from that one awkward moment in class—one that she dropped, unsurprisingly—Kinker said no one at Swarthmore has made her feel uncomfortable for being an ROTC cadet. The administration has helped her secure campus parking spaces to facilitate her commute to St. Joseph's and has waived her physical education requirement. If any of her classmates ask her about ROTC, it's out of curiosity, not hostility, Kinker said. “I've had a few people say they might be interested in joining, although I'm always quick to tell them that ROTC isn't just about free money for school.”
Previous ROTC students had similar experiences. “Most people at Swarthmore were very supportive, even during the Persian Gulf War,” said Matt Zurcher '91, a Navy reserve officer, who was told by the Financial Aid Office that he was Swarthmore's first modern ROTC student. “I think people knew that I was catching a train to the University of Pennsylvania at 5:20 in the morning, and they sympathized.”
Indeed, the campus's ability to accommodate students of different minds regarding military service is a central theme of Swarthmore's history in times of war. “The campus was predominantly anti-Vietnam War—no doubt about it—but it wasn't an uncomfortable place for those of us who felt differently,” said John Bennett '70, who was drafted in fall 1969 and served 21 years as a law officer in the Navy. “I was a contrarian by nature, which is why I became a lawyer, so I was conservative for Swarthmore and liberal for the Navy.”
Moreover, the campus has always been a home for pacifists, even when most of the campus backed Washington's call to war. Ten percent of her class's male students were conscientious objectors, recalled the late Andy Logan Lyon '42 in the book Swarthmore Remembered.
In 1919, the College sent a form letter to its male alumni, requesting details about their military service. Most men replied in brief, listing their rank, battles fought, and wounds sustained, although the late Charles Snyder '18 couldn't help himself from noting that on his ship the soldiers fired on sharks for target practice. But amid the volumes of returned forms, there is also an eloquent letter from Daniel Owen Stephens '15, a conscientious objector who volunteered for the Friends' War Victims' Relief Committee in June 1917 to build homes for people “whose former ones have been destroyed by German, British, French, and American armies”:
I am techniquely [sic] enrolled as being in “non-combatant service,” which is not true in spirit, because I am working for certain individuals of the human family and not for the United States or any other government. I do not consider that I am in the “service” of the United States because I am receiving no wage or pay from them and, far more than that, I have no patriotism for the United States except as it is a part of the internationalism that I hold for all peoples of the world. I began this work eighteen months ago feeling these things intellectually and since then ...; I have become more and more strongly convinced of their depth and worth—they began as a philosophy and now they are my religion.
Stephens went on to describe what he witnessed: air raids in which he gained “a certain physical respect for high explosives” and the perseverance of the French farmers “who make the world go.” “You have asked for tabulated answers,” he concluded. “If you put me on record at all, I ask that all of the above be under my name just as it is written—otherwise I ask that I be left entirely out of the list.”
When Kinker graduates next spring, there may no longer be any ROTC students at Swarthmore. When asked if she thought this was unfortunate, Kinker framed her answer in strictly personal terms.
“My ROTC training has helped me at Swarthmore,” she said. “The training pushes you, forces you to make quick decisions in stressful situations, to lead under a lot of physical and mental pressure.” Likewise, Kinker said her time at Swarthmore has influenced her ROTC experience; she plans to write her senior thesis on the “gendered experience in ROTC.”
But Kinker said the ROTC experience was not for everyone. “I caution people about the commitment, the potential conflicts with other activities, and to think about the campus culture and their place in it.”
Last year, the Air Force gave Kinker the opportunity to walk away from her 4-year obligation to the service. Unlike the Army, which was facing its worst recruiting slump in years, the Air Force had too many officers. Kinker could keep her funding and graduate a civilian. It was a tempting offer.
In 1919, Daniel Owen Stephens bristled at the implication that he was serving Washington, pointing out that he received no pay from his country for which he felt no patriotism. Nearly a century later, Diana Kinker concluded that she wanted to serve the United States and that her commitment had nothing to do with money. As discrete moments, these choices have only one thing in common: They set both Swarthmoreans apart from most of their peers. But in light of Swarthmore's full history—one of pacifism, bugle calls, protests, and early morning drills—they were not lonely choices at all.
Paul Wachter wrote about the Myers-Briggs Personality Indicator in the June Bulletin. He lives in New York. |
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Diana Kinker ’06 is the only Swarthmore student currently enrolled in a Reserve Officer Training Corps. (Photos by Eleftherios Kostans)</size>
Diana Kinker ’06 trains and takes classes at St. Joseph’s University and will become an officer in the Air Force after graduation in May 2006. (Photo by Eleftherios Kostans)</size>
The S.S. Swarthmore Victory (above) was one of 524 Victory-class ships built for the United States Merchant Marine during and after World War II—of which 150 were named for educational institutions. (Photo courtesy of The Friends Historical Library)</size>
Naval trainees cast ballots in Student Council elections during the war, watched over by portraits of Quakers Elizabeth Powell Bond, Isaac Hopper, and Lucretia Mott. (Photo courtesy of The Friends Historical Library)</size>
The sailors march to dinner past Clothier Memorial Hall. (Photo courtesy of The Friends Historical Library)</size>
A contingent of Chinese naval officers trained at Swarthmore during World War II, living and ...
eating alongside their American counterparts. (Photo courtesy of The Friends Historical Library)</size>
During the Vietnam War, the campus was alive with antiwar activity, such as during the nationwide student strike following the invasion of Cambodia in 1970. (Photo courtesy of The Friends Historical Library)</size>
Many Swarthmore students attended protest marches such as this one in the 1960s. (Photo courtesy of The Friends Historical Library)</size>
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