Participation Type
Paper
Presentation #1 Title
Quakers and Bloody Harlan
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
This paper uses original research in the archive of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in Philadelphia to show how the AFSC deployed Quaker pacifist neutrality to deliver relief to striking coal miners' families in violently divided Harlan County, KY, just months after the incidents in 1931 that branded the place "Bloody Harlan." The AFSC workers believed in a divine unity above all conflict. All people, whether strikers or operators, women or children, bore the light of Christ within and were therefore spiritually one. Industrial warfare, like the military variety, violated this sacred unity. The practical antidote to conflict of any kind, the AFSC believed, was absolute neutrality. The AFSC's carefully cultivated and protected neutrality won it the trust of Harlan's coal operators and elected officials. So the AFSC was able to feed people, but it could not work for social and economic justice. And there can be no true and lasting peace without justice. This paper thus explores the tension between relief and peace in southern Appalachia's coal fields.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Guy Aiken is ABD in American Religions at the University of Virginia. His dissertation, "Sowing Peace, Reaping War: Quaker Relief and the Politics of Neutrality, 1919-1941," is about the American Friends Service Committee's mass child-feedings in Germany and Appalachia between the world wars.
Quakers and Bloody Harlan
This paper uses original research in the archive of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in Philadelphia to show how the AFSC deployed Quaker pacifist neutrality to deliver relief to striking coal miners' families in violently divided Harlan County, KY, just months after the incidents in 1931 that branded the place "Bloody Harlan." The AFSC workers believed in a divine unity above all conflict. All people, whether strikers or operators, women or children, bore the light of Christ within and were therefore spiritually one. Industrial warfare, like the military variety, violated this sacred unity. The practical antidote to conflict of any kind, the AFSC believed, was absolute neutrality. The AFSC's carefully cultivated and protected neutrality won it the trust of Harlan's coal operators and elected officials. So the AFSC was able to feed people, but it could not work for social and economic justice. And there can be no true and lasting peace without justice. This paper thus explores the tension between relief and peace in southern Appalachia's coal fields.
