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The U.S/ peace movement is now a well-explored social movement, with studies of national organizations, biographies of important leaders, and the publication of numerous valuable resource guides. However, one vital area remains largely undocumented: investigations into the community-based peace groups through which the vast majority of supporters participated. Lacking such studies, scholars can neither fully gauge the movement's constituency nor estimate the intensity and duration of movement activism.

This paper will follow the Syracuse Peace Council (SPC) from its origins in late 1930s into the early 1970's, a time period that encompassed three distinct phases of activism. Founded as a broad coalition, the U.S. consensus for World War II and the cold war transformed the SPC into an expression of Quaker pacifism. The local group expanded only as concern grew in the late 1950's and early 1960's over nuclear weapons. This anti-nuclear effort induced former Communist Party supporters to join the SPC and, when joined with a new generation of radical Quakers, pushed the group to include a more activist conception of peace work. The war in Vietnam further enlarged the SPC. By the early 1970's, the group had added thousands of new members while becoming a center of New Left-inspired notions of an alternative culture.

The history of the SPC suggests four conclusions. First, Quakers were absolutely crucial to the survival and growth of the peace movement, either as activists from local Friends meetings or as staff with the American Friends Service Committee. Second, the Old Left played a greater role in the peace movement than suggested by studies of the national leadership, primarily because the social democrats who insisted on an exclusion policy had little presence at the local level. Third, the peace movement's campaign against the Vietnam War peaked in early 1970s even as the size and frequency of national antiwar demonstrations declined, a supposition that awards the antiwar movement greater responsibility in finally terminating U.S/ intervention. Fourth, the young people who entered the Vietnam-era movement helped transform the peace movement from foreign policy dissent into a component of a new type of radicalism, one that endured long after the U.S/ military withdrew from Vietnam.

The history of the Syracuse Peace Council cannot be separated from the history of the Syracuse Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends or the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). Members of the Syracuse Meeting founded the SPC in 1936, and the Quaker insistence on opposing World War II, the Korean War, and the cold war transformed the local organization from a coalition of community groups into an expression of religious pacifism. Syracuse Quakers did not sustain the SPC alone as the AFSC provided the local group with speakers, programs, staff support, and financial subsidies. Despite frequent claims of autonomy and ideological diversity, the SPC quickly became a Quaker organization and de facto branch of the AFSC.

Officially founded on March 1, 1936, the Syracuse Friends Meeting exemplified the new meeting movement of the 1930's in three ways. First, only two of the eleven Syracuse founders were birthright Quakers. Second, the Syracuse Meeting, by affiliating with both the Orthodox and Hicksite New York Yearly Meetings, refused to align exclusively with either Quaker faction. Third, the member of the Syracuse Quakers strongly embraced social activism. Horace Eaton, chair of the Syracuse University English Department and his wife, Emily, were both active members of the Socialist Party and the AFSC. Leslie West was called the Jane Addams of Syracuse for her community work. Norman Whitney, although not an official member until 1939, exemplified the local meeting;s commitment to peace by chairing SPC from 1936 until 1957.

Local Quakers, led by Norman Whitney, created the SPC as part of the Emergency Peace Campaign (EPC), a national coalition designed to prevent American entry into World War II by establishing local peace groups around the nation. Whitney had attended the December 1935 EPC organizing and returned to Syracuse to spur the SPC' January 1936 creation. He and the other founders succeeded in creating a broad organization. Early meetings drew representatives from the Council of Churches, League of Women Voters, Parent Teacher Association, Young Men's Christian Association, Young Women's Christian Association, and several local churches and synagogues. Twenty-one organizations affiliated, and the mayor of Syracuse and his wife headed the list of two dozen individual sponsors. By 1937, the SPC produced a weekly radio show, a monthly Peace Newsletter (PNL) mailed to some 1,600 people, a monthly discussion bulletin, educational forums, study groups, and four standing work committees. The group's success encouraged the EPC to establish a Syracuse office and help the SPC sponsor such speakers as Oswald Garrison Villard, Jeanette Rankin, Kirby Page, Evan Thomas, Muriel Lester, Frederick Libby, and A. J. Muste. Thousands of Syracuse residents attended these events, while the SPC filled hundreds of smaller speaking engagements with local peace activists. Memories of the carnage of World War I and the popular desire to concentrate on domestic matters made peace popular and respectable.

The SPC, while widely accepted, was short on active supporters. Whitney wrote in February 1938 that the SPC "really consisted" of only four people - Leslie West, who provided most of the budget; Edward Trump, who provided a rent-free office; Irene Ford, who worked as the executive secretary, and himself. All were religiously motivated, and all but Ford were Quakers. As American citizens slowly accepted the inevitability of U.S. participation in the war abroad, the SPC's passive support declined. By June 1940, the mailing list had dropped to five hundred and paid membership stood at only one hundred, as the SPC's broader affiliates and sponsors "disappeared." A year before the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, the peace movement in Syracuse had lost all wider influence. The September 1940 SPC executive committee described the change: "We find ourselves more radical, not because we have changed, but because the community has changed."

Three days after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, the SPC released a statement calling for the protection of civil liberties, support for relief work, and education aimed at creating a peaceful postwar world. The statement ended with the words "WE CARRY ON!" Indeed, pacifism in Syracuse, as throughout the nation, actually grew during World War II. The S{C budget increased form $1,485 in 1940 to $3,696 in 1945 while paid membership tripled, even as the group undertook such controversial projects as providing office space for the Syracuse chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality and helping twenty-nine Japanese-Americans find jobs and housing in the Syracuse area. In 1943, the SPC office housed five full-time staff and included local affiliates of such pacifist groups as the AFSC, the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), and the National Service Board for Religious Objectors. Hoping to attract a wider membership, SPC leaders never required pacifism for membership. However, World War II transformed the group from a council od local organizations into the expression of Quaker pacifism.

Quakers unquestionable dominated the SPC leadership. In 1944, six of the nine elected leaders belonged to the Syracuse Meeting; in 1945, nine of thirteen belonged. Moreover, at lest half of the four named officers were Quakers, and Norman Whitney continued to chair the group. The SPC leadership also promoted a fundamentally religious view of social change. In 1946, the SPC released the most explicit statement of the founding generation's beliefs. The document rejected capitalism in favor of a "cooperative commonwealth" and asserted that only a world government could end international conflict. Such attitudes we common among all dissenters at the time. The unique aspect of the statement involved its religiosity. The SPC leaders claimed that "no political organization, no economic system, and no social pattern can bering peace unless supported by a cultural and religious order founded on the values of the spirit of God in man."

The SPC was one of only six local EPC-sponsored peace councils to survive the war. However, mainstream churches and civic organizations did not return to the peace movement, as public opinion generally held that the war had been worthwhile and the pacifist position mistaken. The SPC itself largely eschewed participation in the brief postwar campaign against nuclear weapons in favor of helping conscienTious objectors (COs) return to civilian life and providing relief to nations devastated by the war. Alarmed by the growing American-Soviet conflict, the SPC tried to expand in 1948. By summer's end, a budget deficit approaching $3,000 sparked a financial and organizational crisis. Whitney wrote that the "SPC is overgrown, over -expanded, over ambitious, and beyond the means of its community to support. I am responsible." The group cut staff and program as the cold war prevented expanding its base within Syracuse. The SPC remained an assembly of Quaker pacifists within a nation at war.

The SPC still refused to accept the limits of cold war political culture. In November 1950, the group published a statement on communist peace efforts. The statement maintained that the SPC was a "wholly autonomous" organization comprised of people who believed in "democracy and peace" and who "rejected totalitarianism of every kind." However, the SPC went far beyond proving its non-communist credentials. It strongly criticized the "anti-Communist and anti-Russian hysteria" and refused to conform to the growing anticommunist consensus: "as a result of our strong peace position we may sometimes appear to advocate, the same proposals as do Communists or 'fellow travelers.' We regret the possibilities of misunderstanding out, clearly, we can not alter or 'tone down' our message out of timidity or fear."

The SPC further diverged from cold war culture by promoting the equal participation of women. Throughout the 1950s, women constituted the majority of the SPC's active members and half of the group's executive committee. The local Quaker meeting exhibited the same strong female leadership. Ten of the thirteen founders of the Syracuse Meeting were women, and the meeting remained predominantly female in the 1950s A number of the women who were active in both groups were unmarried, college educated women who had been born in the last years of the nineteenth century at least one of whom, Leslie West, openly lived with another woman and in a lifelong relationship. The close support such women provided each other in the small Syracuse pacifist community obviously promoted social activism and gender consciousness.

One cannot understand Quaker peace work during the cold war without comprehending how deeply disappointed pacifists Friends were with the behavior of their fellow Friends during World War II. The Syracuse Meeting hoped to guide the disillusioned toward and increased commitment to peace work. The Syracuse Meeting, originally a regional gathering, rotated convening among Syracuse, Rochester, Geneva and Mohawk Valley into the 1940s. In 1943, upstate Quakers transformed the Scipio Quarterly Meeting into the first united quarterly meeting within the New York Yearly Meeting (NYYM). Pacifists also prompted the merger of two state Quaker Peace and Service Committees years before the competing yearly meetings merged in 1955. In 1950, upstate Quakers even formed their own peace group, the New York State Peace Council, to coordinate and promote regional peace work. Without question, SPC leaders built an exceptionally strong Quaker peace community in upstate New York.

The region contributed numerous important Quaker peace activists besides Norman Whitney, Kenneth and Elise Bouolding, both converts, met and married in the Syracuse Meeting. Both wrote widely on peace issues and served as national leaders of FOR, War Resisters League (WRY), WILPE, and the AFSC. Ruth and Harrop Freeman were convinced Friends from the independent Ithaca Meeting who authored numerous books and articles on peace. Ruth also served as a National WILPF president while Harrop - a Cornell University Law professor - directed the Pacifist Research Bureau, served on the FOR executive board, and ran for Congress in 1962 on a peace platform.

The Syracuse Meeting was dedicated to making pacifism the core of a renewed Quakerism. During World War II, the meeting mailed four statements reasserting the renunciation of force to every Quaker meeting in the country. A 1942 statement signed by seven additional upstate New York Quaker Meetings called for "a spiritual quickening toward a passionate faith that will find expression in social effectiveness. The 1943 statement called for strict adherence to pacifism in all membership decisions. In 1952, the Syracuse Meeting actually denied membership to two individuals who opposed conscientious objections. Such an act had not happened in the memory of the NYYM and Syracuse faced considerable condemnation. The local meeting strongly defended its action, once again mailing an epistle to every local meeting in the nation on the importance of the peace testimony.

No person more symbolized the SPC's Quaker identity and commitment to renewal than Norman Jehiel Whitney. Born in 1891 in rural veteran New York, he moved to Syracuse in 1919 to teach English at Syracuse University. Raised a Baptist, Whitney was drawn into the society by Quakerism's peace testimony. Once convinced, Whitney led. He joined the AFSC staff during World War II to help oversee the Civilian Public Service (CPS) camps and traversed the nation every summer thereafter speaking on the peace testimony. Whitney served on the AFSC Board from 1947-52 and 1954-58 and wrote the conclusion of the pivotal Quaker pamphlet Speak Truth to Power. Whitney would leave Syracuse in 1957 to direct the AFSC's peace work and, after his 1960 retirement, remained with the AFSC as a full-time special consultant on peace until shortly before his death in 1967. His energy, commitment, and leadership prompted the Quaker faithful to reward him with the appellation "The Bishop."

Facing an increasingly hostile attitude toward dissent, the SPC had forged ever closer to the AFSC. Since 1941, the AFSC had co-sponsored - and underwritten all the expenses of - the SPC's annual weekend Institute of International relations (IIR). After the war, the AFSC cosponsored and funded the SPC's annual regional conference of peace workers. Beginning in 1955, the AFSC funded the SPC's annual month-long tour of two young American Quakers paired with two foreign students. The AFSC, also held week-long summer camps in upstate New York for high school students, college students, adults, and families with many Syracuse participants. In 1957, the AFSC sponsored nine weekend IIR conferences, two caravans, ten family institutes, six adult camps, and sic high school camps across the nation. The Syracuse area has at least one of each. With good reason, AFSC national peace education secretary Red Schaal declared in 1956, that, in regard to community peace education, the SPC "has no rivals."

The AFSC support allowed the SPC to establish a pattern of events that varied little during the 1950's. The June 1953 annual meeting could anticipate a fairly exact schedule for the next year; the production of a monthly newsletter, a peace booth at the September New York State Fair, a speaker in December, a January birthday dinner and speaker, the February IIR, a March conference of regional peace workers, a month-long series of education lectures in April, a film series in May, and the annual dinner in June. Among the AFSC-funded speakers brought to Syracuse between `950 and 1956 were Roger Baldwin, Stephen Cary, Norman Cousins, Dorothy Day, Frank Potter Graham, George Houser, Homer Jack, Owen Lattimore, Sid Lens, A. J. Muste, Bayard Rustin, I.E. Stone, and Norman Thomas. The SPC's active membership worked hard to promote and organize the events and initiated numerous projects with out AFSC support. However, the local group undertook far more activities that its approximately $4,000 yearly budget could possibly support.

SPC leaders knew that their claims to be unaffiliated with any national group were misleading. In 1953, Whitney described the SPC as "in many respects an area office for the American Friends Service Committee." The letter, a request that the new Quaker meeting in Jamestown join an SPC-sponsored peace project, confirmed how Quakerism , the AFSC, and the SPC converged. Local Quakers considered the SPC so much their own that the Syracuse Meeting reported on its activities to the two Quaker New York Yearly Meetings: the local meeting had no peace committee of its own. The AFSC-SPC IIR conference further highlighted the union. The conference program always scheduled time for, and listed as part of the official program, "worship with the Syracuse Friends."

The SPC's Quaker leadership frequently lamented its continued domination of the small local peace movement. The 1951 annual report recorded that "as usual our work with young people is the weakest and most difficult area of program (emphasis in original). Whitney's 1956 annual report, the last before he left to join the AFSC staff, reiterated the same point: "Many of us are twenty years older than we were in 1936 - and we are not reproducing our kind. Perhaps this is the most serious problem before us: to reduce the age-level of the Council." Whitney pointed out that attendance at the two major annual SPC events, the weekend IIR Conference and the birthday dinner, had dropped from four hundred and two hundred in 1946 to only half that in 1956. He also detailed the dramatic curtailment of the group's interactions with local clergy, media, and schools. Regardless of the pessimistic analysis, SPC members continued working to end the cold war.

With the rise of the late 1950's antinuclear movement, three new groups began to weaken the traditional Quaker control of the SPC in a campaign to push the group toward a more activist approach to peace work. Former Communist Party (CP) supporters began participating, attracted by the group's strong opposition to the cold war and focus on improving American-Soviet relations. At the same time, the AFSC allowed young COs to serve their alterative service to the draft as SPC staff persons. The third group of new members, younger Quaker converts, supported the increased activism even as they could not forestall a decline in pacifist commitments within the Syracuse Meeting itself.

The Syracuse Meeting in Renewal

The movement to renew the Society of Friends by revitalizing the peace testimony grew with a new decade. In 1960, prompted by the three-hundredth anniversary of Quaker founder George Fox's 1660 statement on peace, Quaker peace activists won resolutions supporting a renewal of the peace testimony from the New York Yearly Meeting, the Young Friends Committee, the Peace and Social Order Committee of the Friends General Conference, and the Five Years Meeting. On the weekend of November 12-13, 1960, some 1,000 Quakers held a Pentagon vigil officially sponsored by the Society of Friends and chaired by recently retired AFSC head Henry Cadbury.

The nine Syracuse Quakers who participated in the November 1960 AFSC Washington vigil returned "encouraged" to being the vigil model home. In January 1961, Robert Wayland-Smith, the clerk of the Syracuse Friends, a Quaker convert, and one of the nine, sponsored a meeting to discuss the recently announced plan to install Titan ICBMs at Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, N. Y. He stated at the meeting that "the time has come when just believing these things is not enough. Somehow we have got to make our voices heard." The resulting twelve-person vigil executive committee included ten Quakers and won the endorsement of the Middle Atlantic Region of the AFSC and the Friends meeting of Buffalo, Ithaca, Mohawk Region, Rochester, Syracuse, Unadilla, and West Branch. The committee held the vigil on Easter weekend, declared their opposition to military force "as Quakers," and began each day's walk to the base with a religious service.

After fall 1961, the effort to renew the peace testimony began to divide American Quakers. The leaders of the Griffiss action, like national renewal leaders, had insisted that vigils excluded civil disobedience. However, the decision by the USSE, and then the United States, to renew nuclear testing in fall 1961 prompted some Quakers to again promote civil disobedience. This change in tactics occurred before most local Quaker meetings had fully endorsed even the more limited vigil concept. A spring 1962 survey of New York meetings disclosed considerable tension. Few had participated in national and local vigils. Most meetings had "concentrated on achieving more unity" among members.Some meetings witnessed "little change in tensions developed by discussion" and others criticized the "radical and enthusiastic members who seem preoccupied only with the method and instruments of war."

Even a meeting as pacifist-oriented as Syracuse experienced internal decisions. The death of Emily and Horace Eaton combined with Norman and his sister Mildred Whitney's move to Philadelphia weakened the meeting's pacifist commitment. By 1959, the meeting began to divide between proponents of two divergent philosophies, a division that prompted a 1960 discussion on actually splitting into two groups. The divisions involved the peace testimony. In 1961, a special meeting discussed the different views on the requirement that all new members be pacifists. In 1962, unable to reach consensus, the meeting abandoned the attempt to write a statement on membership and the peace testimony. After over two decades, the Syracuse Meeting had ceased to be a gathering of pacifists.

Communist Party members had been show to participate in the SPC. During the Korean War, Syracuse communists had sponsored their own peace groups, a local affiliate of the VP's Women for Peace organization. After the collapse of the CI's independent peace campaign, most Syracuse communists protested Ethel and Julius Rosenberg's innocence of charges of passing information on America's atomic bomb program to the Soviet Union. After the Rosenberg's execution in June 1953, Syracuse communists worked for the release of Morton Sobell, who had been sentenced to 30 years in prison at the same trial. CP members did join the SPC in 1950s. Morton Geiger, the Onondaga County chair, even served on the SPC executive committee from 1955 to 1957. However, the CP was unsuccessful in its attempt to turn the SPC from, in Geiger's words, "a discussion group to a force more actively working for peace."

By 1961, three of the SPC's twelve executive committee members were former CP members and supporters, as were numerous SPC activists. Their entrance generated surprisingly little tension, in part because they shared some important characteristics with the longtime SPC members. Both pacifists and communists promoted radical views at odds with the dominant culture. As predominantly second-generation Jewish immigrants, the former Syracuse communist also belonged to a minority religion. Both groups included strong female political leaders in a time when the nation's public ideology stressed domesticity. The Quaker belief in that of God in everyone, combined with hopes for a stronger peace movement, allowed the former CP supporters to join the SPC. Syracuse communists, in search of a political vehicle to express their commitment to improved Soviet-American relations and increased social justice at home, had few other options.

Norman Putter, who served on the SPC executive committee for most of the 1960's, was typical of the new members. Born in Poland in 1910, his family emigrated in 1920 to New York City, where Putter graduated from college and law school. His experiences with anti-Semitism, racism, and the economic hardships of Depression-era America propelled him into the CP in the mid-1930's. Putter enlisted in CP struggle for racial justice, while participating in the American Labor Party and the 1948 Henry Wallace campaign. The cold war's conservative climate and the demands of a successful business reduced his political involvement during the 1950's. Putter, who remained a lifelong socialist, later explained that his work with the SPC was an important part of his "difficult transition" in becoming an anti-Stalinist.

Two if the new Quaker activists were Rajendra Nanavanti and Virginia Gilmore, Nanavanti had moved to Syracuse in 1956 to teach electrical engineering at Syracuse University. Born in India in 1930, nanavanti had become active in the Gandhian movement for national liberation while only twelve years old. Nanavanti regularly attended the local Quaker meeting and, through he never officially joined, his knowledge of, and support for, nonviolent action affected the Syracuse Meeting. Gilmore had arrived in Syracuse in 1957 when her husband began teaching journalism at Syracuse University. Born in 1924 in Flint, Michigan, she was politicized by the hardships her family experienced as automobile factory workers and her husband's left-wing sympathies. Gilmore supported the Progressive Party in 1948, and worked on civil rights issues in the early 1950s. While willing to work with communists, Gilmore preferred the Society of Friends to the CP's "doctrinaire thinking" and officially joined the Society in 1952. Both Nanavanti and Gilmore served on the executive committee of both the Griffiss vigil and the SPC.

Joining the younger Quakers and older communists wa the third new component within the SPC community, political staff. Before 1959, volunteers unquestionably led the group and held all public roles, while the SPC staff performed only administrative and clerical work. This changed after 1959 as Whitney, the AFSC national peace education secretary, placed an AFSC-funded CO in Syracuse for a two-year alternative service assignment . Such an arrangement was highly unusual. From 1957 through 1959, only twenty-two individuals performed alternative service with the AFSC. Only six served within the United States, and all but the one in Syracuse worked in an official AFSC office. Before the end of the 1960s, the AFSC would place four individuals on the SPC staff under the government's alternative service program.

The first AFSC peace intern in Syracuse, James Syphers, served from January 1959 to June 1961. He was twenty-seven, married with two children, and had already worked a minister for two years. On principle, he had refused the ministerial exemption due him as a student at the Oberlin Graduate School of Theology. In Syracuse, Syphers co-directed the area's AFSC project, summer institutes, family camps, and caravans, while fully participating in all SPC public events.

In a portent for the future, Syphers introduced civil disobedience to the S{C. Less than a month after the Easter 1961 Griffiss vigil, Syphers and two other men refused to take shelter during a civil defense drill. SPC chair Adelaide Webster denied any connection with the act in front-page newspaper story next day. Later, executive committee member Bejamin Shove solicited Norman Whitney's advice on responding to those who wanted the PC to support such actions. Shove, the lawyer for the three men, believed the mother of one participant had channeled his $200 fee through the SPC to force it to "back up such action." The SPC would soon encounter more acts of conscience by young radicals.

The Soviet atmospheric test on September 1, 1961, the U.S. underground test on September 15, and the Kennedy administration' moves in early 1962 to renew atmospheric testing, helped push the SPC towards more activism. The more heterogeneous SPC, while still under Quaker control, began to experiment with different tactics as the new members made common cause with the SPC by founding the Peace Action Committee (PAC). The November 1961 SPC executive committee discussed the report that PAC members Nanavanti and Putter had prepared for the upcoming December membership meeting. The meeting concluded that "in essence, the call to the membership is calling for an emphasis on Action, which, admittedly, has not been the tenor of Peace Council group."

The older SPC members learned that even peace education could be too radical for individuals alarmed by the upsurge in protests that followed the renewal of nuclear testing. In February 1962, Webster approached Syracuse University (SU) for permission for Linus Pauling to speak on campus. The university could only allow the talk if Pauling would confine himself "to scientific matters." The SPC rejected the restrictions. Instead, the group secured backing from the Upstate Medical Center, a teaching hospital affiliated with the New York State University system. The week before Pauling's March 22 talk, a New York State senator condemned the Center for providing Pauling a platform and recommended the dismissal of any state employees who thought as Pauling did. A major controversy ensued, resulting in dozens of newspaper stories, hundreds of letters to the editor, and an American Association of University Professors investigation of Syracuse University's actions.

The renewal od nuclear testing prompted the SPC to merge its traditional educational approach with newer ideas about public protest. The SPC sponsored a downtown "education center" from March 21, 1962 until October 1, 1962. Between 11:00 A.M. and 3:00 P.M. Mondays through Saturdays, supporters distributed literature about disarmament, showed lunchtime films, and updated the window display. The volunteers, mostly women, were primarily the same SPC members who had been pushing for more activism. Virginia Gilmore coordinated the effort. The increase in activism also changed the perspectives of some SPC members. For example, SPC chair and longtime Quaker Adelaide Webster served with Feld as the center's summer co-chair.

The challenge by the Peace Action Committee did not end the Syracuse Friends Meeting'

s control of the SPC. However, the PAC raised structural issues the formerly homogenous SPC had never faced. In June 1962, the SPC executive committee discussed the PAC's call for a petition campaign against nuclear weapons. The body could not reach consensus on the project. Ben Shove, declared the project could not be undertaken without endangering the SPC's tax-exempt status as an educational organization. Putter proposed organizing an independent political action committee while Nanavanti suggested working with the local WILPF chapter. Nanavanti added that to effectively take advantage of the nuclear issue the SPC had to "clarify the responsibilities of the Executive Committee, the other committees, and the membership."

The brief surge in nuclear-related political activism before the SPC could settle the organizational dispute. However, the wave of activism had changed the local group. Donations increased dramatically. The SPC took in $5,000 in the first half of 1962, more than it received in all of 1961. Yearly budgets for the remainder of the decade were approximately $6,500, a 40% increase over the 1950s. The years of antinuclear activity prompted the SPC itself to sponsor a "public vigil" on the streets of downtown Syracuse on Thanksgiving Day 1964. Some fifty people urged world leaders to shift the resources from military spending to programs for ending poverty. The vigilers made one additional demand - the removal of U.S. troops from Vietnam.

By the time the antinuclear movements of early 1960s declined, the SPC had become a different organization. The older generation of Syracuse Friends still controlled the local group. However, the SPC's executive committee had become more politically diverse through the inclusion of younger Quakers and older leftists and the development of more autonomous internal committees. The war in Vietnam would challenge that new equilibrium. The S{C discussed various strategies to build a stronger organization and end the war, including holding demonstrations with other peace groups, running candidates for Congress, merging into an official Syracuse AFSC office, and expanding its own staff. The last option, which finally brought organizational growth, also ended Quaker dominance. By 1970, the SPC had added thousands of members and had become the local voice of New Left-inspired notions of an alternative culture.

The rise of the Vietnam War caught the SPC in a weakened state. The group's leaders had hoped the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty would by the 'first step" toward disarmament. However, their call to move beyond the treaty failed to motivate local activists. Instead, many SC activists joined the Syracuse chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Led by Syracuse University chemistry professor George Wiley, CORE organized boycotts, pickets, and blockades in a direct action campaign for civil rights. The shift to civil rights left the SPC without much active leadership. In November 1964, the local AFSC intern wrote of "a crisis in the SPC and thus in peace activity in Syracuse." The group, which had fewer than five hundred members on its mailing list, produced a one-page newsletter, two annual dinners, and a single weekend conference, its lowest level of activity since the 1936 founding.

The war in Vietnam began to draw the activists back into the SPC. On December 10, 1964, the SPC held its first self-declared "protest." Fifteen SPC members braved freezing weather to hand out 5,000 leaflets against U.S. policy in Vietnam in downtown Syracuse. That same month, SPC members at Syracuse University formed a faculty/student peace committee, which sponsored a December 21 talk on Vietnam by Senator Wayne Morse (R-OR). In February 1965, the SPC organized a two-week speaking tour for Vietnamese antiwar activist and Buddhist monk Vo Thanh Minh. In April 1965, the SPC, the local WILPF chapter, and the Syracuse University faculty-student committee sponsored the buses to the April 1965 Students for a Democratic Society march on Washington. On August 6, 1965, the SPC and Syracuse WILPF again demonstrated against U.S. intervention in Vietnam. In November, the SPC helped establish the Niagara Regional Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam, a coalition of twenty five upstate New York peace groups. Antiwar activity had increased throughout 1965 - so too had U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

As the war slowly changed SPC tactics, AFSC subsidies continued moving the local group toward a staff model. In 1963, the AFSC had assigned Bert Fowler, the son of Syracuse Quakers, as a peace intern to the SPC for his alternative assignment. Of the AFSC's ten peace interns nationwide that year, only Fowler did not work in an official AFSC office. Fowler was succeeded by Robert Tenney, also a Quaker, who began his alternate service with the SPC in September 1964. Like Fowler, Tenney was the only AFSC peace intern assigned outside and AFSC office.

Tenney, a member of Student for a Democratic Society and a former staff member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee attempted to move SPC in a more activist direction. As PNL editor, Tenney noticeably changed the publication's tone, sharply increasing excerpts from such New Left magazines as Liberation and Ramparts. In February 1965, Tenney organized a demonstration at the office of the Syracuse draft board that "encouraged people" to refuse the draft. Tenney himself had been previously arrested during a CORE demonstration for chaining himself to the doors of the Syracuse power company to protest discriminatory hiring policies. His actions caused considerable grumbling among the SPC's Quaker leadership.

The antiwar work renewed disputes within the SPC. The March 1965 executive committee meeting questioned "the legality" of a recently established SPC ad hoc committee for peace issuing leaflets in the name of the SPC without the executive committee's approval. The same meeting discussed a Vietnam- related tax statement recently published in the PNL. The executive committee decided to create a special committee to approve all future PNL material. A few voices even opposed concentrating on the war in Vietnam. In June 1965, Ben Shove argued, "We must get back to the Peace message - to disarmament."

Born in 1892, Shove was a graduate of Yale University and Columbia Law School and represented the SPC's older religious tradition. A senior partner in a local law firm, he chaired or served as president of numerous community groups and business organizations, including the County Bar Association and the County Council of Churches. Although not a Quaker his Christian beliefs inspired he abhorrence of war. Shove conceived of non-violence solely as the refusal to use violence and urged people to overcome war with love in the same nonresiant spirit that allowed Christ to accept crucifixion. His commitment had deep pockets. Shove bought an SPC peace bond in 1936, the first of many contributions that would ultimately exceed $14,000.

Even the SPC's long history of supporting conscientious objection did not preclude disagreement over opposition to the draft. Syracuse resident and draft resister Dik Cool had refused to apply for either a student deferment or CO classification. He considered both preferential treatment. Shove represented Cool after hie 1965 arrest. The young resister knew his lawyer and many in the SPC community disapproved of his actions. Since the late 1930s, the SPC had worked hard to support the very right of conscientious objection that the young resister scorned.

The combination of radicalism and religious commitment did allow the SPC to avoid the debate over withdrawal versus negotiations that divided other peace groups. The SpC always advocated the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam. In 1954, the council had urged the U.S. government "not [to] send American troops to Indo-China" and to recognize "the rights of colonial peoples to self determination." In December 1964, the SPC called for an immediate cease-fire, the withdrawal of U.S. troops, and negotiations to create a neutralized, democratic Vietnam. A 1965 SPC leaflet described the conflict in Vietnam as a "civil war fought on local issues" and again called for a U.S. withdrawal. The SPC acknowledged that the departure of U.S. troops posed the possibility of eventual communist victory in South Vietnam, but argued that the question of political system was "an issue for the Vietnamese people to decide." A January 1966 SPC leaflet made the group's position quite clear: "We call for an immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Vietnam."

The move toward more antiwar work was matched by a decreasing interest in the SPC's traditional education project, the annual weekend Institute of International Relations. As a result, the AFSC began to reassess peace work in Syracuse. The AFSC solution, to open a fully staffed office in Syracuse, provoked and organizational crisis. Older Quaker members wanted to merge the SPC into a planned office, a decision that would have effectively ended the SPC's independence and even existence. The AFSC was willing (under considerable prodding from Norman Whitney) to acquiesce in the idea. Newer SPC members strongly opposed the merger and urged the local groups to persevere.

SPC leaders discussed the issue throughout the spring of 1966. At the May 1966 executive committee meeting, Adelaide Webster complicated her matter by resigning as SPC chair. Having held the post since Whitney left Syracuse in 1957, she had come to symbolize the group's Quaker identity. Born in 1911 in Syracuse, Webster had attended Syracuse University and majored in English, having both Horace Eaton and Norman Whitney as professors. She and her husband, a Harvard-trained architect, began attending the Syracuse Meeting in the late 1930s and officially converted in 1942.

Webster's resignation prompted a discussion of disbanding the SPC, an act "some felt wise." Others, particularly Raj Nanavanti and Sam Feld, "voiced strong opposition." Nanavanti contended there were many "untapped resources" in the community around the issue of the war in Vietnam. He called for "new approaches a new format new members and new contributors." Nanavanti and Feld , committed to reviving the group, volunteered to explore these options.

The summer of 1966 SPC membership meeting resolved to continue apart from the AFSC and elected a new group of leaders. Of the nineteen individuals on the expanded executive committee, only four were members of the Syracuse Meeting. The same summer meeting also amended the SPC's statement of purpose for the first time in thirty years. The group would now "encourage the seeking of alternatives to violent conflicts." The pledge to foster rather than merely propose alternatives signified an increase commitment to action."

That fall SPC members tried their hand at electoral politics. Norman Balabanian, and SPC executive committee member and SU engineering professor, ran for Congress on the SPC -created "Citizens for Peace" party line. The new party called for an end to bombing, negotiations with the National Liberation Front (NLF), immediate withdrawal of all foreign troops, dismantling of all U.S. bases, and U.S/ aid for war damages. Balabanian's effort earned him the county Liberal Party (LP) endorsement after Democratic Congressman James M. Hanley refused the office, finding the LP's position on Vietnam too liberal. Hanley swamped his Republican opponent 90,044 to 62,559. Balabanian received 4,900 votes, only 518 of which came on the Citizens for Peace line. SPC leaders expressed surprise at the small number of votes, acknowledging the difficulty in showing the steady escalation of the war.

At the same time, the AFSC began establishing a separate local program. The AFSC staff intern from fall 1966 to fall 1968, David Easter, was a former seminary student at Union Theological Seminary School in New York City. Easter established the Syracuse Vietnam Summer project, and attempt at door-to-door antiwar work similar to that undertaken in many communities in summer of 1967. His weekly downtown vigil project became a gathering of local peace leaders that lasted for years. Easter chaired the coordinating committee of all Syracuse peace groups and opened the new AFSC office to any community or campus peace groups.

Easter's work lacked support in tow important places, the AFSC and the Syracuse Meeting. He faced criticism from within the AFSC for organizing draft resistance groups as internal critics forced his Philadelphia supervisor to acknowledge that Easter's "anomalous position" outside any regular AFSC office had prevented proper supervision. Easter's political approach also displeased local Quakers who preferred draft counseling to draft resistance, religious outreach to public demonstrations, and an intern of the Quaker faith - which Easter wa snot. Easter in turn, wanted the Syracuse Meeting to officially condemn the war, something conservative Friends refused to allow. Before the end of the year, local Quakers created a commitment to oversee the intern program.

In summer 1967, the SPC elected the first non-Quaker as chair in it thirty-one year history. The selection of Sam Feld illustrated the continued political activism of many Old leftists. Born in New York City and educated at City College during the Depression, Feld has planned to become a high school civics teacher, a career by a letter to his college file detailing his communist politics. Instead, he moved to Syracuse, sold insurance and continued his CP work. Feld joined the SPC in 1960 in order to "be a part of some kind of progressive organization." Even after leaving the CP in the early 1960s, Feld remained committed to the principles he believed his support had represented: world peace, racial harmony, and economic and political democracy. He never regretted his CP membership, even after he no longer consider the USSR a socialist country.

During 1967, the three sources of peace work in Syracuse - the Quaker Meeting, the American Friends Service Committee, and the Syracuse Peace Council - became more estranged than at any time since 1936. The SPC survived the loss of AFSC support and a decline in backing from the Syracuse Meeting, but failed to win many new members. The AFSC successfully built a city-wide peace coalition and a burgeoning regional antidraft movement. However, the Syracuse AFSC staff intern lacked the autonomy to expand the programs while the AFSC itself lacked consensus concerning its antiwar strategy. Meanwhile, conservative voices prevented the Syracuse Meeting group from openly condemning the war and, offended by radical activities, began for the first time to exercise control over the intern program. The peace movement in Syracuse had yet to find a permanent organizational home.

During 1968 America experienced the greatest political turmoil since the depths of the Great Depression. War in Vietnam destroyed the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. Assassins felled Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Campuses and cities faced violence and riots. Antiwar forces were defeated with in the Democratic Party and Republican Richard Nixon, a committed cold warrior, won the November presidential election. Regardless of the increasing political obstacle to peace, the movement opposed to the Vietnam War did not disappear.

The divided local peace movement had created a smaller SPC. Subscriptions to the PNL fell to 250, the lowest in history. The yearly budget dropped below $4,000 for the first time in a decade, while the total number of contributions declined from 327 in 1967 to just 182 in 1968. The December 1968 executive committee discussed the decline. Ben Shove urged the group to expand, promising personally cover any shortfall. The same December meeting demonstrated the SPC's growing diversity. One participant raised the concern that members "needed to have ways to know each other better." A summer picnic was suggested. After three decades, the Syracuse Meeting of the Society of Friends no longer performed that function.

Change began to occur at a rapid pace. The SPC proposed a 1969 budget of $10,000 and hired former Syracuse intern David Easter as the new executive secretary. In January 1969, the SPC dropped the annual Institute of International Relations gathering, the mainstay of the group's programming for almost three decades. In May, the executive committee meeting decided that the SPC must now "operate on the assumption" that not all members would agree on every project. The activity under discussion, a citizens' induction of Selective Service head General Hershey into a Peace Army, resulted in 127 arrests. SPC membership increased to one thousand in early 1970, two thousand in winter 1970, and peaked at six thousand in 1973. SPC active committee, nonexistent in 1968, numbered fifteen in 1970 and twenty-two in 1971. The PNL expanded to eight pages in 1970, sixteen pages in 1971, and twenty-four pages in 1973. But 1973, the SPC budget stood at $25,000 and supported five full time staff. The SPC was never the only antiwar group in Syracuse, but its office, staff, and members served the fulcrum.

The SPC grew even as it articulated rather than abandoned a radical critique of both U.S. foreign and domestic policy. The July 1971 executive committee labeled opposition to the Vietnam War "just an ad hoc representation" of its basic philosophy, which was "a concern for human relations." In 1972, the SPC replaced the organization's 1936 statement of purpose with the following paragraph: "The goal of the Syracuse Peace Council is a world community founded on mutual trust and respect. Such a community can only flourish in the absence of war, poverty, sexism, racism, and other social injustices. The Syracuse Peace Council is committed to the elimination of thee barriers to decent human relations through peace education and the exercise of non-violent action."

The Quaker meeting that had done so much to begin the change benefitted little. In a decade that witnessed immense political, cultural, and religious ferment, the Syracuse Meeting increased only from seventy to seventy-six members. The meeting's influence in the local peace movement declined dramatically after 1968, when the intern oversight committee hired an adherent of conservative Quaker Robert Pickus and shifted local AFSC work away from public antiwar activity. Partially in response, the national AFSC curtailed meeting control in 1970 by officially declaring Syracuse as an official area office. Adelaide Webster, Mildred Whitney, and Ben Shove continued to serve on the SPC executive committee, but the new SPC was too large and diverse and newer Quakers never participated on a par with members of the older generation. In 1973, the Syracuse Meeting's annual report listed ten groups with which members worked - the SPC was not among them.

The primary reason the United States lost the war in Indochina was the willingness of its opponents to fight and die in such large numbers. The U.S. totals of some 59,000 dead and 300,000 wounded are dwarfed by the millions of civilian and military casualties in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. However, there was nothing inevitable in the outcome. The war could have ended later, or even in a limited U.S. victory, if the domestic costs of the war had been less. The peace movement's failure to hold ever larger national demonstrations did not reflect a movement in decline but a change in tactics as opponents concentrated on building strong community peace groups. The still expanding peace movement of the 1970s unquestionably impeded President Richard Nixon;s hopes to maintain the South Vietnamese government.

The peace movement not only grew into the 1970's, it grew while maintaining a commitment to radical politics. Historians must avoid the tendency to substitute differences over tactics for differences of ideology. The decline in size of national antiwar demonstrations does not mean radicalism "disintegrated" by the late 1960s, or that liberalism emerged "dominant." People who opposed continued national demonstrations, or the actions of thing revolutionary fringe groups, cannot be so easily defined as liberals. The peace movement continued to articulate a strong critique of U.S. society and a deep desire for social change, fracturing the consensus politics of the cold war even while failing to build the new nation and new world it so fervently desired.

After the Vietnam War, the SPC became a major regional force in the campaign against nuclear power plants. The Syracuse group exhibited a strong commitment to cultural work, organizing musical events, promoting local theater, and producing posters, cards and an annual calendar. During the early 1980s upsurge in opposition to President Ronald Reagan's foreign policy, the SPC had over three thousand newsletter subscribers and nine full-time staff divided among its organizing work, movement print shop, and alternative bookstore.

The peace movement and the Syracuse Peace Council, although now diminished, as yet need no epitaph. Should that time come, Norman Whitney could provide one with the words he wrote in 1947 to describe the local group he did so much to create.

"The SPC did not keep America of war

But it has been a rallying point and a radiating center .

It has kept the faith and upheld the ideal

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