The memory of public ridicule sticks with a person. It surely stuck with Henry Joel Cadbury, a professor of religion at Haverford College who lost his job in 1918 for criticizing the hysteria of World War I. Remembered for his gentle wit and self-effacing modesty, he went on to be a leader in civil rights, peace and justice issues. He was a founder of the American Friends Service Committee, which he led through numerous triumphs and crises.
Still, the Haverford episode was pivotal. “Never again did he risk the accusation of speaking for the group unless he knew that the group was indeed with him,” wrote biographer Margaret Hope Bacon.
Born in Philadelphia’s Spring Garden section, Cadbury was part of the American branch of the same Quaker family famous in the United Kingdom for chocolate and social reform. Cadbury’s father, Joel, was an affluent dealer of plumbing supplies who also served on the boards of various Quaker institutions, including Friends Asylum (now Friends Hospital) and the Institute for Colored Youth (now Cheyney University).
During adolescence, Cadbury began to doubt his family’s evangelical concept of salvation through faith, adopting a belief that obedience to the teachings and example of Christ was the most important religious duty. Upon graduation from Haverford College in 1903, Cadbury decided to be a teacher. At Chester County’s Quaker-based Westtown School, Cadbury found his life’s work. In 1908, he returned to Harvard for a doctorate in Biblical literature. Such study was a trend among liberal Protestants. There was, wrote Bacon, “a growing belief that the tools of higher criticism would lead to a fresh understanding of Jesus.”
Liberals expected that those understandings would support the Social Gospel movement, which sought to apply Christian ideas to issues of compassion and peace. Conservatives vehemently disagreed, but Quakers had never been Biblical literalists. So, when Cadbury emerged with his new degree, Haverford hired him back to share his scholarly approach to Bible study.
In 1915, with Europe at war, Cadbury joined a national Quaker peace movement whose goal was to rouse 100,000 Friends to urge President Woodrow Wilson to help break the diplomatic impasse among the warring powers. He traveled, attended a lot of conferences, spoke and wrote.
Two years later, with war fever building in the United States, Cadbury offered two articles to Biblical World, a leading publication, which refuted leading theologians’ arguments that war could be justified. Christ, he contended, made no categorical statements about war, though the Old Testament said plenty. Biblical World rejected both articles.
When the war came, Cadbury refocused on alternative forms of service for conscientious objectors. The Friends National Peace Committee that Cadbury chaired became the American Friends Service Committee, which launched plans for a reconstruction unit to be sent to France. After the world wars, AFSC would feed millions of children and refugees in Europe and Asia. In 1947, the organization won the Nobel Peace Prize, which Cadbury accepted wearing a borrowed tuxedo.
But in the AFSC’s early years, Cadbury endured frustration, public criticism and time away from his family. As the war ground on, the public was gripped by a propaganda- and media-fueled passion against all things German. Readers were horrified by (false) stories that Germany processed the bodies of its dead to make chemicals for explosives and pig food. European villages and towns were battered by both sides, but the newspapers blamed only the Germans.
In Germantown, negative sentiment was so intense that a protective box was placed over the neighborhood’s monument to its German settlers. At the Society of Biblical Literature, a scholar suggested that Americans break their dependence on the German scholarship Cadbury revered. To him, it all seemed a bit much. In October 1918, he wrote Philadelphia’s Public Ledger a letter to the editor he soon regretted. Press and public, wrote Cadbury, were indulging in an “orgy of hate” that could produce only a temporary peace.
No one at the school stood up for Cadbury. He was called to the U.S. District Attorney’s Office to respond to charges of treason.
Reaction was immediate. Germany could never be punished enough, clamored Ledger readers, who insisted Cadbury didn’t care about the victims. “Hate of the Hun is a Christian virtue,” said one Philadelphia writer. Another remarked on the “appropriateness” of Cadbury’s remarks emanating from Haverford College.
No one at the school stood up for Cadbury. A meeting with the college president went poorly, and the alumni association demanded his removal. Cadbury was called to the U.S. District Attorney’s office to respond to charges of treason. None were brought.
Stunned by the response, Cadbury submitted his resignation. Instead, he was granted a paid leave for the rest of the academic year. He went off to toil for the AFSC. By the time his resignation came up for consideration in March 1919, Cadbury had been offered a new position at Harvard’s Andover Theological Seminary. He remained there until his retirement in 1954.
Throughout his life, Cadbury described the incident as a turning point.
“The experience of bearing the brunt of so much public anger—and trying not to be angry himself—deepened his sense of conviction,” wrote Bacon. “He had helped young men who had an incoherent feeling that they could not kill find service with the AFSC, and through that service articulate an increasingly clear sense of what religious pacifism might mean. He would see himself thereafter as a traveler on that same road.”
Taken from the archives of Mark E. Dixon’s Retrospect column, a fixture in Main Line Today for 16 years.
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