St. Louis Post-Dispatch St. Louis, Missouri Sunday, March 26, 1961
Taking the Long, Long Trail to Peace
Eighteen Determined Pacifists Here En Route From San Francisco; Some Hope to Reach Moscow
“Youngest of the Peace Walkers is Allan Hoffman, 19, a New York artist. The group includes 10 men and eight women. One of the women is Mrs. Regina Fischer, mother of United States Chess Champion, Bobby Fischer of Brooklyn. Mrs. Fischer took advantage of the groups brief stopover in St. Louis to seek treatment for an abscessed tooth.”
Taking the Long, Long Trail to Peace
Eighteen Determined Pacifists Here En Route From San Francisco; Some Hope to Reach Moscow
By Virginia Irwin, of the Post-Dispatch Staff
A DETERMINED little band of pacifists arrived in St. Louis last week. Calling themselves the “Peace Walkers,” these dedicated men and women have pledged themselves to wake a 6500-mile journey across the United States, through Europe and on to Moscow in the hope of prodding people all over the world into thinking about peace.
“We are not beatniks or crackpots,” said Prof. John Beecher, who resigned recently from the faculty of Arizona State University to join the San Francisco-to-Moscow Walk for Peace.
“We're just a bunch of ordinary people who are deeply concerned about the present policies of many governments, including those of the United States and the Soviet Union. We believe these policies are endangering the existence of our families, our country and even the human race. The most dangerous and horrifying result of these policies is the arms race.”
The Walk for Peace began last Dec. 1. By June the walkers hope to be in New York. From there they will fly to England, walk from London to a channel port, cross to France and then walk through Europe. If denied entry to any Communist country, including Russia, the Peace Walkers will, “through acts of civil disobedience,” openly but non-violently attempt to enter the countries without permission.
At 57, Beecher is the oldest of the bank of 18 Peace Walkers, who are sponsored by the Committee for Non-Violent Action. Accompanied by his wife, Barbara, he is a sort of “advance man” for the group, traveling ahead to set up meetings with other groups interested in the pacifist movement and to make arrangements for the brief “picketing” of military establishments and firms handling arms contracts.
Youngest of the Peace Walkers is Allan Hoffman, 19, a New York artist. The group includes 10 men and eight women. One of the women is Mrs. Regina Fischer, mother of United States Chess Champion Bobby Fischer of Brooklyn. Mrs. Fischer took advantage of the group's brief stopover in St. Louis to seek treatment for an abscessed tooth.
Another woman in the group is Millie Gilbertsen, former student at Washington University's School of Fine Arts who was working as a commercial artist in New Jersey when she became interested in the campaign and gave up her job to join the pacifists.
In this group brought together by the common belief that “moral policies and not military power will bring about world peace” are several students, a San Francisco landscape gardener, a Florida farmer, a Chicago fashion model, a Joliet (Ill.) chemist, a California boilermaker, a New Hampshire museum guard, and a 35-year-old man who is in the process of disposing of an inheritance that provided him with an independent income. He wants to reduce his yearly earnings to the $600 level that can be earned without paying income tax.
The young man is 35-year-old Scott Herrick of New York City.
“I will seek voluntary poverty,” Herrick explained as the Peace Walkers paused for a noonday meal on Highway 40 outside St. Louis, “because I cannot in conscience pay income tax to support an arms race that may lead to the destruction of all mankind.”
“I plan, when this walk is over, to devote myself to peace education. People ask me how I will be able to live on $600 a year. The poor of other nations live on much less. I can if necessary get pick and shovel work to enable me to go on with the work for peace. I know that I can eat for 9 cents a day by utilizing the Meals for Millions concentrate that is saving the lives of many people abroad.”
Herrick, educated in private schools, enlisted in the United States Navy when he was graduated from Hill School, a preparatory school at Pottstown, Pa. He saw no combat in World War II but was sent to Princeton University by the Navy for special courses. He says his awakening to the horrors of war came with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“I believe that violence today is not only immoral but impractical.” Herrick explains. “I also believe that people, without realizing it, have been hungering for an enlightened spiritual revival for many years. It is no longer enough to be active physically and passive spiritually. A moral awakening, a mass movement for peace, would frighten Russia. The only things Russia is afraid of are war and ideas.”
Herrick suggests that the United States disarm gradually and make gradual transition to a peacetime economy. Then an increase in national wealth would follow when billions were no longer “squandered in the arms race.” He suggests that the United States set up a massive foreign aid program which Russia could never match.
“In this way,” he says, “we could beat the USSR on the idea level. You can't fight Communism with a hydrogen bomb but you can fight it with a superior idea. We are not living democracy and Christianity in the United States today and Khrushchev knows it. The day we start living democracy and Christianity the Kremlin will begin to totter.”
The Peace Walkers, with the exception of one man who has walked every step of the way from San Francisco, walk in relays. While approximately half the group walks, the others ride in a Buick four-door sedan, a DeSoto station wagon and a converted, red velvet-lined hearse nicknamed Karma by the group. (In the Hindu religion Karma embodies the idea that the ethical consequences of one's acts on earth fixes one's lot in future existence.) The vehicles used in the Peace Caravan are donated.
The one man who has walked every mile is 22-year-old David Rich of Tuftonboro, N.H. While in teachers' college at Plymouth, N.H., Rich had stirrings of conscience which prompted him to leave school and go to New York to spend two years “studying moral ethics and religion in a personal involvement sense.” He calls himself a “multi-denominational Christian and a registered conscientious objector to military service.”
 😄Bobby Fischer registering publicly as a “Conscientious Objector” in 1958. |
A mild, soft-spoken young man, Rich believes that “it is irrational and immoral for one nation to keep on preparing for mass extermination and s*ic*de just because some other nation does.” He also believes that if the United States would take the initiative and start unilateral disarmament, our doing so would give the world a moral example that might end in a world-wide mass movement for peace.
The Peace Walk has no leader in the accepted sense of the world but is a project in which all the walkers are guided “by the sense of the meeting,” to use a Quaker expression. Not all the walkers are agreed on such things as opposition to registering for the draft, refusal to pay income tax when 57 cents out of every tax dollar goes for military expenditures, and refusing to work in military industries and others carrying out research in the weapons field.
All agree however in the belief that military power is immoral and will not work and that only through a mass movement of the people demanding that governments adopt moral policies that will lead to lasting peace will the race to extinction in a nuclear war be stopped.
Formed shortly after the atomic bombs were dropped in Japan, the Committee for Non-violent Action, with headquarters in New York, claims as inspiration the humanitarian examples of Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, Isaiah, Mohandas Gandhi, Leo Tolstoi and Henry David Thoreau.
Financial support for the committee's program comes from several thousand contributors in the United States and throughout the world. Members of the organization have over a period of years engaged in non-violent action, often acts of civil disobedience, in “an effort to arouse the consciences of their fellow citizens to demand that the United States stop all preparations for nuclear war.”
Demonstrations have taken place at nuclear testing grounds, missile bases and plants producing chemical, biological and radiological weapons. In 1958 four-man crew of pacifists tried to sail a ketch, “The Golden Rule,” into the United States nuclear testing grounds at Eniwetok in the Pacific. Recently the committee sponsored Polaris Action, a protest against the new “deterrent” weapon, the nuclear powered submarine carrying Polaris missiles.
In St. Louis about 300 students at Washington University turned out for a visit by the Peace Walkers to the university's main quadrangle. The Peace Walkers also “picketed” McDonnell Aircraft Corp. and Scott Air Force Base, passing out leaflets explaining their stand for the renunciation of preventative war and the support of unilateral disarmament.
In Columbia, the Peace Walkers paused for three days and nights and appeared at a number of public meetings, including gatherings in churches, at Stephens College and University of Missouri. One mass meeting was sponsored by the Columbia Ministerial Alliance.
Usually the Peace Walkers find nighttime shelter offered by churches but if none is offered they bed down in sleeping bags on the ground.
“Our arrival in Oklahoma coincided with a police chiefs' conference in Oklahoma City,” Beecher recalled with some amusement. “The sheriffs and police were warned to be on the lookout for a band of ‘dangerous pacifists’ and we were shadowed tailed and trailed in Oklahoma by cars of the various branches of the law. The result was that people who had never heard of us became interested in our ideas for peace and even if they didn't agree with us, we like to think that we started them thinking about peace and exploring in their minds the ways to achieve it.”
In Kansas City, the pacifists were welcomed by the Church of the Brethren and held meetings at the University of Kansas City and also “picketed” the armed forces recruiting office. In Topeka they distributed peace pamphlets at the Strategic Air Command base.
In St. Louis, Beecher and his wife Barbara were guests of Mr. and Mrs. Tedford Lewis, 1039 Almont Lane, Webster Groves. The Lewises are members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and he is a member of the Board of the North Central Region of the American Friends Service Committee. The other Peace Walkers were given shelter in the basement of the First Congregational Church of Webster Groves.
Beecher admits that “advocating unilateral disarmament, taking unilateral initiative, may sound like idealistic talk.”
“But,” he adds, “I hope we're being practical. If steps by the United States fail to lead to similar steps in the USSR, then I would know that the policy had to be abandoned. But I feel that a bold step, unilaterally taken, would give us an incredible moral advantage. World opinion would almost certainly force the Russians to follow.”
A powerful public speaker, Beecher also taught at Dartmouth, the University of Wisconsin and San Francisco State College. A roster of his ancestors reads like a Who's Who of American history. A John Beecher was one of the founders of the New Haven (Conn.) Colony in 1638; his great-grandfather Edward Beecher was a pioneer abolitionist and the first president of the first college in Illinois.
Edward Beecher's sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote “Uncle Tom's Cabin”; a cousin, Julia Ward Howe, wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Through his father's mother, Beecher is also related to Nathan Hale, revolutionary hero and to Edward Everett Hale, author of “The Man Without a Country,”
Beecher served with the U.S. Navy during World War II on a merchant ship chartered to the Army Transport Service and is the author of “All Brave Sailors,” which describes his experiences on the first racially integrated Navy unit in World War II. He holds a rare degree, Doctor of the More Humane Letters, from Illinois College at Jacksonville, Ill.
“I happen to believe that my action in joining the Peace Walkers will be more effective than anything I could teach in the classroom.” Beecher says.
Not all of the 18 participating in the Peace Walk will go on to Europe and try to reach Moscow. But each says he hopes he will be chosen.
