Quakerism by The book: A Tribute to Tom Hamm And A Call To His Successor Quaker Historians

Tom Hamm, applauded as he concludes service as Clerk of the Faculty at Earlham College on the Eve of his retirement, May 2023.

 

Thomas Hamm was the subject of many tributes and high praise at Earlham College this month, as he retired from more than three decades as a professor of  Quaker history and director of the school’s noted archives, built around an extensive Quaker collection.
I was among those who gathered during the weekend of May 19-20 at the Earlham School of Religion, for “Quakerrama,” an extended hybrid tribute to his scholarship at the Earlham School of Religion in Richmond, Indiana.

My talk there was meant not only for those assembled and Zoomed in. I wanted to reach out to Friends and friends of Friends concerned for Quakerism — those who make our History, and the few who chronicle and pass it on, especially the ones outside academia. The title was, “Let’s take Tom’s Legacy & Run with It”. I’ve edited it for this blog:
What is Tom Hamm’s legacy? This is my take, which I’m sure is incomplete:
Tom’s work showed the continuing value of deep research and clear writing. It has many virtues and two chief accomplishments: it helped fill many gaps in our knowledge, and thereby opened up new questions and areas for exploration.
That was the case with the pair of his books I know best, The Transformation of American Quakerism (1988), and God’s Government Begun (1995).
Transformation gave us a rich and convincing portrait of how Midwestern  & southern Quakerism made the drastic shift from being a silence-based, nonpastoral group to the pastored, evangelical and missionary-centered church forms of the twentieth and 21st centuries — forms which in my observation have passed their long heyday and now are fading pretty rapidly. Transformation richly deserved the church history prize it was awarded.
Then in God’s Government Begun (1995), Tom put the Peculiar back into these peculiar people, limning their many Midwestern utopian experiments, their immersion in spiritualism, their women in bloomers, and their fad diets almost as goofy as some we have now. You outlanders who think the Midwest is dull? Read this and think again.
Tom also let me read an early draft of his major work in progress, on the Hicksites in the 19th century—again beginning to fill another yawning gap.
 I hope finishing that book is one of Tom’s major retirement projects.
We need it, Tom! Hicksites especially: they (aka we) & other liberal Quakers don’t really believe in history, which means we need it most.
So let me repeat my plea to rising Quaker historians, to take Tom’s legacy and run with it.
Some have already done that. I want to quickly mention five recent examples; of course, I haven’t read all the good Quaker histories; but these are several that particularly impressed me:
Fit for Freedom, Not For Friendship: FGC pub, 2009. It remains a landmark of Quaker self-examination around race.  It was also inexpensive, thus widely promoted and discussed. That made it a triple crown winner for how Quaker history ought to be shared. It’s not really a secret formula; we just mostly act that way.

Personality & Place, by my greatly admired colleague Doug Gwyn. He calls it a theological history of Pendle Hill.
Institutional histories are known for their dullness and deserved obscurity. This one is radically different (and better), because for nigh onto four generations, Pendle Hill has been the key crossroads for not only liberal Quakers, but many from other branches and other churches and movements.
Doug’s in-depth tracking of its spiritual and theological trajectory is compelling and illuminating. It’s also laced with a kind of deep pathos as readers follow Pendle Hill’s slide from aiming to be a “school for the prophets” into settling for becoming, as one dejected board member put it, a Navel Observatory. Doug published the book himself, something that’s now relatively easy to do, and affordable as well.

As They Were Led, by Martha Catlin of Baltimore YM. This is a clear-eyed 200-year history of the BYM Indian Affairs Committee Issued by a very small independent publisher in Maryland. Besides being thoroughly researched, it deals with both the “steps and missteps” of the long procession of devoted Friends without sinking into the self-hatred and flagellation that mars too many current releases. It ought to be a key resource for Friends seeking to understand and build constructively in this notable, if imperfect, base.


 

Quakers Living in the Lion’s Mouth, A. Glenn Crothers – U Press of Florida – $32. Crothers is a professor at the university of Louisville. He offers a very impressive and sobering account of the daily challenges, compromises and quandaries facing Friends living in the slave state of Northern Virginia before, during and after the Civil War.

he shows a for even the Quakers most dedicated to the testimony against slavery, almost every aspect of antebellum daily life saw them caught in a sticky web of complicity, visible and invisible, with the systemic evil. But I could not bear to judge them, because on almost every page, there were foreshadowings and harbingers of contemporary forms of similar complicity for me and in our allegedly vastly better world today. Crothers does not preach or belabor these; but he doesn’t have to.

Remaking Friends: by Chuck Fager, 2014. A Narrative History of Progressive Friends. Progressives were the radical left wing of the Hicksites. They made history, but didn’t believe in it, or write it; so they were very influential — the seedbed of Friends General Conference in the east and much of what became the independent yearly meetings of the west. But they were also completely forgotten for about 80 years, even by their own spiritual offspring. Published by my own imprint.


All these books filled real gaps; and all left more to be done. Note that of these 5 authors, only one is a professor and was published by an academic press; it’s also the highest priced at $32, which is steep but within reason.
My guess is that for Quaker historians in the coming generation, that 4-1 ratio of academics to independents is about the way it’s going to be. We all know that stable academic jobs are getting more and more rare, and those focused on Quaker history will be scarce as hen’s teeth.
One example was sitting with us: underlined by the disclosure that Earlham is not planning to appoint a successor to Tom Hamm. The old saw goes that he is leaving very big shoes to fill; it should be true again, but it doesn’t exactly apply this time, because they’re taking away the shoes.  Not that the college powers that be want to dump the topic; but the pitiless pressures of declining enrollment and other cost squeezes have forced such cuts on many smaller schools.
Even so, that gloomy academic job forecast shouldn’t stop the ones who get –- and respond to — serious leadings to fill those historiographical gaps. They will put in the work on their own: they’ll find a tolerable day job, or jobs; do their research and writing whenever they can. It may take longer, but they can — and as four of the titles above show — many will get the job done.
It can be lonely work, but it is important that they do it. After all for Quakers, historical research & understanding is not just a sub-discipline of a sub-field of “religious studies” huddled in a minor corner of the huge assemblies of the Academy of American Religion, or even a career track for a vanishing few:
Rather, it’s ministry; it’s a calling. It is  ministry first to the Religious Society of Friends: I say especially for Quakers. After all, we don’t have a creed (or used to avoid them; the departures from that also deserve note); so we need to grapple with and learn from our history, in dialogue and even in struggle with our current leadings.
Tom Hamm’s major works, his published legacy, have thus ministered to me, in my own development and writing. I believe they have ministered to many others.
And even if the paychecks are not generous, the historical fields, as scripture says, are still ripe for the harvest.  There are still many major gaps in our historiography, just from the last century or so, and I’m speaking here only of Americans, knowing the fields are much broader than that.
Tom’s  legacy has also helped my thinking about some of the big gaps calling out to be filled: Here are just a few:
George Dale was a local newspaper editor, not a Friend, but in the 1920s, he crusaded fearlessly against the KKK, defying boycotts, threats and physical attacks.

— A reckoning with Quaker involvement with the Ku Klux Klan, particularly (but not only) in Indiana— what about North Carolina, Ohio, and even Oregon and California?  How did that become possible? What does it still mean?

Yet Quaker historians have avoided it like the plague that it was, even as the spirit of the Klan is rising and coming after us again, in our time.

George Dale and his family. Where are the heroic Quaker Klan resisters from Indiana in the 1920s, when the Hoosier Klan was the largest and most powerful in the nation?
This is no longer just a dreadful and neglected chapter from our past; it’s a new ordeal brewing, and for those of us who won’t learn from our history, I say we’re being prepared to repeat it.

–A history of LGBT Friends; there was an opening in 1963 in the UK with a pioneering booklet Toward A Quaker View of Sex; then in 1972, when George Lakey came out at FGC. Then the issue really reality broke loose (came out?) in Wichita in 1977, disrupting the first big Quaker gathering I attended. (My account of it is here.) I’ve been writing about related topics for 46 years as a journalist and chronicler, and while age is slowing me down, there’s still no shortage of material.

Jane Rushmore, a mostly unheralded giant of FGC and Philadelphia Hicksite Quakerism in the first half of the 20th century.

When will there be a substantial history of this first out-of-the-closet half century, and with it the important bits of pre-history? Figures like from Walt Whitman, M. Carey Thomas of Bryn Mawr; Logan Piersall Smith; Jane Rushmore, a giant of Philadelphia YM, who lived openly with her partner Emma Wallace for 60 years, long before the “movement” appeared; Tom Bodine, of NEYM & FUM; and of course, Bayard Rustin.

–Bayard Rustin is particularly challenging, because his overall career does not fit into the current liberal stereotypes many of us want it to, or with most of the recent trends of “antiracism.” So there’s a reckoning to come with him and his evolving ideas and convictions as well.
— From Bayard, we’re pointed in a contrarian direction: there are some Quaker names that loom large in the conservative history of the U.S. in the past hundred years: Whittaker Chambers. A. Mitchell Palmer. Henry Regnery. And For Pete’s sake, not one but two Republican presidents, both of whom were substantial figures, even though both were thrown out of office.
That’s Palmer on the right. Wilson is now remembered and excoriated for segregating the federal work force, and promoting the KKK’s revival (not to mention planting the seeds of the modern Military Industrial Complex). Palmer, who identified as a “liberal” Quaker (he gave a major address at an early FGC conference), left his own long-lasting legacy: the awful anti-immigrant and anti-progressive Palmer raids, launching the career of J. Edgar Hoover, and more. However, when Wilson offered to make him Secretary of War, Palmer declined. In a letter he told Wilson: “As a Quaker War Secretary, I should consider myself a living illustration of a horrible incongruity….In case our country should come into armed conflict with any other, I would go as far as any man in her defense; but I cannot, without violating every tradition of my people and going against every instinct of my nature, planted there by heredity, environment and training, sit down in cold blood in an executive position and use such talents as I possess to the work of preparing for such a conflict.” So he became attorney general instead. What could go wrong?

And the truth is, today most Americans who are part of what are called Friends churches, are situated in some of the most conservative populist communities in the country; that’s certainly so where I’m from in North Carolina.

And there are other gaps, worth talking about when we get a chance.
I’ll speak of just one more, not about writing but publishing;
I likewise urge Friends who are entangled in the exploitive, oppressive academic publishing racket. Bust out of it!
My next bestseller. Even scholars can get paid now, and sell quality books and monographs at much lower prices. For details click kdp.com

Quaker history research & writing are not meant to be locked behind these absurdly high paywalls, like prisoners in castles surrounded by alligator-infested moats, or secluded as the semi-secret possessions of a small guild of beleaguered academics, who talk mainly to each other and write books almost no one can afford to buy and very few will ever read. Neither many individual Friends, or meetings buy them.

So one more time: Quaker historians, younger or older, take Tom Hamm’s legacy and run with it: don’t let your lamps be hidden under a paywall bushel. Make your work, your ministry, accessible to Friends, a living part of our religious and community life  — and yes, this can now be done in ways which can even put some dollars in your pocket too. (I know this sounds crazy; but I’ve got the receipts!)
After all, they paid Tom Hamm for his historical work. They can pay young and new authors and historians too, at least something.
Now that would make some new Quaker history.
 Thank you. And thank thee, Tom. Very much.

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