• Goin' Broke Paying for War

• Twilight War Author Warns Omaha About the Folly of U.S. Space Dominance

• Looking Backward:
  A History of Nebraska Peacemaking before NFP

• 

• Keep Space for Peace

• Mike Johanns,
  Global Warming Skeptic

• The Wall Street Crisis

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• 2008 Annual Peace Conference: The True Cost of the 'War on Iraq'

• U.S. Blocks
  PAROS Treaty at UN

• Concerns Grow over Risk to Omaha’s Water

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• ARCHIVE

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Looking Backward:
A History of Nebraska Peacemaking
before NFP

Paul Olson
NFP President

It is more than forty years since “Rural Nebraskans for Peace” and “Nebraskans for Peace in Vietnam” were founded in 1967 and became a force in state politics from 1968-70. Each of these organizations, however, was only a latter-day formalization of a peace movement in Nebraska that had roots dating back nearly a century.

The Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries up to World War II: Nineteenthcentury Nebraska had significant settlements of Quakers and Mennonites whose whole tradition was that of a people of peace. The 1890s-1910 Populist Party, which elected many public officials in Nebraska, had a powerful anti-war strand as well. And although the party’s members for the most part supported the Spanish-American War, the antiwar sentiments of the Populist tradition may well have inspired Nebraska’s legislators to label the successive Philippine-American War of the early twentieth century a colonial enterprise. Despite the fact that another Nebraskan, General John J. Pershing, established his military and colonialist credentials in that war, there existed during this period a seed bed of anti-war sentiment in the state, embodied in the political careers of William Jennings Bryan and George Norris. Bryan’s pacifism and Norris’s trust in international law became the two philosophical pillars influencing most peace movements, and certainly that of NFP.

By 1903, Bryan had proclaimed himself a Tolstoyan pacifist and went to go visit the renowned Russian writer and theorist before Mohandas Gandhi began his own correspondence with Tolstoy. Bryan ran for president in 1908 and served as Secretary of State in the first Wilson administration as a Tolstoyan pacifist — the only American pacifist to act in those roles. He had a huge following both in Nebraska and in the nation, with his paper, The Commoner, counting a circulation in the hundreds of thousands at its height. The Bryan influence in Nebraska was to continue on up through 1931-35 during his brother Charles’ terms as governor.

Norris on the other hand was committed to international law and a strong world and federalist legal regime (not Woodrow Wilson’s token League of Nations) as peacemaking tools. He accurately foresaw the unwholesome power of the Military-Industrial Complex in his 1917 speech opposing U.S. entry into World War I and maintained his philosophical opposition to militarism until the late 1930s.

As the winds of oncoming war began to be felt across the nation in the latter part of the Thirties, a coalition of 22 peace organizations called the Nebraska Peace Council was formed in the state with an R.B. Elrod as the head. The Council was, in turn, a member of the National Peace Conference led by Walter W. Van Kirk, later of the National Council of Churches. The Nebraska Peace Council not only opposed war between Germany and Britain but also resisted all forms of colonialism, war profiteering and economic exploitation, and supported a federalist international order. The organization claimed to have 300 members and to have reached out to 10,000 people in 1939.

World War II to Vietnam: World War II and the undeniable horror of Nazism and Japanese and Italian Fascism destroyed the peacemaking tradition in the state. The naiveté of some would-be peace people in the face of Nazi negotiating efforts at Munich did not help. Only the state’s peace churches and the conscientious objectors that relied on them stood out during that period. Indeed, the peace movement as a public political effort had little in the way of influence outside the peace churches themselves until Dwight Dell of the Church of the Brethren (with help from the Methodist minister Harold Massie) ran for the U.S. Senate in 1952 as a peace candidate opposed to the Korean War.

Later Herbert Jehle, the Quaker physicist, other Friends from Lincoln and the long-time pacifist activist, Rev. Abraham Muste, participated in the “Omaha Action” anti-nuclear weapon protest at the Atlas Missile silo site near Mead, Nebraska in 1959. This was historic — one of the first demonstrations against ICBMs in the U.S. Jehle also corresponded with Albert Einstein about a plan for world peace and Einstein wrote that he agreed totally with Jehle’s ideas. But iconic occurrences of this nature were few in the inclement political environment of 1950s Nebraska.

The Vietnam War up until 1970 and a little after: Even as the Eisenhower and the early Kennedy years seemed to pass by peacefully for the majority of Americans, these administrations were making deep commitments to propping up, and later fabricating, client administrations in South Vietnam. War had begun. So had the great move toward civil rights. The Civil Rights movement began to blossom with Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, the Montgomery Bus boycott in 1955-56, the Selma to Montgomery march in 1962, and the succeeding march on Washington in 1963 that led to the passage of the 1964 U.S. Civil Rights Act. The Civil Rights movement taught the peace movement of the ’60s and ’70s its organizing tactics.

In Nebraska, the ’60s Civil Rights movement had great leaders in Ernie Chambers, Hughes and Lela Shanks, Leola Bullock, Reuben Snake, Louis LaRose, Leonard Springer, Raymond Perez, Sam Franco and others. Most of these leaders also opposed the war in Vietnam, and Hughes and Lela Shanks were early members of NFP. They had been converted to pacifism and joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation while leading Civil Rights efforts in Kansas City, Denver and Lincoln. Clearly, as in the Shanks’ case, one cannot separate the Nebraska peace movement from various forms of civil rights protest.

At the same time as we escalated the number of our troops in Vietnam — first under Kennedy and then, after the Gulf of Tonkin, under Johnson — three streams of peace activism, as Central City farmer and Friends member Don Reeves notes, began to spring up again in this state: a church stream, a campus and faculty stream, and a rural Nebraskans stream. The streams flowed together in 1970 to make the river of Nebraskans for Peace.

First, Church Groups: Quaker, Brethren, some Mennonites, and Methodists (especially Methodist clergy) were part of this teaching effort against the War in Vietnam.

One of the earliest town-gown groups, loosely connected with the Quakers and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, called itself Nebraskans for Peace in Vietnam (NFPV). Its history has yet to be thoroughly traced, because as activist Dan Schlitt had reminded me, “that was the 60s and we didn’t do anything according to protocol.” From the few records available, we do know that NFPV raised money, held vigils in Lincoln, counseled students about the draft and, during the “Vietnam Summer” period in 1967, sent information to public officials and packets to history and social studies teachers to raise their awareness. Among its leaders were Friends Marge and Dan Schlitt (who continued to volunteer for NFP after its founding in 1970) and Dick and Jean Gilbert, and others like Kandra Hahn, Victor Lane, and Bill Campbell. Lela Shanks has recounted that her husband Hughes, Hudson Phillips and Bruce McSpadden worked with students at this time through NFPV. This organization may have begun as early as 1966, when the Daily Nebraskan says it started, or as late as 1967. It was clearly alive in 1967 when it solicited money locally and received support from the national 1967 “Vietnam Summer” efforts to organize students, faculty and townspeople against the war. Its press was an old offset thing located in faculty member Bud Narveson’s basement, the group’s “Xerox” and “email” combined, from which flowed thousands of flyers and political analyses.

Second, Student Groups Largely Based at UNL: As NFP’s first state coordinator Mike Shonsey has noted, no one has a complete record of all of the student groups that opposed the Vietnam War, but they included NFPV students, Yippies, SDSers (Students for a Democratic Society), independent kids, kids facing the draft, and students who had a base in one or another of the peace churches. By 1966, UNL students were beginning to come alive because of the draft and because of the draft-counseling efforts of NFPV.

Former State Senator Steve Fowler remembers a teach-in at Love Library from about 1966, and in the next few years, anti-draft rallies and other demonstrations regularly took place on or near the UNL campus. Some of these activities grew out of NFPV’s draft counseling effort in the basement of the old United Ministries in Higher Education facility and from UMHE’s anti-war religious teachings issuing from Alan Pickering and later from Rev. Larry Doerr. Mike Shonsey actually lived at UMHE at the time. The influence of Carl Davidson, a Philosophy graduate student and founding member of SDS, also should not be ignored. UMHE was the main site of planning for the events surrounding the October 15, 1969 teach-ins and demonstrations accompanying the nationwide “Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam.” In 1969, Larry Zink (later a state coordinator of NFP) burned his draft card in a Hyde Park-like forum at the Nebraska Union, which proved to be a watershed event for its symbolism. UMHE was also the site of the student meetings that led to the May 1970 demonstrations after the invasion of Cambodia and the National Guard shootings at Kent State. (No one has yet constructed a full account of the activities in Omaha during this period, though it is known that Fr. John Krejci, Fr. John McCaslin and Vince McAndrews began protests at the Omaha courthouse in 1966, and other Catholics and religious leaders later demonstrated against the war.)

Third, Rural Anti-war Groups: Rural Nebraskans for Peace has a clearer history than do the church and student movements because we have records.

A document in the Nebraska Historical Society (apparently from 1970) lists the following Board of Directors for Rural Nebraskans for Peace: Gideon Bratten, Arlo Hoppe, Maxine Schroeder, Mrs. Henry Schutz, Rev. Tom Rehorn, Wilfred Wortman, Merle Hansen, Mrs. Arlo Hoppe, Fred Schroeder, Ted Reeves, Warren Messner, Ken Messner, Henry Schutz, Rev. Cook, Mike Shonsey, and John Hansen. The names in bold later became leaders in NFP. (Rev. Tom Rehorn speaks in 1970 of a group for which he has raised money composed of eight families — surely the center of the RNFP group listed in the board roster). The document includes a note that Don Reeves and Jack Stout had just been elected to the Nebraskans for Peace board, NFP having been founded by that time. Don became the first president of Nebraskans for Peace, and Reeves and Stout must have been the transitional figures between the NFP and RNFP boards. Similarly, the placing of Mike Shonsey and John Hansen on the RNFP board must have served to make them, in somebody’s mind, bridges from RNFP to the student movement. The group was formally organized in May of 1967, developing a notable public presence between 1968-70.

Rural Nebraskans for Peace was a genuine Nebraskan and rural organization. One of its leaders, Tom Rehorn, was a Methodist clergy member who, in his application for the Methodist ministry, spoke of having “applied the gospel to social issues” and been fired “often” for so doing. Like many of the first RNFP people, Rehorn was an incredibly eloquent speaker and grassroots organizer. One source document attributed the origin of Rural Nebraskans for Peace to Schuyler, Nebraska farmer Arlo (Dutch) Hoppe, who was motivated to act upon hearing that Rehorn had been “fired” from his job at Wesley House in North Omaha in ‘65 or ‘66 for his peace and civil rights activities. (Rehorn was subsequently reassigned to Fullerton, Nebraska, at a loss of $1900 in salary — one quarter of his previous pay.) Hoppe, according to this account, is said to have told his wife, Marilyn, “Let’s drive over to Fullerton and see that guy,” and, around Tom Rehorn’s kitchen table, the two families birthed the idea for a rural anti-war and civil rights organization.

The actual story is probably a little more complicated. As Dutch Hoppe’s son, Jim (a teenager active in RNFP at the time) remembers things, he doesn’t know how his father knew of Tom Rehorn. Dutch, however, who was a WWII veteran, despised the idea of people killing people, and it is true that once he got wind of Rehorn’s dismissal for opposing the war, the Hoppe family started going to Rehorn’s church in Fullerton, about 40 miles from Schuyler. From The two families did indeed end up having Sunday dinner together after church from time to time, and after several gatherings talking about everything in the world, decided to do something about the Vietnam War and racial injustice. (Rehorn had been a fundamentalist Baptist from Southern Missouri, before the social implications of the gospels attracted him, and as a Missourian, he liked eating muskrat. Arlo’s son would catch muskrat for the Rehorns’ table.)

This tiny group invited Merle Hansen, a farmer from Newman Grove and John Hansen’s father, into the mix and began to buy space in a local paper where they published editorial-style pieces and quotes from ministers and scholars who opposed the war. Dutch and Merle next recruited another farmer, Fred Schroeder of Shelton, who was to often serve as the spokesperson for RNFP. Eventually, Ted Reeves, Don Reeves’ father, came on board, and Ted would take up little collections at the RNFP meetings in order to pay the $200- $300 for Columbus-area radio programs that broadcast moderate anti-war talks — mostly from a religious and nonviolent perspective. With the money, Fred Schroeder was able to organize a 15-minute anti-war radio program on a Columbus station once a week (Grand Island’s KMMJ wouldn’t have them). The group’s commercial outreach effort was to prove short-lived, however. In an obvious censorship move, the Columbus station eventually pushed RNFP off the air in favor of extending a Presbyterian broadcast for another 15 minutes each Sunday. Thwarted but undaunted, the RNFP members continued to travel to rural forums wherever they could get a hearing, spoke at the University of Nebraska as the student anti-war movement coalesced, and wrote many letters to the editor.

RNFP though was not simply an antiwar group. It respected Ernie Chambers’ struggle against prejudice and oppression in North Omaha and arranged for exchanges between North Omaha’s kids and farm kids. Jim Hoppe recalls the irony of Arlo’s taking his farm’s watermelons to North Omaha on the grounds that “everybody likes watermelons.” When the Civil Rights parades led by Ernie Chambers and other local leaders took place in North Omaha, RNFP was represented, with Jim Hoppe and John Hansen riding horses and tractors down the North Omaha streets. In a 1970 paper for UNL’s “Tri-University” project, Rehorn speaks of the witness of the RNFP group as being equally for “racial brotherhood” and for withdrawal from Vietnam.

The Birth of NFP: According to Mike Shonsey, the big push to create a single, state peace organization “came with the Moratorium marches” in 1969. At about that same time, Don Gall, a local UCC minister, had just returned from a national Clergy and Laity Concerned meeting with an offer to pay $200 a month to have a peace organization and organizer on the ground in Nebraska. (Rev. Dave and Gwen Powell of Trinity Methodist may also have had a role in these early plans.) Gall brought Fred Schroeder from Rural Nebraskans for Peace and Shonsey from the various Lincoln anti-war groups together to discuss the CALC proposal. What we now know as “Nebraskans for Peace” essentially emerged from a fusion of Rural Nebraskans for Peace and Nebraskans for Peace in Vietnam, with all of the other church, student, and secular groups opposing the war throwing in their bits. As Shonsey recounts it, “Fred Schroeder and I basically put together the first board; I basically got names from Omaha and Lincoln and Fred got the names from out state.” Mike chose the NFP name for the group, and Don Reeves led the fight for the inclusion of justice and equality issues in its mandate that have been a hallmark from the beginning. NFP’s close connection with Clergy and Laity Concerned, whose initial offer had gotten things rolling, strongly influenced the fledgling organization and continued into the early 1980s. The title of NFP’s newspaper, for example, The Nebraska Report, was inspired by CALC’s national publication, The American Report.

Aside from the names I have mentioned, one should not forget the crucial roles in the early days of Larry Zink, Nye Bond, Kay Young, Loyal and Mary Alice Park, Nick Meinhardt, and many, many others — many of whom are now deceased.

This account should not close without some mention of the price that our early forebears paid for standing for something: the ministers who were fired, the farmers who amassed huge FBI files, the wives who lost their marriages for standing up against the war, the students who went to prison for burning their draft cards, the farmers whose had their cattle herds threatened with poisoning, the rural members who were ostracized by their communities and forbidden access to conventional media expression by newspapers and radio stations. (Democracy cannot survive where censorship reigns, and today with the corporate monopoly of the media NFP is again experiencing the squeeze). If, as the modern cliché goes, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church, then the suffering of the peacemakers germinates the seed of peace.

After 1970 and the founding of NFP came the legislative hearing on Vietnam that Sen. Ernie Chambers and possibly John DeCamp sponsored; Sen. Terry Carpenter’s 1972 legislative journal statement on Vietnam that was drafted by Nebraskans for Peace and the ongoing struggle for withdrawal; the effort to achieve a recognition of Indian treaty rights after the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation; the fight for retrocession for the Winnebago nation; the Nuclear Weapons Freeze and NO MX missile campaigns; NFP’s opposition to the wars in Central America to stop U.S. aid to the murderous regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala and to support the Nicaraguan Sandanistas against Reagan’s Contra warriors. We worked for détente with the Soviet Union and — after the end of the Cold War — the “Peace Dividend.” We opposed American military intervention in the Middle East long before it became fashionable and supported state divestment from South Africa and the preservation of the Nebraska Indian, Mexican-American and Women’s commissions. We championed universal health care, Fair not ‘Free Trade,’ Gay and Lesbian human rights, and initiated the legislative campaign to prevent bullying in our schools. Besides opposing both wars against Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, we have also done what we could to alert the public about Whiteclay and the threat the even more dangerous StratCom poses to the world.

As Nebraskans for Peace approaches its 40th anniversary, it is our hope that we are worthy descendants of the peacemaking and justice-working tradition from which we arose. For without the vision, generosity and courage of those advocates, Nebraskans for Peace would never have survived to become what is now ‘the oldest statewide Peace & Justice organization in the entire country.’

(Drawn from materials given by Bud Narveson, Marge and Dan Schlitt, Kathy Cook, Jim Hoppe, Steve Fowler, Jay Schmidt, John Krejci, Kandra Hahn, Mike Shonsey, Don Reeves, Marilyn McNabb, John Hansen, Lela Shanks, notes and articles by Betty Olson, and documents in the Nebraska State Historical Society and in the Methodist archives at Nebraska Wesleyan. This history is not complete or fully researched, and the author welcomes all corrections and input that might improve later versions.)

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