Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History.

• Author: McCarthy, Colman

By Staughton Lynd and Alice Lynd Orbis Books. 530 pages. $45.00 cloth; $25.00 paper.

In the courses on nonviolence that I've been teaching since the early 1980s, I start off with a spot quiz: "Raise your hands if you can identify these six people: Robert E. Lee, U.S. Grant, Paul Revere, Jane Addams, Jeanette Rankin, and Dorothy Day."

Out of 5,000 students over the years, not one has named all six. Nearly all hands go up on the first three, with rarely a raised hand on the last three. Everyone knows the peacebreakers but not the peacemakers.

Students aren't to blame. They weren't taught. Their teachers weren't taught. We graduate our kids--from our 78,000 elementary schools, 28,000 high schools, and 3,000 colleges and universities--as peace illiterates, and then wonder why we are sunk in violence: Pentagon violence, family violence, corporate violence, crime violence, media violence, abortion violence, killing-animals-for-food-and-clothing violence, environmental violence, verbal violence, military violence, religious violence.

If a vastness is found in all that, an equal breadth--larger, in fact--is to be found in the literature of nonviolence. As competently as any editors have, Staughton Lynd and Alice Lynd--lawyers who work for the Northeast Ohio Legal Services--have compiled essays and excerpts that are the core of America's peace literature. The sampling is diverse and deep, ranging from the known to the obscure, from the dead of past centuries to the living of today. Ninety-seven of what the authors call "documents" are included. They are arranged historically, beginning with William Penn's first letter to the Delawares and John Woolman's "A Plea for the Poor," and ending with some antinuclear statements from tribal members, including the Western Shoshones.

As the Lynds are aware, nonviolence is not easily defined. Gandhi of India never liked the word. He said it's a negative, defining what it isn't. Gandhi preferred satyagraha, a Hindi word roughly translated as truth force. This is the most difficult notion to explain to those who are unread in the literature and history of peacemaking. Every conflict, whether in families, workplaces, neighborhoods, or among governments, has been, and always will be, solved through the use of force: violent force or nonviolent force. Either fists, gulas, armies, bombs and nukes, or the force of justice, the force of shared wealth, the force of organized resistance to Caesar or the Pharaohs, the...