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Winter 1996-97

World Order

THE UNITED NATIONS: AN IMPORTANT
FORCE FOR PROGRESS
EDITORIAL

THE JOURNEY OUT OF
THE RACIAL DIVIDE
MICHAEL L. PENN

LETTERS FROM A NINETEENTH-CENTURY
KANSAS BAHÁ’Í
DUANE L. HERRMANN

CAN POETRY PROMOTE PEACE? A REVIEW
PETER E. MURPHY

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World Order

VOLUME 28, NUMBER 2

WORLD ORDER IS INTENDED TO STIMULATE, INSPIRE, AND SERVE THINKING PEOPLE IN
THEIR SEARCH TO FIND RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY LIFE AND CONTEMPORARY
RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS AND PHILOSOPHY

Editorial Board:
FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH
BETTY J. FISHER
HOWARD GAREY
ROBERT H. STOCKMAN
JAMES D. STOKES

Consultant in Poetry:
HERBERT WOODWARD MARTIN

Subscriber Service:
LISA CORTES

WORLD ORDER is published quarterly by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, IL 60091. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to WORLD ORDER Subscriber Service, Bahá’í National Center, Wilmette, IL 60091. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher, the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, or of the Editorial Board. Manuscripts can be typewritten or computer generated. They should be double spaced throughout, with the footnotes at the end. The contributor should send four copies—an original and three legible copies—and should keep a copy. Return postage should be included. Send manuscripts and other editorial correspondence to WORLD ORDER, 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, IL 60091.

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WORLD ORDER is protected through trademark registration in the U.S. Patent Office.

Copyright © 1997, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States. All Rights Reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.
ISSN 0043-8804

IN THIS ISSUE

2   The United Nations: An Important Force for Progress

Editorial

4   Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor

7   The Journey Out of the Racial Divide

by Michael L. Penn

22   On Restitution and Absolution

poem by Rhea Harmsen

27   Letters from a Nineteenth-Century Kansas Bahá’í

by Duane L. Herrmann

37   Can Poetry Promote Peace?

review by Peter E. Murphy

46   The Anatomy of a Poem

poem by R. D. Huff

48   Authors & Artists in This Issue

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The United Nations:
An Important Force for Progress

FROM their origin the United Nations and its predecessor, the League of Nations, have been controversial. President Wilson’s dreams and plans for a peaceful world were attacked and defeated in his own country, dooming the League to ultimate ineffectiveness and failure. The United Nations, the next inevitable attempt to establish collective security and maintain peace, has had numerous detractors who, even when they did not deny the need for an international organization, have systematically minimized its importance, stressed its defects, and advocated restricting its sphere of activity and influence. On the far-out fringe there are those who see the United Nations as a sinister conspiracy to subvert the nations and establish by force of arms a world dictatorship.

Bringing order to a chaotic world of sovereign states is no easy task. While no aggressor will concede the right of the international community to prevent aggression, and no violator of human rights will welcome international monitoring of its inhumane practices, all states inevitably will resist to a greater or lesser extent the establishment of an order some elements of which are bound to be distasteful to one or another segment of their population. Whether it be peacekeeping, protection of the environment, advancement of women, defense of religious freedom, or adjudication of disputes, some party will feel dissatisfied and will criticize the organization that it cannot control.

Of course, the United Nations, like any human organization, is imperfect. Its defects are many and are periodically discussed. The problems range from such weighty ones as the permanent membership in the Security Council to such trivialities as the frequent nonpayment of New York City parking fines by diplomats. But United Nations bashing is not the solution. Withholding funds assessed by international agreement, refusing cooperation to UN reporters, ignoring General Assembly resolutions, and engaging in persistent destructive criticism weaken the only international organization that is designed to settle disputes, protect weaker nations, and create the means for political, economic, and cultural cooperation.

Bahá’ís hailed the creation of the League of Nations and at its demise fully expected to see it rise again, as it did only five years later in San Francisco, transformed and strengthened as the United Nations. For the last fifty years this world organization has consistently received the support of the Bahá’í community and the cooperation of Bahá’í institutions. Bahá’ís see in the United Nations an instrument for the establishment of a permanent and universal peace and, therefore, a welcome stage in the progress of civilization.

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Interchange LETTERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR

THIS issue of World Order contains an article, a poem, and a book review dealing with what we have came to know as the most challenging issue Facing America— the racial division that is the mirror of all the conflicts assailing humankind. Michael Penn, in “The Journey Out of the Racial Divide,” tells the story of the conquest of prejudice in himself, first from poignant personal experience and then from a deep reading of history and psychology and the consequent understanding of the origins of racial prejudice and of psychosocial and spiritual factors in the cure of this terrible disease. Dr. Penn’s story offers a striking blend of sincerity, conviction, and thorough research on many aspects of the problem of separation and antipathy. His commingling of the profoundly personal and thoughtful contemplation of the logical consequences of his innermost feelings touch the heart and the mind, as does his recognition of the double responsibility of whites and blacks to arrive at true equality.

Rhea Harmsen’s poem “On Restitution and Absolution,” briefly quoted in “The Journey Out of the Racial Divide”—and printed separately in its entirety in this issue, obviously provides Dr. Penn with inspiration. His account of his personal connection with the poem and the poet lends deep human interest to what he has to say. Let his assessment of the poem suffice for the purposes of Interchange: “In her poem Harmsen depicts a century’s exacerbation of the racial division, lamenting that when our forefathers introduced (slavery) . . . ‘They defined the most great issue that would challenge us today.’ . . . Its cadence and deep tones reverberate in the deep wells of pain and confusion that echo from this land.”

In “Can Poetry Promote Peace?” Peter Murphy reviews two anthologies, one a combination of prose and verse, the other devoted entirely to poetry, and both on essentially the same subject: the attempt, mostly by African-Americans but also by other minorities, to find the bridge between two castes that have been artificially defined in such a way as to conceal their essential oneness, their common humanity. But the concealment is slipping, as these poems show for the most part, except for the occasional expression of bitterness against what is perceived as the oppressing “race.” The quotations are generous and representative and are highly revealing of many states of mind of which all our readers might not be aware.

Finally, Duane Herrmann has painted the background of and provided commentary on a treasure trove that he calls “Letters from a Nineteenth-Century Kansas Bahá’í.” From it we receive a breath of fresh air from the dawn of the Bahá’í Faith in America, a time when the Bahá’ís knew very little about the Bahá’í [Page 5] teachings, read the Bible fervently with the knowledge that its prophecies had been fulfilled, and clung to the three or four Bahá’í “communes” they had been taught, confidant that the prayers represented a new divine revelation. Here we have letters from a small town in the Great Plains, a really unlikely place, if you depend on facile stereotypes, for this religion from the exotic Middle East to take root. The depth of the faith of these people, considered against the background of the paucity of sources at their disposition, is remarkable and inspiring. In addition to the commentary, these letters are reproduced in their original form, preserving all the spellings of the Swiss native who was their author.

* * *

Please accept our apologies. In our Fall 1996 issue we printed the U.S. House and Senate debate and their concurrent resolution calling for the emancipation of the Iranian Bahá’í community. However, we neglected to report that the Resolution passed the House on 27 March by a vote of 408 to 0 and the Senate on 16 June 1996 by unanimous consent. Many thanks to an observant reader who called the omission to our attention.

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The Journey Out of the Racial Divide

BY MICHAEL L. PENN

Copyright © 1997 by Michael L. Penn. The author would like to thank the editors of World Order, whose invaluable editorial assistance has made the completion of this essay possible.

Introduction

I AM an African-American professor at a small, well-established liberal arts college. Most of my students are white, upper-middle class, and very hardworking. In general, I love my students and respect them very much. One day, however, I learned that I harbored a great deal of prejudice against a certain type of student. These students are wealthy, white males who wear their caps backwards and who approach life with a certain insouciance. I became acutely aware of this prejudice when one of these students entered my office to chat.

During the first several minutes with this student, I stubbornly resisted having a real relationship with him. Because of his dress and manner, I had decided that before me was a pampered, probably arrogant, party-going young man who had little interest in or concern for anyone but himself. Resentment welled up in me as I thought of the struggles with poverty that I had had to endure as a poor black boy growing up on welfare. I thought of the days when I waited in long lines, gripped with shame, to receive government cheese so that my seven siblings and I could eat; I thought of my struggling mother, who, having been an overweight “welfare mother,” was the secret target of jokes. All of these thoughts mingled with thoughts of the ease, comfort, and privilege that this young man probably enjoyed. I felt myself disliking him intensely.

When I became fully aware of my feelings toward him, I decided, at that moment, that here was my opportunity to practice what I had been struggling to do, with more or less success, for many years. My attitude toward the young man began to change as I consciously struggled to relate to him “as if” he were none of the things I had projected onto him. When I opened my heart and began to listen to his concerns, his dreams, his fears and aspirations, I saw myself in him. The distance between us began to close, and race and class and all those things that divided us began to fade. Quite frankly, in that brief period of time, I grew to care about him, and we had a stimulating, heart-to-heart talk. That moment of personal transformation has inspired these reflections on race in America as we stand on the threshold of the twenty-first century, poised, if we choose, to make the next step in the journey out of the racial divide.

The Journey In

THE FIRST step in the journey out of racism is to look back in history to locate and understand its origins, a legacy shared not only by my student and me but by all humanity. In 1924 an anatomist at the University of Witwaterstrand received some rocks containing fossils from one of his students who had been digging in a limestone quarry at Taung, two-hundred miles from Johannesburg, South Africa. After a careful examination of the rocks, Professor Raymond Dart concluded that they contained three-million-year-old skull fragments, which he later named Australopithecus Africanus. Professor Dart’s discovery was important for two reasons. It [Page 8] was the first in a chain of discoveries that would establish East Africa as the probable birthplace of all humankind. And it established the monogenesis, or common biological roots, of all people. From East Africa human beings began to spread throughout the planet.

The migration of early humans to different parts of the world led to the physical, genetic, and cultural differences commonly referred to now as racial or ethnic groups. Biologists tell us that without the diversification of the gene pool human beings would have gradually become extinct. Biological diversity renders human groups more robust by increasing their resistance to various types of genetic defects and environmentally induced diseases. The diversification of humankind can thus be understood as nature’s way of ensuring humanity’s survival.

In the fifteenth century, after many millennia of evolution and development in relative isolation, the peoples of the world began to come back together again. Yet, despite advancements in shipbuilding, mapmaking, and navigation that enabled increasing numbers of the world’s peoples to have on-going contact with one another, the first several centuries of contact among diverse peoples have been marred by economic exploitation, cultural hegemony, enslavement, and brutality.

The fifteenth century also saw the emergence of racism—a new kind of prejudice— that was to inflict a deep, psychosocial wound on the human community. Racism may be distinguished from ethnocentrism in that it seeks to justify the superiority of a particular ethnic, cultural, or religious group based on permanent and unalterable biological, psychological, or spiritual factors. By contrast, ethnocentrism, a form of prejudice practiced by the ancient Hebrews, Christians, and Greeks, allowed for ways of overcoming the alleged inferiority by conversion to the superior group or by assimilation into the dominant culture’s language, traditions, and values. For example, the Greeks considered anyone who did not speak and write the Greek language a “barbarian.” However, as one came to master Greek culture, one was eventually “civilized” and accepted as an equal.

In contrast to ethnocentrism, racism emerged in Spain to deal with the large numbers of Jews who had been forcibly converted to Catholicism and who were rapidly becoming leaders of the Church. Because the Jewish converts had had a long, distinguished history of religious scholarship, they were well prepared to advance rapidly within the Church hierarchy. Since the absence of knowledge could not be used to discriminate between New Christians, or conversos, and Old Christians, it was decided that they would be distinguished on biological grounds. Anyone who had had a Jewish ancestor in the previous five generations was considered a New Christian and was forbidden to attend college, join most religious orders, or hold government jobs. To prove that one did not belong to the Jewish, “inferior group,” one had to produce a “certificate of purity of blood.” The Inquisition was established in both Spain and Portugal to ensure that those of Jewish ancestry were kept out of mainstream society, irrespective of their knowledge, beliefs, or church membership.

As noted by Richard Popkin, a professor of philosophy and history, the new form of discrimination differed from ethnocentrism in that it allowed no means for leaving the group discriminated against. While some Jews escaped discrimination by changing their identities, going into hiding, or fleeing to different parts of the world, they had no opportunity to prosper while living in Spain or Portugal as converts or as Jews. Since biological racism was contrary to the Christian [Page 9] doctrine of converting everyone to the “brotherhood of Christ,” theories were needed to support and justify the new form of permanent inferiority. Justifications were founded on the idea that Jews possessed characteristics that biologically and spiritually could never be completely changed; these characteristics, it was argued, would lead to behaviors that would jeopardize the development and wellbeing of the community. On this premise Jews were rendered permanent second-class citizens.

When the Spaniards and Portuguese sailed to America, they brought their racial doctrines with them. “Certificates of whiteness” were introduced and served as equivalents to the certificates of purity of blood. As Popkin has noted in his essay “The Philosophical Basis of Modern Racism,” the basis for racism against the Jews was easily established within a Christian paradigm since the Jews were widely viewed as the killers of Christ and eternal enemies of Christianity. When Columbus took biological racism to the New World, however, no such justification for prejudice against the Native Americans existed. European explorers were thus faced with the need to establish the identity of the native inhabitants in a way that would justify their murder, economic exploitation, and enslavement.

One theory advanced to justify the subhuman status of Native Americans was that they did not derive their origins from the Biblical world of Adam and Eve. Rather, they had a separate and independent origin. They were not Adamites, it was argued, but pre-Adamites. As such, they were not fully human in any Biblical sense. In this manner the polygenesis theory of human evolution was born. It held that human groups cannot trace their origins to a single source but, rather, derive from separate evolutionary trees. At the cutting edge of evolution were European Christians. Everyone else fell somewhere below.

In support of the view that Native Americans were subhuman, it was argued that they were incapable of abstract ideas, were unable to govern their own communities, were incapable of becoming true Christians, and, because they practiced sodomy and offered human sacrifices, were not able to be properly moral. The Spaniards and Portuguese would thus have to bring Indian society under their supervision and governance.

Although some accepted the pre-Adamite, not-fully-human status of Indians, others maintained that Indian inferiority derived, not from a separate origin but from degeneration. Similar explanations for the assumed inferiority of Africans were also advanced. For example, the curse of Ham, a “divine act,” was frequently invoked to explain African inferiority. Commenting on this fact, psychiatrists Alexander Thomas and Samuel Sillen wrote that,

As proof of the black’s predetermined deficiency, it was once considered sufficient to invoke Scriptural authority. According to Genesis, Noah was so enraged at his son Ham for beholding him naked that he thundered a curse dooming all the descendants of Ham to be the servants of servants. This passage was interpreted with the customary latitude by plantation owners who identified their slaves with the doomed tribe of Ham, thus providing unassailable Biblical support for the thesis that blacks are inherently subordinate creatures.

Thus the philosophical basis for modern racism was articulated by those who rejected the Biblical account of a single origin for all [Page 10] humankind and replaced it with either a polygenetic theory or a theory of degeneration. The associated claim was that non-Adamites, or those who had been cursed, were characterized by a different nature. Non-white, non-Christians were thereby relegated to permanent inferiority. This was a radically different way to think about human identity in that earlier philosophers did not tend to base their assessments of human nature on skin color, facial features, hair texture, or any other superficial attribute. Rather, “man” had been defined and evaluated in terms of spiritual attributes—such as thought, will, values, and aspirations.

With the spread of the scientific method during the Enlightenment, biological racism received increasing support from scholars, philosophers, and statesmen all over the Western world. By the eighteenth century, according to Popkin,

there was a vast amount of literature on why blacks are black, why people speak primitive and inferior languages, and such matters. The application of the experimental method of reasoning to these problems brought forth two kinds of results, one a highly elaborated degeneracy theory, and the other a polygenetic explanation that claimed that differences between whites and nonwhites were fixed and permanent. Part of the battle between these basic accounts involved the question of whether there is a basic unity of mankind or a basic diversity.

For most of the last several centuries the focus has been on the diversity of human nature rather than its basic unity. With rare exceptions for more than three centuries philosophers, scientists, and politicians affirmed the superiority of whites and the inferiority of all others. In his essay “Of National Characters,” written in 1882, the influential British philosopher David Hume, wrote:

I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufacturers among them, no arts, no sciences. On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the whites, such as the ancient Germans, the present Tartars, have still something eminent about them, in their valour, form of government, or some other particular. Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction betwixt these breeds of men.

In 1840 an eminent physician and professor of anatomy at the Pennsylvania Medical College, Dr. Samuel C. Morton, measured the cranial capacity of skulls by filling them with pepper seeds. Based on his craniometric research, he concluded that the brains of various races became smaller and smaller as one “descended” from the Caucasian to the Ethiopian. These differences in brain size were said to account for “those primeval attributes of mind, which, for wise purposes, have given our race a decided and unquestionable superiority over all the nations of the earth.”

Cranial research continued in the early part of the twentieth century. In an article published in the American Journal of Anatomy in 1906 R. B. Bean, a researcher and anatomy professor, noted that the Negro brain was [Page 11] smaller, had fewer nerve cells and fibers, and was thus less efficient than that of the white man. “We are forced to conclude,” he affirmed, “that it is useless to elevate the Negro by education or otherwise, except in the direction of his natural endowments.” Similar arguments have been advanced by contemporary thinkers such as Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, authors of the widely read book The Bell Curve, published in 1994. For the people of Africa and for the indigenous peoples of North America, such thinking has contributed to an enslavement and genocide so prolonged and so brutal that they will stain the annals of history forever.

Yet in spite of the brutality of slavery, and in spite of the near annihilation of the people who first called America their home, the mass migration of the peoples of the world to the North American continent marked a new stage in the life and development of humankind. Before the fifteenth century the peoples of the world, largely in response to the influence of great spiritual luminaries—such as Abraham, Moses, Buddha, Zoroaster, and Jesus—had successfully organized themselves into families or clans, then into tribes and city-states, and, finally, under the influence of Muḥammad—into nations. In each of these levels of social organization, the scope of community, or what anthropologists call the “fictive kinship,” was successively expanded to include a wider range of the human community.

Now that nation building is nearly complete, it would appear that the next stage in the evolution of life on the planet is the establishment of a single global community that is diverse, yet organically unified, in all the essential aspects of its life. The United States, a nation born out of the many nations of the world, represents a major step toward this end.

Although all the forces of history have been drawing us back together, we have resisted the pull toward oneness for several reasons. First, because America’s national psyche was developed on the foundation of biological racism, this ideology permeates and clouds the nation’s vision. Second, many who confuse unity with uniformity fear the loss of cultural pluralism. Third, it is difficult to forgive the historical and on-going injustices perpetrated by cultural or racial groups against one another. Fourth, many contemporary leaders derive their status from maintaining a spirit of race and class-based contention and divisiveness. Fifth, long-term, institutionalized injustices continue to create economic disparities that keep races, cultures, and nations in a constant state of conflict. And, last, much of humanity lacks the spiritual vision, moral discipline, or social maturity necessary to contribute to the creation of harmonious relationships. This combination of factors has led to a weakening of faith in humanity and a consequent paralysis of the collective will. It presents problems in communication that can seem almost insurmountable, even to people of goodwill such as my student and I, who want to transcend them in our daily interactions.

Some Perspectives on the Way Out IN spite of the fact that in America the practical means for the realization of a prototype for the unity of all humankind is already firmly established, few racial and cultural groups occupying the planet are more deeply divided than are America’s blacks and whites. Our journey out of the racial divide cannot be realized without a greater maturity on the part of both races—a maturity founded on a deep and heartfelt recognition of our interdependence.

In an illuminating series of studies in social psychology conducted in June 1954, Muzafer [Page 12] Sherif and his colleagues found that crises play a vital role not only in orienting people’s awareness to their interdependence but also in bringing antagonistic groups of people together. Sherif and his research team discovered this when they took two groups of eleven-year-old boys to a summer camp called Robber’s Cave in the San Bois mountains near Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The Robber’s Cave State Park provided a two-hundred acre site with fishing, swimming, canoeing, hiking, and other camp games and sports for the unsuspecting participants in Sherif’s three-week experiment.

All those who went to Robber’s Cave that summer were white, middle-class males with no record of psychological, school, or behavioral problems. They became involved in the experiment when their parents secretly agreed to let them participate in a field study of intergroup conflict. None of the boys knew that the camp counselors and directors were all social psychologists. In addition, because Sherif had sent each group to camp on a separate bus, neither group was aware of the other’s presence for one week.

During the first week at Robber’s Cave, each group gave itself a name. One group called itself the “Eagles”; the other, the “Rattlers.” The Eagles and the Rattlers took part in separate activities designed to promote group cohesion. Each group developed its own norms and leaders, and each designed its own flag. After the Eagles and Rattlers had established close bonds among themselves, conditions were arranged so that they would “discover” one another.

When the Eagles first saw the Rattlers using what they regarded as “their” ball field and “their” hiking trail, it sparked demands for a competition. As had been planned, the staff arranged a four-day tournament including basketball, tug-of-war, a treasure hunt, and other events. The experimenters promised the winners a trophy, badges, and multibladed pocketknives. Both groups worked hard in practice, cheered on their teammates, and booed and insulted the competition. Hostilities escalated as the tournament progressed, culminating in a flag burning when the Eagles lost the tug-of-war.

The Eagles ultimately won the tournament and collected the trophy and pocketknives. But while they were celebrating their victory, the Rattlers raided their cabins and stole their prizes. The rivalry quickly escalated into a full-blown war. Name calling, fist fights, cabin raids, and food wars occurred around the clock. The experiment had successfully transformed twenty-two normal boys into two gangs of violent troublemakers full of hostilities, prejudices, and resentments.

Sherif and his colleagues had set up this experiment to understand how intergroup conflict and hostilities develop and how they can be resolved. Conflict, Sherif found, arises out of a perceived incompatibility of goals: “what one party desires, the other party sees as harmful to its interests.” The primary source of conflict is competition. In the conflict between the Eagles and the Rattlers, each group sought to defend its swimming and playing territory; each stole the other’s most valued possessions; and each engaged in athletic competition with the knowledge that only the winners would receive new pocketknives. The resulting escalation in hostilities thus arose out of competition for limited material resources.

The Robber’s Cave experiment shows how easy it is for group competition to escalate [Page 13] into hostility, prejudices, and violence. In situations of conflict, groups demand loyalty, solidarity, and adherence to group norms. Group members “close ranks” and present a united front. Interaction or empathy with the out-group is condemned, thereby widening the gap between the groups and making further conflict nearly inevitable. Group leaders take advantage of the unifying effect of conflict to consolidate and strengthen their personal power. This is what Sherif and his colleagues found in the Robber’s Cave experiment. Historical evidence suggests that the same conditions tend to develop among competing groups in the wider society.

Having accomplished their first goal, Sherif set out to discover how the two antagonistic groups might be brought together. Their first approach to establishing intergroup harmony was based on the assumption that pleasant contacts between members of conflicting groups would reduce friction. Thus the Eagles and the Rattlers were brought together for social events: going to movies, eating in the same dining room, intergroup parties, and so on. Far from reducing conflict, each time they were brought together the conflicts between them only multiplied. The Eagles and Rattlers used the situations as additional opportunities to berate and attack one another. In the dining hall line they shoved each other aside; they threw food and paper at each others’ tables; an Eagle touched by a Rattler was warned by his fellow Eagles to brush “the dirt” from his clothes. Thus under pleasant conditions the rift between the two groups grew wider and deeper.

Then Sherif and his research team hit upon an interesting idea. They returned to the assumption that just as competition creates conflict and friction, working in a common endeavor should promote harmony. They decided to create problems that would adversely affect both groups and that could not be solved unless the Eagles and Rattlers worked together. To test this hypothesis, Sherif created a series of urgent, natural challenges requiring cooperative action from both groups of boys.

The first problem they created was a breakdown in the water supply. Water was delivered to Robber’s Cave through pipes connected to a tank about a mile away. The experimenters arranged to interrupt it and called the rival groups together to inform them of the crisis. Both groups immediately volunteered to search for the water-line trouble and worked together harmoniously until the camp’s water supply had been fully restored.

Another problem emerged when the boys requested a movie. When they were told that the camp could not afford to rent one, the two groups got together, figured out how much each group would need to contribute, chose the film by a vote, and then enjoyed watching it together.

On another day the two groups went on a hike to a lake some distance from the camp. A large truck, they were told, had been sent for the food. But at just the time when everyone was getting quite hungry, they were informed that the truck, which was still some distance from where they were, and which the experimenters themselves had disabled, would not start. After a brief consultation, the boys decided to get a rope and pull together in an effort to start the truck. Interestingly, the same rope they had used in their acrimonious tug-of-war was used in the cooperative effort to get the truck started.

The cooperative efforts between the Eagles and the Rattlers did not immediately dispel all hostility. Following the resolution of the first few crises, the Eagles and Rattlers immediately returned to bickering and name calling. But gradually, as they faced and overcame an increasing number of wide-ranging problems, the cooperative acts began to reduce friction and conflict. During the latter part of the three-week experiment the antagonism between the Eagles and the Rattlers gave way to a sense of collective pride and [Page 14] solidarity. Out of the two contending groups they were becoming one. Sherif noted that gradually the members of the two groups began to feel more friendly toward each other:

The boys stopped shoving in the meal line. They no longer called each other names, and sat together at the table. New friendships developed between individuals in the two groups. In the end the groups were actively seeking opportunities to mingle, to entertain and “treat” each other. They decided to hold a joint campfire. They took turns presenting skits and songs. Members of both groups requested that they go home together on the same bus, rather than on the separate buses in which they had come. On the way the bus stopped for refreshments. One group still had five dollars which they had won as a prize in a contest. They decided to spend this sum on refreshments. On their own initiative they invited their former rivals to be their guests for malted milks.

As we contemplate the way out of the racial divide, much can be learned from the Robber’s Cave study. Crises create what Sherif and his colleagues call “superordinate tasks”— problems so difficult or complex that no group working alone can possibly solve them. Thus superordinate tasks force into cooperation groups who would otherwise be unwilling to work with, or even associate with, one another. Examples of superordinate tasks that have forced the whole planet into consultation include threats to the ecosystem such as global warming and the proliferation of nuclear and nonnuclear wastes, threats to the life and health of millions of the earth’s peoples due to the spread of AIDS, global economic crises occasioned by the transition from a military-based economic system to one that is more suitable to the maintenance of peace, and mass migration of refugees from war-torn, economically devastated, or politically oppressive regions of the globe.

Sherif’s study shows that when antagonistic groups are forced to work together for mutually important goals, their attitudes about one another also tend to change. Might not the deepening crises in the social, economic, and political fabric of our nation impel us to consider transracial cooperative ventures heretofore untried? Might not our collective striving lead us further out of the racial divide?

Martin Luther King, Jr., once said that “All men are interdependent. . . . When we rise in the morning, we go into the bathroom where we reach for a sponge provided for us by a Pacific Islander. We reach for soap that is created for us by a European. Then at the table we drink coffee which is provided for us by a South American, or tea by a Chinese, or cocoa by a West African. Before we leave for our jobs we are already beholden to more than half of the world.” That black and white Americans are interdependent, that our futures are intimately intertwined, that there is little chance of this nation’s maintaining its standing in the world community with so many of its black citizens living in poverty or in jail is becoming increasingly obvious. If for none other than selfish reasons, blacks and whites are compelled by circumstances to attend to one another’s needs. What is critical for us is that our collective efforts be animated by a new spirit. Those ventures should be microcosmic as well as macrocosmic. They begin with responses to personal situations such as the one facing my student and me.

Recognizing the Spirit
Animating Oneness

OF THE many scientific truths discovered in the twentieth century, none is more profound [Page 15] in its implications than is the knowledge of interdependence. From the smallest particles of matter to the grandest stars and planets, the universe is a tightly woven fabric of interconnected energies, entities, and processes. In the biological world the unity of diverse parts is the cause and sign of life, while disunity is the cause and sign of death. If we want to know if an organism is dying, we examine whether its diverse component parts are able to function together in some coordinated fashion. In animals we might monitor vital signs—respiration, heart rate, liver and kidney functioning, digestion, and so on. These diverse systems cannot simply act independently. They must function in such a manner that the entire system benefits. In the absence of constant feedback concerning the health and needs of the whole, the functioning of each component part becomes increasingly impaired. As a result, the whole organism begins to die. In addition, a living system survives—not because every component part has the same characteristics—but because every part is different. This metaphor may also be applied to the social world.

For example, on a societal level the nations of the world, which are themselves made up of ethnic, racial, religious, and cultural groups, constitute the diverse parts that must work together in some harmonious fashion if humanity is to prosper fully and evolve. Within a society member groups that interact only by competition and conflict will be unable to cultivate or use society’s limited resources in the most effective way. The conflicts that divide blacks from whites, women from men, Muslims from Jews, conservatives from liberals, the middle-class and wealthy from the poor, and so on all pose serious threats to the future viability of the country and world. Changes now taking place in America’s demographic makeup will only exacerbate these conflicts if a deeper understanding of the value and uses of diversity as components of oneness leading to human happiness and prosperity are not cultivated.

In the twenty-first century, for example, racial and ethnic groups in the United States will grow to outnumber whites. The Hispanic population will increase by about 21 percent, Asians by 22 percent, blacks by 12 percent, and whites by less than 3 percent. Within twenty-five years the number of Americans who are Hispanic or nonwhite will have doubled to nearly 115 million, while the white population will have barely increased at all. In about sixty years the typical American will no longer trace his or her ancestry back to Europe but to Asia, Africa, South or Central America, the Middle or Far East, or the Pacific Islands. As Time writer William A. Henry III observed, “The former majority will learn, as a normal part of everyday life, the meaning of the Latin slogan—E PLURIBUS UNUM, one formed from many.”

For many of the nation’s students the “browning of America” is already a visible reality. Forty percent of New York’s elementary and secondary school children are ethnic minorities. In California, Hispanics, Asians, and African-Americans outnumber white students. Large numbers of Vietnamese call San Jose their home, and thousands of Hmong refugees live in St. Paul, Minnesota. Every state, city, and town in America has begun to feel the realization of the vision expressed by Emma Lazarus in her welcoming poem “The New Colossus”:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand [Page 16]

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips, “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Every year about 100 million people will leave their native homes in search of greater economic, political, or religious freedom. The destination of choice for the majority continues to be America. If we are to draw from the enormous human capital that new immigrants bring, we will have to do more to make diversity work. But what method should we use?

While science has illuminated the laws and principles that facilitate the unific functioning of diverse systems in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms, we are only recently beginning to understand the unific forces that harmonize the diverse needs and interests of human beings. The most potent of these forces is love. Love is not a luxury reserved for starry-eyed youth. It is the bond that unites families, communities, and nations.

True love—as distinguished from mere infatuation—is reflected in a myriad of principles and values that make family and community life possible. Among these principles are justice, fidelity, compassion, trustworthiness, courtesy, forbearance, self-sacrifice, and a willingness to pursue and defend that which is right and true. Whenever these values are distorted or undeveloped, the spirit of love begins to dissipate. The result is chaos, confusion, violence, and a gradual collapse of the social order. If ethnic and race relations in America are in a critical condition, the situation can be improved only through a wider, more sincere application of these love-related principles.

Of all love-related values, justice is the most important, for it regulates the expression of individual self-interests by requiring that the rights and needs of others be taken into consideration when determining a course of action. In this way justice embodies the recognition of interdependence and makes community life possible. In the absence of justice, disunity, conflict, and resentments are catalyzed, and the social world becomes dangerous and unpredictable.

In its recent statement entitled The Prosperity of Humankind, the Bahá’í International Community’s Office of Public Information explains that there are many levels on which to understand justice. On an individual level justice is that uniquely human power that enables us to distinguish truth from falsehood, right from wrong. It is an essential aspect of conscience and serves as a guide to human action. A commitment to justice requires fair-mindedness and equity in one’s treatment of others.

On a group or community level the sustaining pillars of justice are reward and punishment. The fear of punishment and the hope of reward are powerful stabilizing elements in a community: “Justice hath a mighty force at its command,” wrote Bahá’u’lláh, the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, “It is none other than reward and punishment for the deeds of men. By the power of this force the tabernacle of order is established throughout the world. . . .” When justly applied, these twin [Page 17] forces provide a potent means for individual and collective safety and development. In the absence of justice, rewards and punishments become the instruments of domination, exploitation, and abuse. In such a context some prosper at the expense of others; some have their needs and interests gratified while the efforts and needs of others go unrecognized. Once we fully accept the concept of the oneness of humankind, whenever we witness great wealth amidst galling poverty, we can be sure that injustice has played a major role.

Just how important reward and punishment, hope and fear, are to the well-being of individuals and society can be seen in the research of two social scientists who have developed the concept of possible selves. Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius have shown that young people’s willingness to delay immediate gratification and to work hard for important future goals is dependent upon assessments they make about their future possible selves. Everyone, according to the researchers, has a set of “feared selves” and “hoped for selves.” A feared possible self might include the image of “me in prison,” while a hoped-for self might include the image of “me as a doctor.” What is important about their work is that it has shown that people must have both hopes and fears if they are to achieve important goals. Young people who have feared selves (“me in prison”) without corresponding hoped-for selves (“me as a doctor”) will not be deterred from crime by threats of imprisonment. Fear influences an individual’s behavior only if it threatens the loss of a valued possible self. Thus, if an individual can see no real options for becoming what he or she dreams of becoming, you cannot prevent such an individual from committing crimes by increasing the severity of threats. This is one reason why our present approach to crime in the inner cities is so ineffective.

In an unjust situation people’s hoped-for selves cannot be realized. As a result, their feared selves no longer serve as deterrents. They grow to disregard the justice-related principles that govern community life because they do not expect to derive the benefits associated with respecting the rights of others. Correspondingly, the threatened loss of freedom, in the absence of viable options for exercising freedom, is meaningless. The consequence is lawlessness and a collapse of civil society. Within many inner-city communities the loss of hope has resulted in an eclipse of fear; and when hope and fear are arrested, these twin forces are incapable of either constraining destructive impulses or unleashing human potential.

Michael Tonry, author of Malign Neglect: Race, Crime and Punishment in America, reports that the number of African-Americans in prison since 1980 has tripled; that between 1979 and 1992 the percentage of blacks among those admitted to state and federal prisons grew from 39 to 54 percent; that incarceration rates for blacks in 1991 were nearly seven times higher than those for whites; and that in 1991, in the nation’s capital, 42 percent of black males aged 18 to 35 were in jail, on parole, or awaiting trial. The figure for Baltimore was 56 percent. To some these high rates of incarceration suggest the presence of bad genes or irremediable character flaws; to others they suggest a need to look more carefully at the structure of present-day society.

Because a commitment to justice as one expression of love is the only means whereby unity of thought and action can be achieved, a concern for justice is indispensable to the progress of all societies. In a statement on the role of justice in social and economic development, the Bahá’í International Community [Page 18] made the following observation:

justice is the practical expression of awareness that, in the achievement of human progress, the interests of the individual and those of society are inextricably linked. To the extent that justice becomes a guiding concern of human interaction, a consultative climate is encouraged that permits options to be examined dispassionately and appropriate courses of action selected. In such a climate the perennial tendencies toward manipulation and partisanship are far less likely to deflect the decision-making process.

. . . Concern for justice protects the task of defining progress from the temptation to sacrifice the well-being of the generality of humankind—and even of the planet itself—to the advantages which technological breakthroughs can make available to privileged minorities. In design and planning, it ensures that limited resources are not diverted to the pursuit of projects extraneous to a community’s essential social or economic priorities. Above all, only development programs that are perceived as meeting their needs and as being just and equitable can hope to engage the commitment of the masses of humanity, upon whom implementation depends. The relevant human qualities of honesty, a willingness to work, and a spirit of cooperation are successfully harnessed to the accomplishment of enormously demanding collective goals when every member of society—indeed every component group within society—can trust that they are protected by standards and assured of benefits that apply equally to all.

When we understand that the acknowledgment of interdependence is the supreme moral need of the age and that it is the practical expression of justice, arising from love for humanity, we have added another guidepost on the path toward a unified, racially harmonious society.

From Childhood and
Adolescence to Maturity

OF ALL of the phases of human development, none—with the exception of the first few months of life—is characterized by as much tumult, confusion, and transformation as is adolescence. For those familiar with the processes of growth, the upheavals that attend the adolescent phase of development are understood as necessary precursors to the young person’s long-awaited coming of age. During the past century and a half humanity has experienced rapid, revolutionary change in nearly every aspect of life. The globality and diversity of change renders a developmental metaphor more than apt. In the words of writers Lori McClaughlin Noguchi, Paul Lample, and Holly Hanson, writers on moral leadership and moral education:

Whether in government or law, in science or industry, or in the relationships between individuals and nations, reevaluation and innovation have become the rule. New knowledge and new understandings are uprooting age-old practices everywhere. Society, in all its aspects, economic, political and cultural, is undergoing a process of fundamental transformation.

Accelerated change in so many areas of human life has posed unprecedented challenges to previously accepted moral codes and belief systems. The deepening crisis in which mankind finds itself starkly demonstrates the inability of these systems to satisfy the demands of an age of transformation.

If the challenges of the present hour are to be met, the attitudes, thoughts, and habits [Page 19] of childhood will no longer suffice. Collectively, we are called upon to abandon the ways of youth and to develop those qualities of mind, heart, and behavior that will enable us to respond befittingly to the pressing requirements of a new age. McClaughlin, Lample, and Hanson point out that it is within the context of humanity’s passage to maturity, as well as for the development of a civilization that embodies the principle of unity in diversity, that a new, all embracing process of institutional and individual transformation must take place.

In all spheres of existence, order, within the context of change, is governed by rules. The laws of thermodynamics, the laws of motion, the law of the conservation of mass and energy, and so on all regulate processes of change in nature. Likewise, the orderly transformation of individuals and societies must be governed by laws and principles. The principles of transformation that are applicable to this stage in humanity’s evolution must facilitate the establishment of harmony between the blacks and whites of America:

Let the white make a supreme effort in their resolve to contribute their share to the solution of this problem, to abandon once for all their usually inherent and at times subconscious sense of superiority, to correct their tendency towards revealing a patronizing attitude towards the members of the other race, to persuade them through their intimate, spontaneous and informal association with them of the genuineness of their friendship and the sincerity of their intentions, and to master their impatience of any lack of responsiveness on the part of a people who have received, for so long a period, such grievous and slow-healing wounds. Let the . . . [blacks], through a corresponding effort on their part, show by every means in their power the warmth of their response, their readiness to forget the past, and their ability to wipe out every trace of suspicion that may still linger in their hearts and minds. Let neither think that the solution of so vast a problem is a matter that exclusively concerns the other. Let neither think that such a problem can either easily or immediately be resolved. . . . Let neither think that anything short of genuine love, extreme patience, true humility, consummate tact, sound initiative, mature wisdom, and deliberate, persistent, and prayerful effort, can succeed in blotting out the stain which this patent evil has left on the fair name of their common country.

One of my dearly loved friends, Rhea Harmsen, is a biracial poet who has captured America’s racial quandary in a powerful reply to James Russell Lowell’s epic poem, “The Present Crisis.” While “The Present Crisis” was written more than a century ago, Harmsen’s poem—“On Restitution and Absolution” —was written in 1994. She explains that after reading Lowell’s poem she found herself almost communing with the writer who had devoted much of his poetry in the 1840s to the abolitionist cause. She was struck by the poet’s words that “In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim” and by his characterization of slavery as a corpse crawling around unburied, calling for its own burial and final rest.

In her poem Harmsen depicts a century’s exacerbation of the racial division, lamenting that when our forefathers introduced that evil (slavery)

. . . where our trusting feet played,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

They enslaved their children’s children in

a trackless round of hate. [Page 20]

They defined the most great issue that

would challenge us today.

She cries out, “‘Who will give us restitution?’ ‘Who will grant us absolution?’” and “‘Do we even have volition to break with our tradition?’” Then she intimates that it is within our power to win these elusive prizes. Explaining that American blacks and whites are “As two saplings grown entwined, who cannot be divided,” she asserts that “our destinies can’t be parted” and that “one brother’s restitution is the other’s absolution.” She invokes milestones in the nation’s “soul-struggles” for racial unity and reminds us that the visions and prophesies of unity that abound in Biblical scripture bear directly on the current American race dilemma.

Recently I wrote to Rhea about her poem: “It is 6:21 A.M. and several months since we last spoke about “Restitution.” A day has rarely passed when I did not think of it; ”Restitution” haunts me. Its cadence and deep tones reverberate in the deep wells of pain and confusion that echo from this land. One gets the image of a people, both black and white, wandering in tears in a vast desert, filled with regret that slavery and its aftermath has been visited upon us. The whites are confused by the guilt that they have been asked to shoulder. ‘It wasn’t me,’ they seem to cry. The blacks groan with resentment and bitter agony that no heartfelt apology is offered. And so, side by side, yet so far apart, we wander together in this desert, secretly hoping that the other will reach out and embrace, but wondering how much all of it will cost.”

The cost of our collective healing will be inner and outer transformation. Both black and white Americans, as Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, points out, have prejudices to overcome: “one, the prejudice which is built up in the minds of a people who have conquered and imposed their will, and the other the reactionary prejudice of those who have been . . . sorely put upon.”

For many years social scientists believed that the prejudices dividing black and white Americans would spontaneously disappear through a process they called “cohort replacement” —a theory predicated on the notion that each successive generation, because of increasing interracial contact, would quite naturally be less prejudiced than the preceding one. While on the face of it, such a theory sounds reasonable, the last several decades have taught us that mere contact between antagonistic groups is not sufficient to change deeply entrenched prejudices. What we are learning now is that the prejudice that divides white and black Americans is so deep and so institutionalized that it will take a mighty effort and a great vision on the part of both races to overcome it. Furthermore, as we learned from the Robber’s Cave study, it will likely require that we cooperate in applying solutions to the superordinate problems that now threaten our happiness and well being.

Envisioning the Destiny of America

THE ideals of freedom and liberty, of the equality and dignity of all peoples, expressed in the American Constitution; the humanitarian aspiration embodied in the inspired, welcoming poem etched on the base of the Statue of Liberty; America’s beautiful and spacious skies, her rich and diverse landscape; and her multicolored, multitalented peoples— all bear witness to the greatness of this country and to the loftiness of the vision that has given it wings. On these wings America has soared to great heights. In the Bahá’í view its future will be more glorious still.

[Page 21] If America is to realize her great destiny, she will do so, not because a few wise and noble leaders—of whatever race or culture— have saved us. Nor can the effort of will required for this, or for any other similar task, be “summoned up merely by appeals for action against the countless ills afflicting society. It must be galvanized by a vision of human prosperity in the fullest sense of the term—an awakening to the possibilities of the spiritual and material well-being now brought within grasp?” As has been suggested, America’s destiny also hinges upon its ability to catalyze and coordinate the untapped capacities that now lie fallow in its largely minority populations who inhabit her neglected cities.

We are not likely to do this if we do not believe in the rich potentialities of all persons, irrespective of race, creed, or national origin. With the publication of books like The Bell Curve and with the reemergence of caustic assaults on the dignity and station of the poor, we add momentum to the long-held assumption that America’s problems arise out of an unwillingness of a few with bad genes to do their part. Such thinking cloaks the nation in cynicism and prevents us from stepping into the next millennium in full stride.

You will recall the young white student who entered my office to chat. When I next saw him, he called out, “Hello Professor Penn. We must get together soon for one of our talks.” His smile bespoke friendship and respect, and I felt myself feeling the same for him. Friendship is hard to come by when we fix our gaze on otherness, notes ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Bahá’u’lláh’s son and appointed successor. But when we welcome all with the eye of oneness, real unity becomes possible. “Regard ye not one another as strangers. . . .” is Bahá’u’lláh’s admonition; “Of one tree are all ye the fruit and of one bough the leaves.” This consciousness of oneness is the knowledge that illumines the way out of the racial divide.

[Page 22]

On Restitution and Absolution
(Meditations on James Russell Lowell’s “The Present Crisis”)

I

From the cauldron that’s America, now in full rolling boil,

Feel the heat of convolution, smell the stench of bubbling oil.

Arms reach out from bloody soil, for relief of human misery.

Mingled voice of white and black call on heaven to take pity

On the people of this nation, ‘cross the heartland and the cities.

Where the sheet-covered figures now march by light of day,

And by night roam the youth gangs sacking unsuspecting prey.

Where retreat into tribalism is our new found insanity,

Self-hate and righteous bigotry reach a level of profanity

And America is drowning in her own inhumanity.

Race relations in America, it’s like entering a maze.

The racism in our fibers is a cancerous malaise.

In some hearts there’s deep despair, while the poor hope no more.

‘Neath the barely restrained violence dwells a lust for retribution.

There dwells an anger deeply rooted in unjust persecution.

While a hoard of TV pundits poke the wound in fascination,

Mesmerized by all its festering, paralyzed by complications,

A new wayward generation can’t transcend its own confusion.

The past beckons ever-present, calling out for resolution,

While the future looms so imminent, with the threat of no solutions.

The momentum of decay is now measured by the hour

As the race-related incidents descend in steady shower.

Each assault deals loss of hope, each new verdict heightens panic.

Feel the fall of a great country, sinking like the great Titanic.

Rearing now for its third gasp, as it drowns in the Atlantic.

One great canvas holds the anguish now reflected in all eyes,

Our faces all turn upward, voices question darkened skies:

“Who will give us restitution?” “Who will grant us absolution?”

“When will come illumination, when an end to tribulation?”

“Do we even have volition to break with our tradition?”

[Page 23]

White sister, black mother, come to table, eat your supper.

White father, black brother! Cool your anger, ease that hunger.

Cast the load and sit you down! Break your bread; pass it round.

Hush your mouth, do some listening! Drink the gall of your own history.

Humbly look into each eye. Bow your head; eat your pie . . .

II

The children gangs today, you see, who live by hatred’s rule

Only mimic what was learned in our forefathers’ school.

When they led that Cyclops, Slavery, where our trusting feet played,

To the offspring of that monster they sentenced us as prey.

They enslaved their children’s children in a trackless round of hate.

They defined the most great issue that would challenge us today

As we struggle to retrieve our wounded children from the fray,

From the claws of Slavery’s offspring, Indifference and Self-hate.

We glance behind to roads long forgotten in dismay,

Where the bare bones of history, show both greatness and disgrace.

It was the white man’s portion to be this land’s oppressor,

Blundering into this great drama oft to plunder and divest her.

And now even when immigrating lately to the scene,

He is burdened as accessory to our forefather’s sin.

Now he totes a weary load in the color of his skin.

And it fell to the black race to be sacrificial lamb.

Then, the victims free of sin on the stage of this land.

But like the children of the Israelites when freed from their bondage

Some went wandering in the desert, some turned to idolatry,

Seduced by every idol, now the tools of their own carnage.

So while white man did battle with the demons in his head

The black man had to wrestle with the dragon in his bed.

While the one lost his faith in succumbing to his greed,

The other reaped grace by overcoming evil deeds,

For even beneath oppression the spirit can wander free.

III

At this pass, this great juncture, when the stars are all aligned

And the fruitage of our actions have all ripened on the vine

From the forces of the universe we must question this convergence.

We must ask the divine purpose in the cyclical resurgence

Of Moses’ children’s bondage; of Pharaoh’s people’s scourges.

[Page 24]

On the shores of this new nation were we destined here to meet?

Some came fleeing intolerance, some came shackled by their feet.

Are we then: to chart a course through God’s primordial maze;

Meant to play out age old themes upon this nation’s stage;

Search the meaning of the cosmos through kaleidoscope of race?

Could it be our Revolution, from which our freedom grew,

Won that privilege of dignity only for the few?

And the truth we found self-evident, but still chose to deny

Entombed in our constitution a poison-laden lie;

An incongruity we’ve struggled ever since to rectify?

For as each century came full circle we came inching towards the truth.

By the strife of good and evil our thirst for freedom grew:

Fighting for emancipation our whole nation agonized;

Marching for desegregation we were further purified;

It but remains to ask the present hour: “Where does our crisis lie?”

IV

For our country’s schizophrenia there must be a resolution,

Lest the strain of our dis-union prove the final dissolution

Into shards of shattered principle, into stripes of shredded dream.

What began in incongruity must forever be made clean.

In the river-tide of history we may never swim upstream!

To redeem our great nation from the brink of destruction,

Retrieve its mangled soul from the pit of its corruption,

Let us wade in the water trusting ever in His grace.

And thus, coax a resolution from the iron teeth of fate

Where we all gain restitution for humanity’s mistakes.

In America’s march triumphant towards spiritual evolution

Then one brother’s restitution is the other’s absolution.

The one who shows forgiveness heals the wound in his own soul;

His mistrust once relinquished severs slavery’s last hold,

Breathing peace where resentment once took a heavy toll.

The other, who through trial overcomes his own denial,

Or wrenches from his gut an unconscious racist bile,

When relinquishing supremacy his redemption will attain.

In becoming brother’s keeper he’ll wipe from his hand the stain

Of the slaying of poor Abel by his wandering brother Cain.

[Page 25]

Thus, for each man and race to his challenge overcome;

To determine what his station, in darkness or in sun.

To the measure each man caters to his love or to his hate,

Or voices, by his silence, his collusion with race,

Turns the tide of this nation and of our commingled fate.

We’re merged, blood with blood, our destinies can’t be parted,

As two saplings grown entwined, who cannot be divided.

By the sheer sweat of sinew, by the act of conscious will,

We must turn our sights up mountain, scaling back on back until

We plant the flag of oneness on the peak of highest hill.

As we’re made from the same dust, dwell in the same land,

We must become one soul, be the lion and the lamb.

We must eat with the same mouth and walk with the same feet

Until the signs of oneness make the round complete.

And though darkness be upon us, we dare not accept defeat.

For a glorious vision beckons, in prophecies of old,

Of a day when former enemies will willingly take hold

Of the weapons of their hatred, gladly to transform

Them into instruments of healing, to remove that crown of thorns

From the brow of all their brethren, and witness peace be born.

And America’s share in breathing life into this vision

Is to heal the wound within, to cure her own division.

For our ever-present crisis is mirrored in all nations

Where old enemies now rise in burning conflagration.

Yet, dare we raise up the first hate-free generation?

A global race, devoted to advance civilization

And ransom all “those who have trespassed against us?”

For leading by example is our only global power

And with each of our soul-struggles we are hastening the hour

When humanity, as one, yields the planet’s finest flower.

—Rhea Harmsen

Copyright © 1997 by Rhea Harmsen

[Page 26]

[Page 27]

Letters from a Nineteenth-Century
Kansas Bahá’í

BY DUANE L. HERRMANN

Copyright © 1997 by National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States.

ENTERPRISE, Kansas, has “the distinction of having had the second group of Bahá’ís in North America,” the first having been formed in Chicago in 1894. Two letters survive from the person responsible for the Bahá’í teachings coming to Kansas so early: Barbara Ehrsam, a resident of Enterprise and a student of Ibrahim George Kheiralla, who introduced the Bahá’í Faith to North America. She invited Kheiralla to come to Enterprise during the summer of 1897. He and his family stayed seven weeks in her home, where he gave classes in her parlor. He left behind a small group of Bahá’ís. Although the Enterprise Bahá’ís corresponded for a time with a number of Bahá’ís in the United States, Kheiralla remained the only personal contact they had with the larger Bahá’í community. Twice in 1899—On 3 May and 14 November —Ehrsam wrote to Maude Lamson, Kheiralla’s secretary, seeking more contact with Bahá’ís and more information about the Bahá’í Faith. The inability of Bahá’ís in other parts of the country to visit Enterprise and the lack of responses from the few correspondents and most particularly from Kheiralla were not sufficient to sustain Ehrsam’s commitment to the Bahá’í Faith.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Enterprise, Kansas, was one of the few cities in the United States where the Bahá’í teachings had been systematically taught and a group of people had accepted them. Though Enterprise had the second Bahá’í group, it was the smallest locality in the size of its general population and the number of its Bahá’ís, as well as the most remote.

Barbara Ehrsam was one of the founders of the town of Enterprise and, by the turn of the century, its most prominent woman. She had been born Barbara Senn in Switzerland in 1843. Her parents brought the family to America in 1854 and settled in Grasshopper Falls, Kansas. In 1860, shortly before her seventeenth birthday, she married Joseph Hilty, a fellow Swiss immigrant. They produced two children, Leonhard and Josephine, before Joseph went to serve in the Civil War. He survived his brief enlistment only to be killed by a horse after returning home. This left Barbara alone with a small child, an infant, and a 160-acre farm.

Barbara’s brother, Michael Senn, not yet married, joined her to help work the farm. Eventually the two decided to relocate from northeast Kansas to central Kansas where their sister, Elizabeth, and her Swiss immigrant husband, Christian Hoffman, were creating a new settlement on the open prairie. Nine years earlier the Hoffmans had moved west to settle near Louden’s Falls on the Smokey Hill River. On the falls Hoffman, a miller, built a mill that prospered, and plans for founding a town began to crystalize.

In 1869 Barbara rented her Grasshopper [Page 28] Falls farm and with her children, her brother, and four wagons of goods set out for Louden’s Falls. When she arrived, she and Michael, with the help of other settlers, built a two-story frame store and stocked it. In 1873 the town of Enterprise was platted around her store and Hoffman’s mill.

---

BARBARA EHRSAM
the first Bahá’í in Enterprise, Kansas

---

In 1874 Barbara married Jacob Ehrsam, another Swiss immigrant and a machinist who had helped build the mill and who had become Hoffman’s right-hand man. After the mill was finished, he had started his own machine company, which remained in operation until the summer of 1996. Barbara’s and Jacob’s first baby was the first white child born at the site. Together they had five more before Barbara decided eight was the limit. By 1894, at the age of fifty-one, she was worn out in body and spirit. Jacob had built her the fanciest house in town, but it was no comfort in her search for spiritual satisfaction as well as physical health.

Barbara Ehrsam’s search for spiritual knowledge was wide ranging, including Christian Science; Dowieism, a millennial group headquartered in Zion, Illinois; and the Bahá’í Faith. Her investigation of the Bahá’í Faith, which revolved around Kheiralla and his teachings, caused an uproar. The new teachings were maligned as being “fanatical.” “Neo-Platonism,” and a mix of “Arabic mysticism, German rationalism, mesmerism, etc.”

Ehrsam had learned about Kheiralla through her daughter, Josephine Hilty, who was studying music in Chicago. The Abilene Weekly Chronicle, published in the county seat, reported that “Miss Josie Hilty, who knew the ‘Doctor’ in Chicago . . . is said to have embraced the doctrine he teaches.”

Ibrahim Kheiralla was of Syrian background and had converted to the Bahá’í Faith shortly before coming to the United States from Egypt in 1892, hoping to become wealthy. His financial ambitions were soon frustrated, but when he discovered the profitability of being a “doctor” and “healer” (his medical title came from a mail-order school), he turned to the healing professions. Noting the social obsession in the United States with secret and fraternal societies and “orders,” he found that it was not a great step from claims of physical healing to spiritual healing. He used his scant knowledge of the Bahá’í Faith to create a partially secret society, which he unfolded in a series of public talks and twelve private lessons.

Kheiralla’s teaching effort in Enterprise appears to have followed the same pattern he later used in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and New York City. He gave public lectures partly based [Page 29] on his small pamphlet called Za-ti-et Al-lah: The Identity and the Personality of God. Newspaper articles often quoted or reworded some the pamphlet’s contents. Kheiralla’s statement in the pamphlet that “the name of the Order is known only to those who have taken the teaching” is almost identical to the last line of the first newspaper article published in Enterprise: “the name of the order is only revealed to those who have taken all the teachings.” The article went on to summarize aspects of the pamphlet, noting that Kheiralla “teaches the Oneness and Singleness of God; also whence we came, why we are here and where we are going. He gives to his private pupils the key to the sealed books of the Bible which he uses to verify his teachings. He believes the truth is in the Bible but that the Bible is not the truth.”

Kheiralla’s private lessons were a mixture of his own ideas and the very little he knew about the Bahá’í teachings. He devised

a series of graduated lectures, the earliest dealing with such general issues as the immortality of the soul, the nature of the mind, and the need to believe in God. Later lectures dealt increasingly with Biblical prophecy concerning the second advent and the existence of a “Greatest Name” of God by which the believer might enter into a special relationship with the divine. Finally, for those who had taken all the lectures and shown themselves worthy, Kheiralla delivered the “pith” of his message: that God had returned to earth in the person of Bahá’u’lláh [the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith], and that now his Son, Jesus Christ [‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Bahá’u’lláh’s son and appointed successor], was living in Akka. Those who believed were given the Greatest Name and told to write a letter or sign a form letter to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá confessing their belief.

---

BARBARA EHRSAM’S HOUSE
in Enterprise, Kansas, were Ibrahim George
Kheiralla stayed for seven weeks in 1897,
giving lessons on the Bahá’í Faith.

---

Kheiralla’s public lectures and private lessons generated considerable newspaper coverage. “THE BIBLE IS NOT THE TRUTH” proclaimed a front-page story in the Enterprise Journal on 15 July 1897. Additional articles appeared in the Abilene newspapers, and smaller notices continued in the Enterprise paper, which was owned by Christian Hoffman, Ehrsam’s brother-in-law. Some of the articles were reprinted as far away as Topeka, Lawrence, Salina, Leavenworth, and Kansas City. These news articles may be the first extensive press coverage of the activities of the American Bahá’í community. Their content was not accurate according to currently available sources, but Kheiralla insisted on secrecy: “These teachings are private and you are not to mention them to any one, they [Page 30] are not secret, but private, and we trust to your honor. We do not ask you to take any obligation or oath. These teachings are private for many reasons.” Hence those who did not take the classes never really knew what was being taught (a fault on which the press remarked).

In his 1897 visit to Enterprise, Kheiralla did not complete the sequence of classes, as he had in Chicago, for he was in town only seven weeks. To give all of the lessons, which usually took three months, he had to double them up—giving two a week, as the Enterprise Journal reported. The newspaper reported that Kheiralla might return to continue his lectures, which suggests that he did not complete the lessons.

Nor did Kheiralla, as has been presumed, hold a private ceremony during which he bestowed upon the new believers the “Greatest Name,” which is a form of the name of the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, Bahá’u’lláh, which means the Glory of God. In May 1899 Ehrsam mentioned in her first letter to Kheiralla’s secretary that Kheiralla had “hoped that Mr. Chace [Thornton Chase, the first person in North American to become a Bahá’í] could of stop of [sic] and give us some more lessons or perhaps the Greatest Name,” presumably shortly after Kheiralla’s 1987 visit. In the same letter Ehrsam wrote that “My daughter, . . . has given me the Greatest Name. . . .” Notations in the “Supplication Book of Students in Miscellaneous Cities, 1895” indicate that nine of the Enterprise Bahá’ís eventually received the Greatest Name, but these notations were made in September 1899 and probably reflect Josephine Hilty’s efforts.

When Kheiralla left Enterprise in 1897, the new Bahá’ís were alone without books, magazines, or sustained contact with other Bahá’ís. After two years of isolation their desperation grew until Ehrsam finally wrote on 3 May 1899 to Kheiralla’s secretary, Maude Lamson: “This is the first time I started to write to you although I wished to have done so many times since I had these teachings.” Why did she wait so long to write? She explains: “I have been very ill for nearly two years, but now have gained much strength the last three weeks that I have hopes of becoming well again.” Her hope was not to be realized, for she was plagued with ill health during the latter part of her life.

Much of Ehrsam’s May 1899 letter refers to her desire for contact with other Bahá’ís: “The Drs stay was so brief”; “I thought it might be possible that they [the Getsingers] could stop on the way back [to California from Akka] with us for a few days”; “What has become of Mr. Chace?” These new Bahá’ís wanted to learn more, but “with no one to instruct” them, they were at a loss. Her plea for information about Kheiralla is wrenching: “please lett me know when you expect the Dr to come or inform me if he should already be in Chicago.” Ehrsam’s question about Kheiralla’s return to Chicago was based on information she had received from Mrs. [Page 31] Bell about Kheiralla’s and the Getsingers’ 1898-99 pilgrimage to Akka to see ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and the possible dates of their return.

In her May 1899 letter Ehrsam mentioned Bahá’ís with whom she had contact. One was the enigmatic Mrs. Bell, about whom no other information has been found. Another was Ehrsam’s daughter, Josephine Hilty Kimmel, who was married and living in St. Louis and who is mentioned in the “Supplication Book of Misc. Cities,” which lists Bahá’ís in St. Louis. A third Bahá’í was “Mrs Hilty in Enterprise.” This was Ehrsam’s daughter-in-law, Rose Abbuehl Hilty, who had married Ehrsam’s oldest son, Leonhard, in Grasshopper Falls, Kansas, on 1 January 1882.

In the May letter Ehrsam also said that “one of the believers here” had written to Thornton Chase but that Chase had stopped writing. A search of Chase’s correspondence discloses that this Bahá’í was John Abramson and that Chase and Abramson had corresponded in 1898. A modern history of Enterprise described Abramson as “a cousin’s son from Switzerland” who had come to Enterprise to live with the Ehrsams “after a few years in Palestine with a missionary. Although but a boy of fifteen (in 1888), he spoke German, English and Arabic fluently and added much energy to the family life in Enterprise.” Stockman speculates that Abramson may be the first North American of Jewish descent to accept the Bahá’í Revelation.

In her second letter, dated 14 November 1899, Ehrsam mentioned no additional Bahá’ís with whom she had had contact, but she gave more information about her relationship with her daughter-in-law: “It is now impossible for Mrs Hilty to come to Chicago, for she had to have a very difficult operation performed. That was done in September but altho she is doing well, she will have to waith a longer time to gett strong and able to take a long journey. She will write you er long. We live close and see one another every day.” A trip to Chicago at that time by one of the Bahá’ís would have provided a very valuable link, but there is no evidence that such a trip was ever made.

In her May letter Ehrsam referred once to all the new Bahá’ís, suggesting that they thought of themselves collectively as a group: “We are a little band of believers here. . . .” This is crucial in determining whether the individuals in Enterprise should be considered a Bahá’í community. Although the Enterprise Bahá’ís might not be recognized as such by 1990s standards—they did not elect a spiritual assembly or consultative body, or even choose officers—the fact that they considered themselves to have an identity separate from that of other religious groups legitimizes them as a Bahá’í community of the 1890s.

In the May letter Ehrsam asked about the book Kheiralla had told her he was writing when he was in Enterprise: “We are verry eager to gett the Drs book as soon as it is published. So please inform me when it is expected . . . in print. . . .” Her November letter repeated the request: “Is It done or if not finished when can we expect to have it.” Such was her desperation that she offered to pay for the book ahead of time: “If it be desirably, I will send the money at once and wait for the book.” The book Ehrsam was so eager to receive was Behá ‘U’llah, which was published in 1900. But whether Ehrsam ever purchased the book is uncertain because the accuracy of its contents immediately fell under a pall. In late 1899 Kheiralla began to question ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s authority and rewrote his book to incorporate some of his uncertainty.

[Page 32] ‘Abdu’l-Bahá sent a Persian teacher to the United States to talk to Kheiralla and revive his Faith, but the efforts were unsuccessful, and Kheiralla broke with the Bahá’í community in mid 1900. The majority of the Bahá’ís in the United States remained loyal to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, but Kheiralla’s disaffection was an enormous blow to their morale and made it even more difficult for them to assist the struggling community in the middle of the Kansas prairies.

In her November letter Ehrsam also expressed her longing for more of the Bahá’í Faith’s spiritual truths: “We talk much about the blessed truth and long to hear and know more abouth ‘Oh God give me Knowledge faith and love’ [it] is the desire of my heart at all times.” The quotation is from a prayer Kheiralla gave to his students, who believed it to be a Bahá’í prayer, but it was Kheiralla’s own creation.

Despite Ehrsam’s May and November 1899 letters, the Enterprise Bahá’ís remained deprived of further contact as well as more information about the revelation of Bahá’u’lláh. In place of literature they could only hope for letters, the sharing of which was common during the first decades of the Bahá’í Faith in the United States, especially when a Bahá’í had seen ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. Letters about such experiences were passed around and copied so that others could also learn from the experience. In her first letter in May 1899 Ehrsam chided Kheiralla’s secretary: “You promised in the letter to my Daughter to send her, also Mrs Hilty in Enterprise a copie of Mrs Gezingers letter or perhaps some of the Drs, but we have not seen anithing of the kind yett and it is nearly 5 weeks ago.” At the end she cried out: “Now please lett us have the letters we will gladly copie them and send them back withought delay.”

Since Ehrsam’s May 1899 letter did not help to relieve the isolation of the Enterprise Bahá’ís, her November letter began abruptly: “Its been such a long time since I heard of you.” One letter after two years of no contact was not sufficient. How could she and her fellow “band of believers” learn more about the Bahá’í Faith when no information or support was available from those who knew more than they?

Considering the lack of letters, literature, and visits from other Bahá’ís, it is surprising that any Enterprise Bahá’ís weathered the lack of news and remained faithful. One who did was Mrs. Mary M. F. Miller. In 1899 she was listed as a Bahá’í in Kansas City; later she moved to Enterprise, where she and her husband had lived decades earlier. They had known the Hoffmans since at least 1868. The Millers had pioneered on the prairie and founded the Methodist church in Lyona. Mr. Miller was a Methodist minister and had conducted the first worship service in the Hoffmans’ cabin before Enterprise was founded. Mrs. Miller continued her association with the Bahá’ís and until her death in 1911 contributed to the fund to build the Bahá’í House of Worship in Wilmette, Illinois, a major undertaking of the U.S. Bahá’í community. Her obituary appeared in 'Star of the West, the first Bahá’í magazine published in the United States.

Another Bahá’í who remained firm in her faith was Ehrsam’s daughter-in-law, Rose Hilty. One of Rose’s daughters was the “little girl named Hilty,” to whom the newspaper referred as being slightly cured of blindness by Kheiralla. Rose and Mrs. Miller, together with more than four hundred American Bahá’ís, signed a petition to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, which was sent to Him on 4 July 1905. In 1906 Rose moved with her family to Topeka, becoming the first Bahá’í in the capital city [Page 33] of Kansas. She was the only Bahá’í there until about 1914 when Bertha Hyde became a Bahá’í through her mother, Ellen May Hyde, and sister, Mable Hyde Paine, in Urbana, Illinois. Hilty and Hyde worked together to build a Bahá’í community, but when Hyde moved in 1921, Hilty was alone again. She subscribed to Star of the West from its first appearance in 1910 until her death in 1933 and also bought Bahá’í books as each new one was published. When she died, her library was given to the Topeka Bahá’í community and formed the basis of the current Topeka Bahá’í Library. Hilty also contributed to the fund to build the Bahá’í House of Worship.

---

‘ABDU’L-BAHÁ
(front row, seated, third from right) at the 1 May 1912 ground-breaking ceremony for the
Bahá’í House of Worship to be built in Wilmette, Illinois. Kansas Bahá’í Elsbeth Frey,
wearing a wide-brim hat, is standing at the far left.

---

In December 1911, shortly before ‘Abdu’l-Bahá visited the United States and Canada to strengthen the Bahá’í community, a feature article on the Bahá’í Faith appeared in Everybody’s Magazine, a general interest, nationally [Page 34] circulated magazine. Ehrsam wrote to Hilty, calling her attention to it and commenting that she had never thought Kheiralla’s secrecy was right. That correspondence, plus a contribution to the Temple fund, are all the evidence found to date of Ehrsam’s commitment to the Bahá’í Faith after 1899.

The Kansan who made the most evident and documented commitment to the Bahá’í Faith was Elizabeth Frey, the wife of Enterprise’s postmaster. Not only did she maintain her commitment, but she taught the Faith to her daughter, Elsbeth, who had been too young to attend Kheiralla’s classes. The two traveled to Chicago in 1912 to see ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. Elsbeth appears in photographs of the 1 May ceremony during which ‘Abdu’l-Bahá laid the cornerstone for the House of Warship to be built in Wilmette. Residents of Enterprise remember Mrs. Frey’s holding “religious meetings” in her home. Elsbeth became an active Bahá’í in St. Joseph, Missouri, where she taught school for many years and continued to be an active Bahá’í until her death in Denver, Colorado, in 1970. She came back to Kansas at least once for a conference in Wichita in 1955.

Considering the isolation and the lack of information and support available to the Enterprise Bahá’ís, it is not surprising that the group eventually ceased to exist. F. C. Havinghurst, in his 1919 Master’s thesis, criticized the Hoffman-Ehrsam family for not interacting with the ordinary citizens. He noted, however, that their “idiosyncrasies were bound to destroy any influence for good which these leaders might have had among the average, church people of the town, and it served to deepen the wide chasm between the church and non-church groups in the town.”

The experience of Enterprise is unique in the early history of the Bahá’í Faith in North America. Batbara’s two letters written in 1899 provide windows to the times and condition of the American Bahá’í community before the turn of the century. They provide a glimpse of the eagerness of isolated Bahá’ís for information about the Bahá’í teachings and the activities of their fellow believers, and they help illuminate the ignorance about the basic Bahá’í teachings that characterized those years. More than any other nineteenth-century American Bahá’í community, Enterprise was isolated from the rest of the community. It is amazing that any interest in the new religion survived. Yet the achievements of the Enterprise Bahá’ís are still felt today: the Topeka Bahá’í community, its Spiritual Assembly and the Bahá’í library have direct roots in Enterprise. From Topeka the Bahá’í Faith has spread to more than one hundred localities in Kansas. And Kansas Bahá’ís have settled in several dozen foreign countries to share their Faith. In spite of its isolated beginning in Enterprise, the Kansas Bahá’í community has been continuous and growing for a century.

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Here follows the complete text of the Barbara Ehrsam’s letters to Kheiralla’s secretary, printed without corrections of grammar, spelling, or context.

[Page 35] MRS. BARBARA EHRSAM TO MRS. MAUDE LAMSON, MAY 3, 1899

Enterprise May 3/99

Mrs Lamsen

Dear Madam:

This is the first time I started to write to you although I wished to have done so many times since I had these teachings which makes a bond of unity between us. My daughter Mrs Kimmel of St Louis formerly Miss Hilty has given me the Greatest Name (with your permission) while there on a visit. I have been verry ill for nearly twoo years but have now gained much strength the last 3 weeks that I have hopes of becoming well again. We are a little band of believers here but have no one to instruct us. The Drs stay was so brief and he hoped that Mr Chace could of stop of and give us some more lessons or perhaps the Greatest Name. I understood Mrs Bell to say that Mrs and Mr Gezinger would go back to California after there return from Acca and I thought it might be possible that they could stop on the way back with us at least for a few days. We are verry eager to gett the Drs book as soon as it is published. So please inform me when it is expected to (be outh) in print and if the Getzingers intend to go to Oakland again. What has become of Mr Chace? He used to write to one of the believers here but no one has heard lately. And please lett me know when you expect the Dr to come or inform me if he should already be in Chicago. I have something to impart to him. You promissed in the letter to my Daughter to send her, also Mrs Hilty in Enterprise a copie of Mrs Gezingers letter or perhaps some of the Drs but we have not seen anithingh of the kind yett and it is nearly 5 weeks ago. Now please lett us have the letters we will gladly copie them and send them back withought delay.

Hoping I am not asking to much of you I remain yours truly
Mrs J. B. Ehrsam
Enterprise Kansas

MRS. BARBARA EHRSAM TO MRS. MAUDE LAMSON, NOVEMBER 14, 1899

Enterprise Nof 14/99

My dear Mrs Lamson.

Its been such a long time since I heard of you. Of course you know how it was, how sick and feeble I have been and therefore unable to write. But thank God I am much better and would now like to know abouth the Drs wherebouts, also abouth his book. Is it done or if not finished when can we expect to have it. If it be desirably I will send the money at once and wait for the book. Lett me know how the believers are prospering and how they grow in grace and knowledge at the headquarters. Has Mrs Khairalla arrived in Chicago. It is now impossible for Mrs Hilty to come to Chicago, for she had to have a very difficult operation performed. That was done in September but altho she is doing well, she will have to waith a longer time to gett strong and able to take a long journey. She will write to you er long. We live close and see one another every day.

We talk much abouth the blessed truth and long to hear and know more abouth “Oh God give me Knowledge faith and love” is the desier of my hearth at all times.

Hoping to hear from you soon I remain yours for the truth Mrs J. B. Ehrsam.

[Page 36]

[Page 37]

Can Poetry Promote Peace?

A REVIEW OF On Prejudice: A Global Perspective, ED. DANIELA GIOSEFFI (NEW YORK: ANCHOR DOUBLEDAY, 1993, 716 PAGES) AND Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry, ED. MARIA MAZZIOTTI GILLAN AND JENNIFER GILLAN (NEW YORK: VIKING PENGUIN, 1994, 406 PAGES)

BY PETER E. MURPHY

Copyright © 1997 by Peter E. Murphy.

On Prejudice: A Global Perspective and Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry are two valuable collections of modern and contemporary literature that expose the flesh and illumine the souls of many of the world’s penples. They include the work of hundreds of writers from around the globe, many whose names and views are familiar, and many more whose voices have not yet reached a wide audience. Though designed as thematic, multicultural readers for university courses, these anthologies have a comprehensive scope that makes them useful on several levels for anyone striving to develop a world-embracing vision. Both anthologies contain literature not only from the maltreated but, surprisingly, from those perceived as being the oppressors, thus destroying easy stereotypes and building a foundation to understand the cyclical nature of bigotry and all its abhorrent synonyms. On the literary level those engaged in realizing a global society will not only learn much from the poems, short fiction, and essays in these collections, but they will enjoy the deeper perspective obtained from reading well-crafted language that differentiates poetry and artistic prose from ordinary discourse.

Daniela Gioseffi begins the massive On Prejudice with a fifty-page introduction that casts one eye on a barbaric history of bigotry while focusing the other on the atrocities of the present, including those in Bosnia and Africa. Troubled by all forms of injustice, Gioseffi examines prejudice in its many forms: genocide, racism, ethnocentrism, sexism, and monoculturalism. “Our current predicament,” she writes, “is one of global demise, and great minds, East and West, South and North, are warning us that the planet’s salvation can be accomplished only through world unity and the end of wasteful war economies that use our human potential, our earthly resources, and our intelligence and knowledge for a rapidly advancing omnicide.”

[Page 38] Though not a Bahá’í, Gioseffi espouses global-minded views that concur with the Bahá’í teachings. Asserting that all humans are of one race, she writes:

If we are to survive, race prejudice and nationalism must give way to international cooperation. It is time for all to count themselves planetary citizens in nonviolent civil disobedience against outmoded military technocracies everywhere across the biosphere. But despite the lessons of slavery and the Holocaust and numerous genocides from the Rape of Nanking to Armenia to Babi Yar and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ethnocentric ideas still govern our political decisions and stifle our ability to rise above human folly.

Gioseffi describes the apathy that is symptomatic of our age as “psychic numbing . . . a psychic malaise which prepares us to accept genocide and omnicide . . . a conditioned response to a glut of horror. . . . Humane feelings which might bring action are so utterly drenched in blood, so to speak, that one can no longer see ‘red’ or feel the outrage or emotional pain that might motivate action.” This indifference to social chaos parallels the “spiritual lethargy” of which Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith from 1921 to 1957, warned, and the “paralysis of will,” which the Universal House of Justice, the supreme governing and legislative body of the Bahá’í Faith, cautions against more recently in The Promise of World Peace:

This paralysis is rooted, as we have stated, in a deep-seated conviction of the inevitable quarrelsomeness of mankind, which has led to the reluctance to entertain the possibility of subordinating national self-interest to the requirements of world order, and in an unwillingness to face courageously the far-reaching implications of establishing a world authority.

Although her essay exudes urgency, Gioseffi sees hope in some of the same movements praised in The Promise of World Peace, including religious movements. She describes the outcome of a World Conference of Religions held in Kyoto, Japan, in 1970, where representatives of many of the world religions —Bahá’í, Buddhist, Confucian, Christian, Hindu, Jew, Muslim, Shintoist, Sikh, Zoroastrian and others—assembled to “try to articulate a concrete universal basic ethic of all religions in the service of world society.” They concluded

that all shared a conviction of the fundamental unity of the human family, of the equality and dignity of all human beings; a sense of the sacredness of the individual conscience, and of the values of an interracial human community; a recognition that might is not right, that national power is not self-sufficient and absolute; a belief that love, compassion, unselfishness, [Page 39] and the force of inner truth and spirit have ultimately greater power than hate, prejudice, enmity, and self-interest; a sense of obligation to stand on the side of the poor and the oppressed as against the rich and the oppressors; and a profound hope that goodwill [sic] finally prevail.

Gioseffi not only applauds “The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights”; she includes it in her appendix together with “The Seville Statement on Violence,” statements on race published by UNESCO International Scholars, a “Disabled People’s Bill of Rights,” and other documents, including addresses of twenty-four national and international organizations such as Amnesty International, The Anti-Defamation League, Cultural Survival, Foundation for Humanity, Greenpeace, International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, the National Institute against Prejudice, and The World Council of Indigenous Peoples.

While the introductory essay and the closing appendix alone would make On Prejudice a valuable resource, its pulse beats in the hundreds of selections organized in its three sections: “On Xenophobia and Genocide: The Past and the Present,” “Cultural Destruction and Cultural Affirmation,” and “Beyond Culture and Prejudice, Toward Pride and Tolerance.” It features prose by celebrated writers such as Joseph Conrad, Frederick Douglass, Tolstoy, and Voltaire; imprisoned writers such as Ghandi, Geronimo, Malcolm X, and Nelson Mandela; and women writers such as Marilyn French, Gish Jen, Toni Morrison, and Virginia Woolf. Even politicians are included, with essays from Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Al Gore.

Although the value of On Prejudice springs from the strength and diversity of its short fiction, memoirs, and essays, it also contains a glaze of poetry by an international assortment of writers such as Bei Dao, Joseph Bruchac, Jayne Cortez, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Garcia Lorca, Philip Levine, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Carole Stone, Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats, and others. While many of the poets reveal with discerning exactness, the reciprocal chains that bind oppressors and the oppressed, some poets settle less ambitiously with merely expressing pain, outrage, frustration, or anger. Maya Angelou, the African-American poet who became well known when she read at President Clinton’s inaugural in 1993, professes determination and faith in these stanzas from “Still I Rise”:

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

[Page 40]

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise.

Although Angelou’s language and imagery are unsophisticated, the poem’s tone echoes in its repetition the music and tradition of spirituals that ignited the hope of the ancestors she praises. A less familiar poet, Dennis Brutus, who has lived in exile in the United States since leaving South Africa in the 1960s, uses a more restrained rhythm and rhyme to express hope in “Yes, Mandela,” his tribute to the South African President:

Yes, Mandela, some of us

we admit embarrassedly

wept to see you step free

so erectly, so elegantly

shrug off the prisoned years

a blanket cobwebbed of pain and grime:

behind, the island’s sea sand,

harsh, white and treacherous

ahead, jagged rocks and crannies

bladed crevices of racism and deceit

in the salt island air

you swung your hammer grimly stoic

facing the dim path of interminable years,

now, vision blurred with tears

we see you step out to our salutes

bearing our burden of hopes and fears

and impress your radiance

on the gray morning air.

Both Angelou and Brutus use the dawn to symbolize the hnpefulness that has arisen out of centuries of oppression, but Brutus’ diction is more subtle, and his choice of images, more complex and surprising. Unlike Angelou’s “daybreak that’s wondrously clear,” Brutus’ “hopes and fears” illumine “the gray morning air,” anticipating the struggle after the struggle, when the people who live in the promising land must reconstruct themselves into a nation.

In “For Medgar Evers,” David Ignatow, an American poet of Jewish descent, [Page 41] weaves a denser and darker fabric of expectancy in his memorial poem to the slain civil rights worker.

They’re afraid of me

because I remind them of the ground.

The harder they step on me

the closer I am pressed to earth,

and hard, hard they step,

growing more frightened

and vicious.

Will I live?

They will lie in the earth

buried in me

and above them a tree will grow

for shade.

Ignatow’s ambiguous ending pleasantly complicates the abomination of oppression. The question “Will I live?” is resolved in the elaborate image of the murderers being absorbed by and becoming what they have attempted to destroy. Out of this crime, beauty grows thick with benevolent umbrage that promises to protect future generations from the atrocities of the present.

Noticeably missing from On Prejudice is Robert Hayden. A Fellow of the Academy of American Poets and long-time poetry editor of World Order before his death in 1980, Hayden was the first African-American honored by the Library of Congress as its Consultant in Poetry before that position was retitled Poet Laureate of the United States. Poems such as “Middle Passage” and “Night, Death, Mississippi” are among the most moving and highly crafted poems describing the experience of Africans in America. They would add significantly to the depth and quality of the poems presented here.

It is impossible to sample or even list all the contributors to On Prejudice, but the variety of cultures and ethnic backgrounds included reflect that of a large, diverse American city. While too many of these voices have been silenced throughout history, in this book they have the opportunity to sing. American Indians alone, are represented by writers from ten different native nations: Abenaki, Apache, Chippewa, Cree, Laguna/Lakota, Mohawk, Ottawa, Pequod, Sauk, and Sioux. Anyone searching for a world-embracing vision will enjoy this chorus of voices and recognize in the cacophony of different experiences and expressions the familiarity of human thought, emotion, and experience that binds humanity together as one race.

While On Prejudice represents mostly nonfiction prose, Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan have collected in Unsettling America poems that aim to challenge all conceptions of what it means to be American. Rather than make an inclusive, well-defined anthology of “American” poetry, the editors chose instead, to “create a pluralistic play of voices” with “poems that directly address the instability of American identity. . . .” They have succeeded. The [Page 42] five sections of Unsettling America are stages in the continual pathology and (eventual) healing of prejudice: “Uprooting,” “Performing,” “Naming,” “Negotiating,” “Re-envisioning.”

As the title of the collection implies, the poets selected evince a particularly American interest as shown by a random selection of titles, “Portrait of Assimilation” (Chrystos), “We Never Stopped Crossing Borders” (Luis J. Rodriguez), “How I Learned English” (Gregory Djanikian), “We Are Americans Now, We Live in the Tundra” (Marilyn Chin), “Notes for a Poem on Being Asian American” (Dwight Okita), and “So Mexicans Are Taking Jobs From Americans” (Jimmy Santiago Baca).

The America in which these writers live, though rich in ethnic diversity, is poor in charity, a poverty of spirit that leads to much “unsettling.” Americans enjoy the myth that they relish rugged individuality, but they are not always hospitable to those whose skin color, religion, language, or customs are different from their own. In the xenophobic Nineties, Americans need to appreciate the shared hopes, dreams, and fears of all humans, as the manipulative make scapegoats out of the tired, poor, and hungry who have come here pursuing the same life, liberty, and happiness that long-time citizens’ ancestors have before them. The poets in this volume illustrate how the newcomers have managed to persevere and frequently prosper, even when this nation declares war on them. Consider these stanzas from Dwight Okita’s “In Response to Executive Order 9066,” the mandate that imprisoned Americans of Japanese descent during World War II.

I saw Denise today in Geography class.

She was sitting on the other side of the room.

“You’re trying to start a war,” she said, “giving secrets

away to the Enemy, Why can’t you keep your big

mouth shut?

I didn’t know what to say.

I gave her a packet of tomato seeds

and asked her to plant them for me, told her

when the first tomato ripened

she’d miss me.

Told from a child’s point of view, this poem shows the innocence and the strength of the young to offer, in the face of rejection and hatred, forgiveness and faith, qualities that create unity in a fragmented world. Like many in this collection, Okita’s poem reflects both the vulnerability and dignity that many Americans, new and established, have shown in response to racial, ethnic, sexual, and religious prejudice.

Gerald Stern, an American Jew, also writes about a childhood memory from the same era. His, however, is from a sadder but wiser adult perspective. In “The Dancing,” he describes the exact moment near the end of World War II when innocence and experience collide.

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In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture

and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots

I have never seen a post-war Philco

with the automatic eye

nor heard Ravel’s “Bolero” the way I did

in 1945 in that tiny living room

on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did

then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming,

my mother red with laughter, my father cupping

his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance

of old Ukraine, the sound of his skin half drum,

half fart, the world at last a meadow,

the three of us whirling and singing, the three of us

screaming and falling, as if we were dying,

as if we could never stop—in 1945—

in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburgh, home

of the evil Mellons, 5,000 miles away

from the other dancing—in Poland and Germany—

oh God of mercy, oh wild God.

The living rooms of childhood are joyously preserved in the memory and imagination of the poet as he shows his family’s inspired dancing. Has the family learned that the war has ended, or is the family’s joy unrelated to the events of the world? The poem is furnished with the ambivalent disappointments of their American city, “beautiful filthy Pittsburgh,” and the American barons who manage it, the “evil Mellons.” Amidst the family’s raucous pleasure Stern abruptly conjures the ghosts of six million Jews: This understatement makes a far more powerful poem than if he had proclaimed the obvious. The whisper of “1945” and “the other dancing—in Poland and Germany—” are enough to plunge the reader’s imagination into the most horrific atrocities of the century. The last line, “oh God of mercy, oh wild God” is half prayer, half curse, and blurs the dichotomy between rapture and remorse that the speaker has conveyed so brilliantly.

Like Okita’s and Stern’s, many of the poems in Unsettling America are childhood remembrances. Gregory Djanikian, who emigrated from Egypt to the United States as a child, writes about infatuation with a classmate and his new country in this excerpt from “In the Elementary School Choir.”

There was Linda Deemer with her amber waves

And lovely fruited plains,

And she was part of America too

Along with sun and spacious sky

Though untouchable, and as distant

As purple mountains of majesty.

“This is my country,” we sang, [Page 44]

And a few years ago there would have been

A scent of figs in the air, mangoes,

And someone playing the oud along a clear stream.

As the poem concludes, the boy has lost his sweetheart to the “high society of the hallway”; he remains rooted to the classroom floor thinking,

One day I was going to tell her something.

Des Moines, I was saying to myself,

Baton Rouge. Terre Haute. Boise.

The poem merges his yearning for his American girl with his new American language, both of which he longs to taste more fully. This poem, like others in Unsettling America, shows the speaker encountering his or her own new world while trying to hold fast to or adapt the old world of his family, culture, language, or race. Like Djanikian, other poets in this anthology are humorous, charming, and insightful in showing how individuals learn to navigate the racial and ethnic gulfs separating the peoples of many continents who live here.

Many poets in Unsettling America write about the spread of the cancer of racism, and some, such as Cheryl Clarke, resound with the bitterness of the wounded. Her poem “14th Street Was Gutted in 1968” describes the human firestorm that erupted in the Newark riots.

14th Street was gutted in 1968.

Fire was started on one side of the street.

Flames licked a trail of gasoline to the other side.

For several blocks a gauntlet of flames.

For several days debris smoldered with the stench

of buildings we had known all our lives. Had known

all our lives. I recalled the death of Otis Redding.

My sense of place was cauterized.

Since that time the city has become a buffalo

nearly a dinosaur and,

as with everything else white men have wanted

for themselves,

endangered

or extinct.

While some critics will defend or rationalize Clarke’s animosity, her stereotyping of “white men” is as erroneous and immoral as the avarice and destruction of which they are accused. Neither white indifference nor black rage will lead to the racial peace envisioned by Bahá’ís. Clarke’s artless generalization advances neither human rights nor poetry. The integrity of both are slaughtered in its blind sweep that ignites fires that continue to burn in our cities and in our hearts. This is not to say that rage cannot be artful, but it takes a greater commitment to justice and to the craft of poetry to succeed. Lucille Clifton illustrates the difference between righteous and self-righteous anger in her poem “Sam,” which subtly illuminates the life of one black man who has suffered from America’s racism.

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if he could have kept

the sky in his dark hand

he would have pulled it down

and held it.

it would have called him lord

as did the skinny women

in Virginia. if he

could have gone to school

he would have learned to write

his story and not live it.

if he could have done better

he would have. oh stars

and stripes forever,

what did you do to my father?

Clifton’s allegation against America is both poignant and surprising, but it works because she has displayed the torn carcass of its not so innocent victim. She indites the administrative and economic racism that stole her ancestors here and enslaved them for centuries before releasing them to a thirsty land of shared crops and unfulfilled promises. She does not give in to easy generalizations that destroy all prospects of nurturing unity. Unlike Clarke’s poem, which recklessly scatters shrapnel among the innocent, “Sam” is a scalpel which makes an incision in the reader’s heart as a necessary part of the healing.

America’s role in bringing about the oneness of humanity is unparalleled. Yet America, the melting pot and the salad bowl, has been for centuries the country where people from every nation have come to live and to work and to continue their ancient wars while waging new ones against each other. African-Americans, Asian-Americans, European-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Middle-Eastern-Americans, Native-Americans—the hyphens in these designations can separate us, or they can they can join us the same way they join the words together. Those committed to seeing the world and its people as one will enjoy the poems in Unsettling America because they already understand and consent to the purpose that unites them. The best of On Prejudice and Unsettling America use startling imagery and pleasing music to demonstrate the extraordinarily common loves and concerns that give meaning to all our lives. These collections make clear that, despite the pervasive disorder at the end of the millennium, the similarities within the human species are greater than its differences. On Prejudice and Unsettling America welcome the reader to taste the exotic and the strange, and find it familiar. The essays, stories, and poetry they offer are sometimes sorrowful, sometimes shrill, sometimes angry, and sometimes humorous. But they are frequently beautiful and always compelling.

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The Anatomy of a Poem

You’ve got to give us more information,

The words are a picture, yes, but incomplete.

We need to know who was with you, what the weather was like,

If you had laughed or not that day,

And how many times the telephone rang.

We are not modern doctors,

We want not the symptoms, but the cause.

We will treat that,

We will take it out by the roots if necessary—

What’s that? Speak up, boy!

You say you have hung your soul out to dry—

Don’t you know that all the neighbors, passing by,

Will now know that today is Saturday

And much more about you than is conveniently

Necessary? Move your clothesline, son!

Didn’t you know that’s why the backs of houses exist?

Where if you must disclose your soul,

It takes some work to get a glimpse.

Our advice is to stop it.

All that exposure can’t be good for it,

And as for your poem, whatever happened to it,

Take two aspirin, and if it comes back again,

Give us a ring.

—R. D. Huff

Copyright © 1997 by R. D. Huff

[Page 47]

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Authors & Artists

DUANE L. HERMMANN, who makes a third appearance in World Order, has for the past two decades been investigating the early history of the Kansas Bahá’í community, which will celebrate its centenary in 1997. His publications include poetry, essays, and a short book on the Kansas Bahá’ís.

RHEA HARMSEN holds a doctorate in plant breeding and plant genetics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a poet and novelist who writes about gender equality and race relations. She edits Race Unity News; her first collection of poetry is entitled Language of the Spirit.

R. D. HUFF, who lives in Venezuela, makes a first appearance in World Order.

PETER E. MURPHY, whose review of three books by and about Robert Hayden appeared in World Order’s Fall 1987/Winter 1987-88 issue, teaches English and creative writing in Atlantic City, New Jersey. His poems have been published in numerous journals, including World Order, and have been anthologized in several collections. He has been a poetry advisor and educational consultant to the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Education Testing Service, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the PBS television series on poetry entitled “Moyers: Power of the Word.”

MICHAEL L. PENN, a regular contributor to World Order, is a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at Franklin & Marshall college in Pennsylvania. He is currently working on two books—Desecration of the Temple, an examination of the global problem of violence against women and girls, and Hope, Hopelessness, and American Race Relations, a study of the psycho-historical attitudes about the viability of healthy relationship between blacks and whites during the last three decades.

ART CREDITS: Cover design by John Solarz, Steve Garrigues; pp. 1, 3, 6, 27, photographs, Steve Garrigues; p. 28, photograph, courtesy Kalimát Press; pp. 29, 33, photographs, courtesy National Bahá’í Archives; p. 36, photograph, Hans J. Knospe; p. 47, photograph, Sharone Burris.

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