Interview with Chuck Harker : A Lifetime of Activism for Peace and Justice By Diane M. Cameron September, 2004

The War Resisters League in 1991 published a Peace Calendar that featured fifty-two "veterans of social change," edited by Pat Farren. Reading these capsule biographies has given me sustenance when I’ve teetered on the edge of burnout. " We can learn a great deal from our elders in activism," Farren observes. "Most have discovered how to maintain vision and personal equilibrium. Some of us are fortunate enough to know a few of these people."

In the Maryland Green Party, we are indeed fortunate to know a few of these elders in activism. These veterans of social change include Maryland Green Party founders Bob Auerbach and Joe and Rose Marie Flynn. This group of our elders also includes Montgomery Green Chuck Harker.

I first met Chuck when we both spoke out against the Iraq War at a County Council meeting. On February 5, 2003, the Montgomery County Council held a so-called "Town Hall Meeting" in Gaithersburg. I had emailed fellow Greens that this was an opportunity for us to advocate for a resolution against the Iraq War (over one hundred other municipalities, including the city of Chicago, had already done so). While sitting with my family in the audience that night, I saw a tall, distinguished-looking man in white hair starkly address the Council: "....I speak as a Navy veteran of World War Two, with the lingering guilt for our destruction of the innocent men, women and children of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, even as our armed forces had defeated the armed forces of Japan and victory was in sight.....I come to you out of a sense of patriotic duty because of my deep concern that a unilateral decision by the President to go to war, even without there being an imminent danger, would be a disaster for our County, our State, and our Country, possibly even our Earth."

While Chuck's prophetic words to the Council fell on tin ears, (our Councilmembers refused even to consider an anti-war resolution, though they ultimately passed a separate resolution questioning the USA Patriot Act), they did inspire me to seek out Chuck and to learn more about this remarkable veteran. I have since protested alongside him at an anti-ICC rally (he lives in Sandy Springs, along one of the proposed ICC routes).

And in a June 23, 2004 visit to his home, the Friends House retirement community, I met his wife Eleanore and several of his friends, and learned how this "happy war veteran" had come to make war resistance and peace activism his life's work. Ensconced in their comfortable apartment at Friends House, next to a neat garden and greenhouse, Chuck and Eleanore are Midwesterners hailing from Minnesota and Peoria, Illinois. Chuck was an engineer who was commissioned from his Northwestern University NROTC to serve in the Navy in World War II. Just prior to shipping out in the Pacific Theatre, he and Eleanor were engaged. During the war, Eleanore, a strong Quaker, sent Chuck a lot of Quaker pamphlets and books, on the peace movement and conscientious objection. He is reluctant to elaborate on his actual experience of the war, suggesting that because it was, paradoxically, generally positive, it would only confound his family and friends who’ve since come to know him as a committed peace worker.

To help explain this paradox of his World War Two experience, he reaches for a book: Chris Hedges’ War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. It was only later, Chuck reflects, after the war, when he came home and married Eleanore and started attending Quaker meetings, that all of the "peace studies' he'd undertaken took root within him.

Chuck notes that he is a peace worker, not a pacifist. When he resigned his Navy commission and became subject to the draft after WWII ended, he registered as a 1AO, someone willing to wear the uniform but unwilling to use weapons. Chuck says that this continues to be his position regarding military service.

Shortly after the war, Chuck’s father, who’d also been in the Navy, invited Chuck to attend meetings at his local American Legion post. Chuck, who had become convinced that "Veterans oughtta be carrying the banner for peace," tried to get a peace resolution through his American Legion local. "When they wouldn’t support it," Chuck recalls, "I walked out." That experience taught Chuck that he needed to practice more patience: "You don’t cast judgement on those who don’t agree with you. Instead, you just keep on working with them, and working through your disagreements." This philosophy is reflected in his Green Party work, especially in his ongoing recruitment efforts among his fellow residents of Friends House.

Many of Friends House residents are progressive-liberal Democrats who come from within the Quaker activist tradition. Chuck has worked hard over the years to represent the Green Party to his friends and to persuade them to join the Party. Thanks in part to Chuck's constant, recruitment efforts, there are now about ten Green Party members living at Friends House.

Chuck Harker listens to fellow Green Party member and Friends House resident Pat Weiss

"It's been a very tough, uphill battle," Chuck says. Although as Quakers they are not comfortable with the Democratic Party's militarism; they see it as the only viable alternative, and they are very reluctant to leave it. "But I keep trying,” affirms Chuck. Such an approach is typical of a man whose basic philosophy is to "keep on working, and not worrying about results....I don’t get frustrated anymore.” Chuck asserts.

Shortly after the American Legion incident, Chuck resigned his Naval Officers' commission and became a Quaker. He signed on with Caterpillar Tractor Company as an engineer and manager in their Peoria facility. The Harkers had three children of their own and "virtually adopted a fourth." They count themselves blessed with seven grandchildren. About fifteen years later, in 1960, the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) asked Chuck to come to Washington to become one of eight on the staff.

A major part of Chuck's FCNL work was interpreting the legislative action to the wider Quaker community and he traveled widely in the United States. Internal conflict within even the Quaker community continued to challenge Chuck's inclusive vision. But through that experience, Chuck learned that open discussion of differences and listening to one another could lead to unity, if not unanimity, that strengthened everyone in the effort.

As an FCNL staffer, Chuck worked on a variety of bills and initiatives and demonstrations related to the War in Vietnam, Civil Rights (including the Southern Christian Leadership Council's Poor Peoples Campaign after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King); as well as resistance to, and education on ending the draft. Chuck refers me to the 1975 book, Uphill for Peace: Quaker Impact on Congress, by E. Raymond Wilson, for a description of FCNL’s work during Chuck’s tenure there.

One action that Chuck remembers well is the FCNL's organizing congressional visits for retired military officers, corporate executives and medical relief workers with direct experience of what our military forces and the people of Vietnam were experiencing. "We took them around Capitol Hill so they could tell their representatives and other members of Congress just what their experience of the war had been and why it needed to end."

Listening to Chuck tell this story, I hope that today’s retired officers and Iraq War Veterans have ample opportunity to describe their experiences and their views to members of Congress. Chuck's views on the need for peacemaking and resistance to the draft were deepened by the experience of his son "who spent two years in prison because of his refusal to register for the draft in 1968, on the basis of his conscientious objection to service in the military."

Also around that time, Chuck realized that his work was becoming less effective because of his deep frustration with the escalation of the Vietnam war, the refusal of so many mainstream Americans to see the reality of that war, and the loss of the Presidential election by Vice President Hubert Humphrey, “who refused to criticize President Johnson for his escalation of the war.”

So Chuck resigned and took up a job as an apartment manager in Southwest D.C. Meanwhile, Eleanore was a teacher at the lower school of Sidwell Friends. Chuck maintained his activism throughout this time, in a new way: he got involved in welfare rights and housing justice issues.

Chuck's inclusive philosophy of acceptance, and continual engagement with people, keeps coming back into our conversation. In these times of increasing anxiety and fear about world affairs and the direction of U.S. politics, and withering internal tensions within progressive organizations including the Green Party, Chuck's "long view" is reassuring: "It's not a matter of a single person's work or career," observes Chuck. "It's not a matter of ten years, it's not even just one person's lifetime" that is the measure of success or failure of our movement for peace and justice....but rather, "it's longer, much longer, than that. It's a matter of the evolution of our thinking, of our
beliefs. I'm optimistic that things will change, that this country will adopt the role of peacemaker and not continue to fuel the war machine. It's not important to me that I may not see this happen in my lifetime. I see it happening, little by little. I see the signs all around me." And he sees the growth of the Green Party as one of the most important and hopeful signs.

The current tensions within the Green Party, and in particular, between the equally flinty supporters of Green Party Presidential Candidate David Cobb, and those backing Populist Party candidate Ralph Nader, are to Chuck simply a normal part of the natural process within a progressive movement, a process that he fondly calls "grinding down”:

"The grinding that's going on now, within the Green Party, is a learning process that'll ultimately make things smooth. We should deal with it, and stay with the process, and not turn our backs on it. We should grind it out with those who disagree with us, work things out, even though it's a painful process, because it moves everybody forward in the end. The consensus process (used by both Quakers and Greens) is a grinding process. I have faith in this grassroots process." Similarly, Chuck was intrigued by Peter Camejo’s "Unity" proposal prior to the June 2004 Milwaukee convention, because he liked the idea of having the State parties work things out.

"I see the Green Party as the coming thing in the country's electoral process. The two-party system has got to go. The strength of the Green Party is in its 'People Action..' We will just keep on making inroads into holding elected offices. The Courts have upheld the [Green Party] Mayor of New Paltz, New York, Jason West, for his right to officiate over gay weddings. This is evidence of the progress that Greens are making in elected offices nationwide."

Chuck observes that Greens are creating our own new patterns of campaigning, free from "the big money/ big media cycle that the two major parties are locked into." As evidence, he cites Linda Schade's run in 2002 for the Maryland General Assembly, in which her "sidewalk campaign" consisted of waving to motorists along major routes: "Linda demonstrated that there's nothing like getting out on the sidewalk and talking directly to people."

Being an anti-war and ecology activist over the past twenty years has severely challenged my sense of hope for the future. But if Chuck Harker is still going strong for the Green Party in his 80s, after sixty years of activism, then I too can keep going. “In our lifetimes,” reflects Chuck, “we give what we can. And then, we have to look beyond that, we have to say, ‘This is a building process.’ And I really believe that this is happening. I have to believe that it’s a different world, a better world.”