Katrine Barber and Eliza Elkins Jones

"The Utmost Human Consequence"

Art and Peace on the Oregon Coast, 1942–1946

It seems to me that the artist's situation in a community can best be understood when compared with that of the conscientious objector. Both work for ends that are of the utmost human consequence, but both do them in ways that conflict with current social mores. Society wants entertainment, distraction; the artist insists on giving it reality, charged, concentrated and inescapable. The c.o., if he is to be effective, must become a revolutionist.... He has fashioned upon an idea that is dynamic, visionary, and he will not be shaken from it. He runs squarely into the utmost social resistance because society does not understand, does not know its needs, cannot see so far, doesn't care; can't tell how. So with the artist.

— William Everson¹

THE 1950s PHOTOGRAPH SHOWS a small group of people in San Francisco protesting the atomic bomb. On the left is Kermit Sheets, a gay man in his thirties, carrying a sign with the plea "and among these Life," a phrase from the Declaration of Independence.² On the right is Manche Langley Harvey, an activist with two daughters who was close to ending her marriage to a conscientious objector (CO) who suffered from alcoholism.³ The two protesters had known each other for more than ten years, having first met during World War II at a Civilian Public Service (CPS) camp near Cascade Locks, Oregon, in the Columbia River Gorge. Harvey, a young pacifist who had grown up in Portland, had discovered the CPS camp by chance and became friends with some of the COs there who were also artists, including Sheets, who was from California. In October 1942, Sheets relocated to Camp 56 on the Oregon coast near Waldport, where he joined other transfers and artists already at Camp 56 to establish a Fine Arts Program — a loose association of people that had no specific agenda but enabled COs to transfer from other CPS camps for the purpose of creating, studying, and performing art together. Under the auspices of the camp's Fine Arts Program, they discussed the relationship between pacifism and art as they produced plays, wrote and published poetry, played and composed music, painted and sculpted, and designed and made myrtlewood bowls and other objects. "In being pacifists," one CO at Waldport wrote, "we did not forget we were also artists."⁴

Kermit Sheets, Bruce Bishop, and Manche Langley Harvey protest the atomic bomb in San Francisco during the 1950s. Sheets and Harvey had met at a Civilian Public Service camp in Oregon during World War II.

Courtesy of the author

Shortly after Sheets transferred from Cascade Locks, Manche Harvey also moved to the Waldport CPS camp, where worked with the Fine Arts Program. She had accepted an invitation from friends to stop at Camp 56 and help put on a play and decided to stay. For the next year, she lived at or near the camp, socializing, helping produce plays and work the printing press, and doing secretarial work for the Fine Arts Program. The camp was mostly populated by men, of course, but Harvey remembered "lots of females around," including "several wives" who she "became very close friends with." Camp 56's substantial female population was not unusual in CPS. Historian Rachel Waltner Goosen estimates that "two thousand women, and perhaps half as many children, lived in and near Civilian Public Service camps" across the country.⁵

As part of the Fine Arts Program at CPS Camp 56, Manche Langley (Harvey), Enoch Crumpton, Kermit Sheets, and William Eshelman performed Aria Da Capo, by Edna St. Vincent Millay, on September 22, 1944.

Lewis & Clark College Special Collections, Sheets S70

When Kermit Sheets and Manche Harvey were photographed protesting the atomic bomb in the 1950s, their lives were still focused on community art production. Shortly after the end of the war, they had joined other pacifists who had been conscripted during World War II, political radicals, and artistic visionaries in San Francisco, where they produced plays at a cooperative theater, created avant-garde films, and protested war and injustice as part of the city's renaissance art scene. Throughout their adult lives, Sheets and Harvey continued to work and socialize with people who had been involved in the fine arts study group at Waldport, all of whom were connected to a broader history of national and international political resistance. Neither Harvey or Sheets became well known outside their circle of friends and colleagues, yet their experiences illustrate the potential effect a small group of peace-minded citizens can have on the cultural and political life of a region.

THE STORY OF ARTIST conscientious objectors in Oregon is founded in a tension between general citizen support of religious freedom and of taxation and conscription, which allows the government to fight wars. Historically, religious pacifist resistance has ranged from a withdrawal from war to a removal from all affairs of the state. Jehovah's Witnesses and Mennonites, for example, preach removal of their own populations from the affairs of secular government, but the two religious groups differ in the directives that guide their relationships with the state. Some Catholics similarly remove themselves from governmental affairs, while others allow church leaders to determine whether a war is "just." The so-called historic peace churches — the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), the Mennonite Church, and the Church of the Brethren — are considered such largely because of their longstanding pacifist traditions in Europe and Russia. That tradition continued in the United States, where pacifists pressured the government to make concessions for them.⁶

In his original proposal for the Bill of Rights, James Madison included a clause in what eventually became the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in prison."⁷ Congress did not include that principle in the final Bill of Rights, but citizens and policymakers have continued to debate the rights of pacifists within the context of democratic freedom. The United States has required compulsory military service of its citizens only a handful of times, with the debate over pacifism understandably becoming most heated during times of war. Modern conscription in the United States dates to the Civil War, during which both the North and the South made some provisions for pacifists, but war resisters did not necessarily have rights. For instance, some Southern pacifists were placed on the front lines, where they refused to raise their weapons, while others paid five hundred dollars to secure an exemption from service. Northern pacifists generally fared better than their Southern counterparts, but only if they were willing to hire substitutes to fight for them.⁸ The treatment of pacifists during World War I was also poor. The 1917 draft law gave the option to COs to serve in a noncombatant military position only if they were members of a recognized peace church. Those who refused noncombatant military service were imprisoned, and military and prison officials were often cruel and sometimes deadly in their treatment of COs.⁹

As U.S. entrance into World War II seemed imminent, pacifist church leaders hoped they could negotiate better treatment for young men who objected to war. As Congress began its lengthy debate over conscription, representatives of the historic peace churches lobbied vigorously for objectors' rights. In September 1940, Congress passed the Selective Training and Service Act — the nation's only peacetime draft law — which differed from the World War I draft law in two important ways: the government recognized the rights of religious COs who were not members of the historic peace churches, and Civilian Public Service was created and mandated to enable COs to do "work of national importance under civilian direction."¹⁰ Embedded in the program was a significant compromise: because a pacifist must first be drafted before he could officially register as a CO, church leaders had to accept the right of the state to conscript its citizens.¹¹

The historic peace churches made Civilian Public Service a reality by agreeing to shoulder much of the responsibility for the program. CPS camps were supervised by the Selective Service and administered and funded by the National Service Board of Religious Objectors (NSBRO), a group created by the historic peace churches. In Oregon, the men worked for the U.S. Forest Service, fighting fires, felling trees, building roads, and working at other jobs in the national forests.¹² CPS camps such as those at Cascade Locks and Waldport provided an alternative to prison for objectors who refused noncombatant service in the military and created a space in which COs could consider how to act on their beliefs after the war.

KERMIT SHEETS WAS a drama teacher at a central California high school when he was drafted in late 1941. Although he was not a member of one of the recognized peace churches, he was certain in his religiously rooted belief in pacifism. Sheets's response to the draft was atypical in a nation braced for what historians would later call "the good war." The total number of COs represented a mere one-tenth of one percent of people who enlisted in the armed services. Even within the historic peace churches, most young men accepted the draft into active military combatant service. There were about 43,000 COs in World War II, including 25,000 noncombatants, 12,000 CPS inductees, and 6,000 prisoners. Most of the COs — 39 percent — were Mennonites. Quakers made up 11 percent, with 7 percent Brethren, and less than 1 percent Congregationalists and Methodists.¹³

Kermit Sheets reads at CPS Camp 21, where he was stationed in 1942 after being drafted.

Lewis & Clark College Special Collections, Sheets S26

In a 2005 interview, Sheets talked about why and how he came to CPS:

So, in our family ... [at mealtimes, before] asking in prayer for a blessing, my father would read a chapter from the Bible. And there was a phrase about the Bible: "Where the Bible speaks we speak; where the Bible is silent, we're silent." And I took that up as being true. And when the draft was coming along, I went to the Bible and two things just stood out for me — "Where the Bible speaks, we speak." So in this case, the Bible spoke to me: "Love your enemies, be good to those who persecute you." Well how could I kill anybody and believe in the Bible? So, that's when I became a conscientious objector.
... After I went to [the draft board] and made a claim on the basis of religious training and belief, they said: "We understand what you've said. Now hold on and we'll give you our decision." ... Once this local draft board found out that there was a classification for conscientious objectors based on religious training and belief, they gave me credit for having done that.¹⁴

This cartoon, drawn by Kermit Sheets, was published in The Compass, a CPS publication, in 1944.

Lewis & Clark College Special Collections, Sheets papers

Sheets's path to Civilian Public Service was straightforward. His parents had taught him to respect a literal interpretation of the Bible, and he used that teaching to decide what to do. Representatives of the federal government acknowledged his reasons for refusing to serve in the military, and Sheets was sent to Wyeth, Oregon, to Camp 21, about six miles east of Cascade Locks. Many COs had similar backgrounds, but objectors held an incredibly diverse array of beliefs and came from a wide variety of circumstances. At the Cascade Locks and Waldport camps, COs had lengthy debates about CPS and their participation in it, and those debates affected Sheets's understanding of his own pacifism. He remembered:

There were men in the camp who had, to a certain extent, prevaricated, lied, about being a conscientious objector for religious training and belief, who were more political in their CO's feelings, thoughts, activism. I became, rather quickly, interested in their ideas and grew that way in what my ideas were.¹⁵

Sheets reflected on the effect that college and CPS camp had on his life:

I became more political. This happened while I was at camp. I did change. I had changed when I went down to college in Los Angeles, changed to begin to bring those religious reasonings and to focus as a conscience objector. That happened before I went to the camp. And then at camp, it was the experience of the political side of being a pacifist and change with new ideas about art and the theater and so on. So it was a wonderful awakening time for me. I've grown more and more aware of it as the years have gone by. But it was a preparation, both of them, for me to live as myself in San Francisco in its art years too.¹⁶

The political approach that Sheets described embodied a belief in active resistance among pacifists in many countries, an approach that the Brethren Service Committee encouraged in CPS through classes and specialized study groups, such as the one in fine arts at Waldport. The push to form social structures that negated war was part of what political scientist William Marty has termed the "new pacifism," which "was most notable for wanting to be effective in the world. It aimed not only to witness to love but also to lead in establishing peace in the world."¹⁷ Mohandas K. Gandhi, the best-known practitioner of the new pacifism, used nonviolence to dismantle the power structures of British colonialism. In Gandhi's hands, nonviolence became a means for social change, a demonstration that violence was not an unavoidable result of normal human tendency but, rather, a means used by some people to oppress others. Using Gandhi's approach, nonviolent protesters allowed themselves to be beaten and killed by authorities. Gandhi's success prompted justice-minded people to consider war as both a product and tool of hierarchy, and many began to think about peace as an aspect of social reform. Historians Peter Brock and Nigel Young argue that during the first half of the twentieth century it was "not sufficient for pacifists to say that they refuse to participate in war. They must go further and work for a classless society in which cooperation replaces competition as the goal of human actions."¹⁸ In other words, many pacifists had come to reject the removal from political life that some peace churches espoused in favor of advocating for the political and social changes they believed would lead to lasting peace.

Manche Harvey's pacifism grew out of that new, political peace movement. In 2004, she talked about where her pacifist beliefs had come from:

There was a great, very strong, pacifist move in the 1920s because of the First World War. The way I became aware of pacifism and the First World War [was] a lot of books were published ... showing the guys who were severely injured, pictures that came out of the war of injuries to the guys. You know, no legs, no arms. They came home in baskets with a head and a body and that was all, and ... I was very impressed with that. This happened to me when I was about ten, a very impressionable age, and I think that had a lot to do with my feeling so strongly about pacifism.¹⁹

Harvey was remembering a period after World War I when the horrors of trench and chemical warfare and a perception of economic profiteering among the nation's private military industries fueled widespread disillusionment in the belief that the U.S. government could be trusted with the power to make war. That disillusionment combined with the economic upheaval of the 1920s and 1930s, and many Americans responded by challenging the status quo and creating significant oppositional — and often radical — social movements, many of which incorporated pacifism. The peace movement was especially strong in the nation's Protestant churches, including those that had not historically endorsed pacifism; but it also drew inspiration from international political movements, such as the efforts to create the League of Nations and the establishment of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Radical, nonreligious calls for peace were often linked to anti-capitalism. On February 24, 1936, Congress released the Nye Report, which found that munitions companies had actively promoted aggression between nations for the sake of profit.²⁰ Such findings could only have strengthened the new links between pacifists and those working for economic and social reform. Manche Harvey's faith in pacifism and her path to CPS were steeped in the era's radicalism.

Kemper Nomland, Don Baker, and Kermit Sheets, pictured here in about 1942 at CPS Camp 21, transferred to CPS Camp 56 to participate in the Fine Arts Program.

Lewis & Clark College Special Collections, Sheets S16

Harvey's idol when she was young was her unmarried aunt and namesake, Manche Langley, her father's sister and one of the first women in Oregon to become a lawyer. Until the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Harvey recalled, her aunt was also a staunch pacifist. One summer, when Harvey was a teenager, Langley introduced her to radical politics through George Bernard Shaw's The Intelligent Women's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. Harvey later spent a year at Marylhurst College in Portland. She remembered reacting to the Spanish Civil War in 1936 by deciding to start a pacifist club at school. "I think that was the first time," she said, "when I recognized that I was such a thing as a real pacifist."²¹ When Pearl Harbor was attacked a few years later, Harvey was living in Los Angeles. "I was really very, very distressed," she remembered. "These big airplanes were flying all over and going zip-zip, and everybody was in uniform and it was a terrible time. It was just a terrible time."²²

Manche Langley (Harvey) was photographed on a visit to CPS Camp 21.

Courtesy of the author

Because she was a woman, Harvey was not conscripted, and she moved back to her hometown of Portland. She recalled that she was "just alone about pacifism, being a pacifist."²³ While working as a car checker at a rail yard — determining whether cars in the yard were full or empty — one of her co-workers, another young woman, told her about the CPS camp in Cascade Locks.

Then she told me about the CPS camp and that her husband was at the CPS camp. But she was waiting to be sure that I was ok before she told me where he was. And, so I almost fell apart, because I had vaguely heard of a friend ... who was a conscientious objector, and that he was going to, quote, a camp. So, I knew there was such a thing. I was just so delighted to hear that there was a camp of conscientious objectors.
So, she said, "Would you like to come out for a weekend?"
And I said, "Oh, God, would I. And how. I'll walk, if necessary."²⁴

It was not only being surrounded by pacifists that Manche appreciated about Camp 21, the CPS camp at Cascade Locks, but also the attention some of the COs paid to art. She recalled:

And there were many artists there, and for the first time in my life I was around a group of artists.... Oh, it was that feeling of finding like minds. You know, here I had been wandering around feeling very differently than other people felt, and here was a whole group of people who felt the same way I did about many things, about pacifism, about the war, about aesthetics.²⁵

Kermit Sheets was one of those people.

A FEW MONTHS AFTER Harvey first visited the camp, Sheets and a few other COs transferred to Camp 56 near Waldport to begin the Fine Arts Program. He remembered:

After one and one-half [years in CPS] I went [from Camp 21] to Waldport [Camp 56]. See, there were camps all over the country. They were all sponsored by one of the three peace churches. And the one in Cascade Locks was sponsored — that means funded — by the Brethren Church. A representative from that church came around to the camp and said they were thinking of setting up education programs in the free time we had from the planting trees and building trails. So, [he said] "will you be thinking about what sort of study group you would like to have."
A friend of mine [Kemper Nomland] and I said, "What about fine arts?" This happened at the camp at Waldport also. So the Brethren decided on setting up a study group in the fine arts at Waldport. This friend of mine and I were permitted to transfer. That's how I got to Waldport.... The program was labeled "study groups." We just produced art [laughs]. In college, I had always been active in the drama departments. I had been teaching in the small town before the draft took over and I directed plays. So, it was always a keen interest of mine.²⁶

The Fine Arts Program was defined by the people who participated in it. The conscripted artists — and the women who lived, worked, and socialized with them — wrote and produced plays, wrote poetry, played music, made crafts on a loom and a wood lathe, painted, and practiced book arts in the form of performance programs and poetry chapbooks.

Administered by the Church of the Brethren, Camp 56 was located just east of Highway 101, about four and one-half miles south of Waldport and just over three miles north of Yachats.²⁷ The complex, a relatively recent Civilian Conservation Corps camp set in a muddy forest clearing, included four dorm buildings, a kitchen, and a dining area, where the men lived, cooked, ate, did office work, prayed, met, and discussed and created art. To the east of the camp lay the steep hills of the Siuslaw National Forest, where they felled snags, built roads, and planted trees for the U.S. Forest Service. In a 2003 interview, Waldport CO Myron Miller described the dormitories:

Well, there was a long room and I think we had about six feet between the cots. We had like orange crates at the end, or a shelf, and we had our pictures and stuff on that. Then we'd have these single cots and the space between. There were two cots here, and then a little bit bigger space and then two more cots. We called them bed space, or whatever. You had a closer relationship with the fellows who were bed space people because we could turn around and hear each other pray. We had a shower room and sometimes there would be singing in the showers. So it was really close. A lot of times people sat around. I was one of the few people had a radio. At night you could get Long Jean Al, I think it was, with the music at night. People were sitting around on cots listening to radio and writing letters, and everyone turned in about the same time. We usually didn't stay up too late. But no one used to go to bed before everybody else because he couldn't sleep any. So, it was an exercise in getting along with people. You did tend to be closer to the people in your barracks.²⁸

This map shows the layout of CPS Camp 56, also known as Camp Angel. The men worked in the Siuslaw National Forest, to the east, and often relaxed on the beach or swam in the ocean during their time off.

Lewis & Clark College Special Collections

Camp 56, which operated from October 1942 to April 1946, was typical in its administration. USDA employees trained the COs and organized and supervised their work while the Church of the Brethren administered the day-to-day operations. The camp was organized "family style," which meant that "with the exception of Selective Service regulations which were more or less iron-clad, all regulations pertaining to the internal living situations were determined by the men themselves."²⁹ The camp director, Richard Mills, had worked under Mark Schrock at CPS 21 near Cascade Locks and he administered the camp in much the same way Schrock had. Historians Mulford Sibley and Philip Jacob conclude that "leaders in the Historic peace churches ... envisioned Civilian Public Service as an opportunity to demonstrate the positive nature of their beliefs. Here they could build a 'good community,' the model of a peaceful world, instead of simply protesting the war-like actions of their countrymen."³⁰ Like other camps, residents at Camp 56 drew up a constitution and elected governing officials, including a president, a secretary, and chairmen for public relations, education, religion, workers, recreation, and health committees.³¹

The camp's population fluctuated with transfers, which were frequent in CPS, with residency averaging 120 men. According to a March 1943 survey, which provides a snapshot of the demographics of Camp 56, the camp was home to 118 men, the majority of whom were from California and Michigan. On average, the men were in their early to mid twenties, single, had completed twelve years of schooling, and were religious.³² The group of pacifists at Camp 56 represented twenty-eight religious denominations. The largest single group was the Brethren (at twenty-nine members). COs were also Methodists and Jehovah's Witnesses and one was a member of the Temple of the Jeweled Cross.³³ The Fine Arts Program at Waldport, which served between 25 and 35 participants at any given time, tended to attract more urban, more cosmopolitan, better educated, and less actively religious participants than were represented in the rest of CPS.

The camp was simultaneously a place of community, contestation, conflict, and cooperation. The men had been brought together by a shared pacifism, but pacifism had many hues and was rooted in diverse traditions and philosophies. Harvey said that there were more religiously focused COs, who she called "Holy Joes," at Camp 56 than at Camp 21. The "Holy Joes" "were nice guys," she said, "and I had very little to do with them, but they were very religious, very religious, and very quiet." She did not include the camp's Jehovah's Witnesses, however, in that assessment. "They lived in the back of Dorm Four, which was where the fine arts guys lived, too. So, they sat back there and they'd play poker. There was no drinking, but they'd play poker.... They were very jolly." Harvey also remembered some individual friendships between the "Holy Joes" and participants in the fine arts group and that "the religious guys would come to plays."³⁴

There were tensions between the objectors who leaned toward religion and those who leaned toward politics, and the Fine Arts Program seems to have exacerbated those differences. COs who were involved with the fine arts group had the same work requirements as everyone else in camp. Involvement in the group is difficult to quantify because people participated at different levels — such as making crafts from wood or fabrics, attending music or drama performances, or planning the production of a play or book. Still, it seems there was a core group that kept somewhat to themselves. In a camp meeting convened because of complaints about the quality of food and service by the kitchen staff, several men charged the fine arts group with being insular and snobbish. The meeting's note-taker reported that "one man said he thought that many of the fellows who are called Fundamentalists have been more tolerant than some members of the Fine Arts group. That group is too cliquish, he felt, and their meetings have never been announced as open."³⁵

Kermit Sheets played the role of Burgess in a 1944 performance of Candida at CPS Camp 56.

Lewis & Clark College Special Collections, Sheets 74

There were other complaints as well. A few wives lived on the outskirts of the camp in cabins left empty by tourists who had been thwarted by gas rationing. The camp's cafeteria was open to them, so it was not unusual to have women at the camp. When she first joined her friends at Camp 56, Harvey lived in one of the camp buildings and took her meals in the dining hall. Because she was a single woman, her presence was disturbing to some COs. In late 1944, Adrian Wilson wrote his parents:

While I write, the discussion of the Fine Arts is going on between the camp and W. Harold Row [from the Brethren Service Committee in Elgin, Illinois].... We should win tonight, too, except that Manche will probably be deported. As far as we, the group, are concerned, she is wonderful, but pressure from the non-Fine-Arts, intimations of immorality, etc. make it uncomfortable for her.³⁶

After that meeting, Harvey moved across the highway and rented one of the empty tourist cabins.

Despite those tensions, the camps became a place where men and the women who joined them debated the role of pacifism in a democracy and the role of government in their lives and where they could envision and, to a certain degree, create alternative communities. The camps were also places where young pacifists contributed many hours to federally designed projects, work that the government considered to be "of national importance." When Kermit Sheets transferred from Camp 21 to Waldport, he worked in the kitchen, but most men worked in the forest, where they replanted the 1934 Blodgett Burn, built roads, felled snags, and acted as fire lookouts during the dry summer months.

This illustration was printed in "The Fine Arts at Waldport," a prospectus for the Fine Arts Program written by William Everson in 1943.

Lewis & Clark College Special Collections

"Project work," as COs called labor for the Forest Service, sometimes included assignments to smaller, more isolated side camps such as Hebo and Mary's Peak. Raymond Long, described the work:

What I remember is cutting trees in rain every day. I remember slogging up a mountainside one day [to get to] the area to plant trees. One of the guys said, "My God, I must have committed an awful crime in an earlier life to have to go through this" [laughs].³⁷

The typical workweek was eight and a half hours a day, six days a week. In a memo written in March 1944 to their neighbors in and around Waldport, camp members reported that their work had

resulted in the planting of 2 1/2 million trees on the 9,000 acres in the Blodgett Tract, the construction of 9 miles of gravel roads, the building of 3 1/2 miles of fire trail, the crushing of nearly 10,000 tons of rock for road and surfacing, the maintaining of 37 acres in 6 Forest Service Parks, and the assistance in the suppression of 7 fires in Oregon and Washington. Furthermore, [we] constructed a look-out tower on Blodget Peak and have built 6 new buildings on the camp site.³⁸

The project work was often physically difficult, especially to those not used to physical labor. Felling snags was dangerous, and two objectors stationed at Waldport died in that endeavor, fueling debates about whether the Forest Service had offered adequate safety instruction and equipment. Some COs felt they were doing "busy-work" and believed they could not fulfill their desire to provide meaningful service to society by felling snags and planting trees. Opinions differed. John Johnson described the work as empowering:

I felt I was doing something for my country. I felt I was doing something worthwhile. We were building roads. We were replanting trees and replacing the part of the forest that was burned. We were setting up picnic areas for citizens for when they came through that area so that they can use them when they come off the road to stop.³⁹

Earnest G. Barr explained the emotional conflict he felt about the landscape and his work in it:

I have often said that if it were for any other reason it would have been a ball. I liked being out in the woods and the work was interesting. I think we set foot on some land that probably last would have been covered by surveyors or Indians. It was really primitive out there in the beautiful Douglas fir forest and hemlock. We measured the largest hemlock tree that had been on record in the U.S. Forest Service. Those kind of experiences you can't get anyplace else. But the whole thing was tarnished by the reason I was there.⁴⁰

"Bill Everson's Moods," was drawn by CO Waldo Chase on July 8, 1945.

Lewis & Clark College Special Collections, Blocher DO12

Because national forests provided timber to the military, many questioned whether their jobs actually contributed to the war effort rather than being an alternative to military service. Some COs at Waldport put in the "second mile" — a reference to Matthew 5:14: "If any one forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile" — and worked twice the hours expected of them, which alarmed Forest Service supervisors who worried about their safety and endurance. At least one Waldport CO, Kemper Nomland, decided not to work at all for a period of time as a demonstration of resistance to CPS.⁴¹

A handful of COs did the administrative and service work required to run the camp, such as corresponding with NSBRO and the Brethren Service Committee, completing paperwork required by the Selective Service, cooking and serving meals, providing medical care, purchasing supplies, and directing recreational and educational programs. COs elected to the camp's administrative staff offered educational and recreational programs at the end of the workday. Objectors accumulated furlough time, much like military personnel did, and they were allowed to leave the camp after work. It was during the hours after they had worked a full day under the supervision of the Forest Service that COs participated in the Fine Arts Program. Sheets remembered the informality of the program:

We just produced art. Well, if someone wanted to direct a play, and there were other people supporting him, that came about. He would have casting readings, select the cast and rehearse. All that had to be done in the evenings, plus Sunday all day because we worked six days a week."⁴²

After hours, CO Charles E. Davis remembered, Waldport was "a beehive of activity."⁴³

A CO works at his weaving after hours at Camp 56 as part of the Fine Arts Program. COs at Waldport also made other crafts, including myrtlewood bowls.

Lewis & Clark College Special Collections, Sheets papers

The printing press, a centuries-old tool of revolutionaries, gave many of the camp's artists an outlet for their literary, artistic, and political urges. Manche Harvey recalled:

And after dinner, that's when the real work started, because this was when the press work was being done.... I did quite a lot of presswork .... I knew how to set type, but I never became an expert at it.... some of the guys worked on and on and on half the night, depending on what they were doing. But I still marvel at what good quality work was turned out.⁴⁴

Publications at Camp 56 included The Tide, an official camp newsletter; The Untide, "a semi-clandestine journal with unsigned contributions"; The Compass, "the most lavishly produced journal at Waldport," which had come to the camp with Martin Ponch, who transferred from the Ames, Iowa, CPS camp; and The Illiterati, "an avant-garde literary magazine" edited by Kemper Nomland and Kermit Sheets.⁴⁵ Publication of The Untide did not last long, and the name transferred to a book press that was begun at Waldport. "In January, 1943," wrote one CO who was involved with the Fine Arts Program,

three men at Waldport decided the camp needed a newssheet and commentary more informal and biting than the official camp organ, THE TIDE. They issued, therefore, a little half-size, mimeographed weekly, given to agitation, horseplay and wit. It was called UNTIDE, in derision of its big brother.... From time to time it published creative material and, in February, began the serialized publication of TEN WAR ELEGIES, by William Everson, with illustrations by Kemper Nomland, Jr.... That was the beginning of the Untide Press.⁴⁶

Being able to express their beliefs in the publications was a powerful experience. "I think," wrote William Everson, "those of us of Untide rank among our biggest moments in CPS the completion of a book, and the very real sense of achievement it occasions."⁴⁷

Participants in the Fine Arts Program produced several plays, including Aria da Capo, by Edna St. Vincent Millay; The Mikado in CPS, Kermit Sheets's rewrite of the Gilbert and Sullivan play; and Tennessee Justice, Martin Ponch's dramatization of a trial of African American pacifists. The experimental program was successful enough that it attracted the interest of non-CO artists, including poet Kenneth Patchen (the Untide Press would publish his An Astonished Eye Looks Out of the Air) and painter Morris Graves, who lived in Seattle. William Everson, the first director of the Fine Arts Program, invited Graves to visit, and he moved to the Oregon coast for several months. He built a shack at the beach's edge, painted, occasionally visited Camp 56, and entertained COs as guests.

Adrian Wilson, a CO who transferred to Camp 56 to join the fine arts group, described one of the program's discussion sessions:

... the talk was highly spiritual, [William] Everson leading on the methods of writing or being creative, why we feel inspired or obsessed, and the relationship between the artist and the mystic. I took the point of view of the straight mechanist; he left room for the freedom of the will and God. The others, including Manche Langley ... introduced objections, illustrations, and confusion.... As far as I can make out this is as close the School of Fine Arts gets to school.⁴⁸

The group spent a good deal of time talking, working to determine the role of creative expression in the ways they lived and to find the intersection between the production and study of art and their pacifist beliefs. One CO wrote in The Compass:

... in being pacifists we did not forget we were also artists. As time went on, as ... the CPS system stabilized ... and gradually permitted the opportunity for the development of group action into tangible forms ... we began to see that we, too, could consolidate ourselves, and our particular talents be drawn to a focus that could give our pacifism a breadth it could not otherwise obtain.⁴⁹

William Everson works the press at Camp 56, printing his book, The Waldport Poems.

Lewis & Clark College Special Collections, Sheets papers

CPS created a supportive environment in which the pacifist artists could explore their beliefs. They succeeded in refusing to participate in war and in forming a community dedicated to creating a more just world. In The Compass, editors published not only paintings and poems but also essays about how to create peace in the post-war world. Being gathered together and set apart from wartime society gave the group an opportunity to dedicate their daily lives to both peace and art.

But the COs were also supervised by the Forest Service and the Selective Service Board, employees of the government that had forced them to live in the camps and work without pay. On December 13, 1944, Everson wrote a short history of the Untide Press in which he stated that "the policy of no-pay and hard physical labor introduces the ... factor of the 'slave' psychology to the men in CPS." He continued:

... realizing the cold eye of Selective Service upon all that is produced, and the attacks by local papers charging everything up to sedition, often gives the group the feeling of being something in the nature of an underground organization. One begins to think of the writing of a poem as a subversive act, and the publishing of it a criminal one!⁵⁰

The men at Camp 56 were isolated, but they were not invisible. Dave Hall, the editor of the Lincoln County Times in Waldport, wrote front-page columns decrying the existence of the nearby camp. In one article, he targeted the Untide Press's publication of William Everson's X War Elegies, a collection of anti-war poems, declaring "some literature which was printed at Civilian Service (Conchie Camp) near Waldport ... is not an addition to the Literary World. Neither is it conducive to the Welfare of America at War."⁵¹

The Untide Press published William Everson's The Waldport Poems in 1944.

Lewis & Clark College Special Collections

It is difficult to determine whether Hall's rancorous editorials reflected the mood of the Waldport community. Interviews conducted with former COs who lived at Camp 56 suggest both tension and cooperation and tolerance between camp residents and their coastal neighbors. CO Robert Lam said, "you could never tell how the local people's attitude was. Just like the general public, different people had different attitudes." Charles Jehnzen told of having hot coffee thrown in his face at a restaurant in Waldport but said that he "had a good rapport" with people in Yachats. Mark Rouch explained to an interviewer that the people in Waldport "were very standoffish, as you might expect," which Bruce Reeves echoed when he declared: "We didn't have too good of relations with the community." Russel Eisenbise said, "The first Sunday I was there I decided I would go into the town to church and received such a cold shoulder that I never went back," but Pius Gibble "managed to get to church in Waldport many Sundays."⁵² These statements provide a glimpse of the varied interactions between COs at Camp 56 and their neighbors, experiences that defy generalized conclusions about how people in Waldport and Yachats viewed the nearby CPS camp.

Vladimir Dupre, William Everson, and William Eshelman work in the print shop at CPS Camp 56. This photograph was originally published in The Compass.

Lewis & Clark College Special Collections, Sheets papers

FOR MANY OF THE MEN and women involved with the Fine Arts Program at Camp 56, their commitment to creative expression continued after the war. Broadus Earle and Warren Downs, for example, had long careers as musicians. Several of the objectors who were part of the group settled in California, where they participated in the San Francisco Renaissance, which became famous because of the work of poets such as Kenneth Rexroth and Kenneth Patchen and because of an association with the Beat movement. It was also a driving force in the avant-garde work of filmmakers such as James Broughton. Writer Kim Stafford — the son of poet William Stafford, a CO who served in CPS camps in Arkansas, California, and Illinois — concluded: "One explanation of the San Francisco 'Beatnik' Renaissance of the 1950s and 60s begins with the infusion of creativity from people ... heading south from CO Camp Angel [sic] on the Oregon Coast."⁵³

Adrian Wilson captured some of the postwar feelings of his CO cohorts in a description of a conversation he had several months after having left camp. The group was discussing the "psychology of education" and

... everybody threw in his own theory. Conversely it meant Quaker work camps, labor unions, welfare agencies, and co-ops. When it became unbearable I said. "I should like to put in a plug for the Arts, which it seems we have completely forgotten. To my mind the arts give a social criticism and an implied way of life which is the answer to many of our problems." When Anna Brinton interpreted this to mean it was a good idea to keep people amused, I said, "I don't deny that function of the arts, but I should hope their function would go far beyond that. Art, particularly its creation, gives life dedication and meaning." For the next three days people kept coming up to me saying they agreed with me one hundred percent....
I think it is high time I put my ideas into practice. I think in January I shall go to California to start a community theater and buy some land, out of which food, buildings, everything can grow. I am forgetting about the atomic bomb.⁵⁴

William Everson's War Elegies was published by the Untide Press in 1944.

Lewis & Clark College Special Collections

In California, Adrian and Joyce Wilson joined former Waldport COs Martin Ponch, Kermit Sheets, Kemper Nomland, and Tom Polk Miller. Together, they started a theater company that eventually split into the Interplayers and The Playhouse. Manche Harvey spent many years doing costuming and production work for The Playhouse, while Kermit Sheets directed plays and managed the company.⁵⁵ Despite being surrounded by fellow pacifists, Wilson's promise to forget about the atomic bomb was likely impossible to keep. The threat of violence during the Cold War fueled the desire among postwar pacifists to reinvent the world just as actual war had done on the Oregon coast. By acting on beliefs that placed them firmly in the minority of American society, Manche Harvey, Kermit Sheets, and the friends they worked with at Waldport created communities that placed both art and their opposition to war at the center.

Civilian Public Service fostered the growth of unconventional communities that focused on peace-making, individual freedom, and consensus governance. In that way, the program fulfilled the goals of church leaders who lobbied to form alternatives to prison and noncombatant military service for conscience objectors. Camp 56 was a crucible for many of the artist COs and the women who gathered with them on the Oregon coast. They confirmed their commitments to both peace and art, establishing a wartime community that looked beyond the distinctions of "axis" and "ally" to search for an understanding of humanity through creative expression. "For the artists who were seriously into their field, it was a safety valve for them to be able to do this at camp," Manche concluded. "I still marvel at what good quality work was turned out."⁵⁶

For the people involved with the fine arts at Waldport, the exploration of creative expression in a community that was committed to pacifism was the legacy of World War II. The pacifist artists wrote and printed volumes about their beliefs, documentation that contains valuable material about how they thought about peace and art, and the connection between the two. The books and journals they published are filled with visual art and literature that illustrate a group of people thinking intently about their work and how it related to the world around them. Recent oral history interviews confirm that members of the group continued to hold the same beliefs and to act on them throughout their lives. Rather than being content to resist war simply by not participating, Manche Harvey, Kermit Sheets, and the people with whom they worked at Waldport "fashioned upon an idea that is dynamic, visionary" and "worked for ends that are of the utmost human consequence" by opposing war and creating art.

Note: The drawings used to illustrate this article were designed by Kemper Nomland and published in William Everson, War Elegies (Waldport, Ore.: The Untide Press, 1944). They are used by permission of Lewis & Clark College.

Notes

^1. William Everson, "Vocational Art and Community Living," Folder "Education," Box 2, in Camp Waldport Records, 1943–1945, University of Oregon Special Collections, Eugene [hereafter Camp Waldport Records].

^2. At the time, Sheets was probably in a relationship with filmmaker James Broughton. See Stan Brakhage, Film at Wit's End: Eight Avant-Garde Filmmakers (Kingston, N.Y.: McPherson and Co., 1989). Among the movies Broughton produced was Looney Tom, The Happy Lover (1951) in which Sheets played the leading role of Looney Tom.

^3. Manche Langley had married Bob Harvey, a painter and writer who grew up on the East Coast. They met at the Waldport CPS camp.

^4. The Compass (Summer/Fall 1944), 21. Copy in Box 1, Folder 1, William Eshelman Papers, SFM 105, University of Oregon Special Collections, Eugene [hereafter William Eshelman Papers].

^5. Harvey interview, Tape 5, Side A, June 5, 2004; Rachel Waltner Goossen, Women Against the Good War: Conscientious Objection and Gender on the American Homefront, 1941–1947 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 2.

^6. See Mulford Q. Sibley and Philip E. Jacob, Conscription of Conscience: The American State and the Conscientious Objector, 1940–1947 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1952), esp. Chap. 2.

^7. Annals of Congress: The Debates and Proceedings of the United States, vol. 1, 1st Cong., 1st sess., June 1979 (Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1834), 431–2; quoted in Lillian Schlissel, ed., Conscience in America: A Documentary History of Conscientious Objection in America, 1757–1967 (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1968), 47.

^8. Sibley and Jacob, Conscription of Conscience, 10–11.

^9. For example, Hutterites Joseph and Michael Hofer were sentenced to thirty-seven years for refusing military service during World War I. They died while in prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Their deaths brought national attention to the harassment that many draft-age members of the historic peace churches experienced during the war. Donald B. Kraybill and Carl F. Bowman, On the Backroad to Heaven: Old Order Hutterites, Mennonites, Amish, and Brethren (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 30. See also Sibley and Jacob, Conscription of Conscience, 5.

^10. Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, Section 5(g).

^11. On CPS, see Peter Brock and Nigel Young, Pacifism in the Twentieth Century (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999); Goossen, Women Against the Good War; Heather Frazer and John O'Sullivan, "We Have Just Begun to Not Fight": An Oral History of Conscientious Objectors in Civilian Public Service During World War II (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996); Richard C. Anderson, Peace Was in Their Hearts: Conscientious Objectors in World War II (Scottsdale, Penn.: Herald Press, 1994); Paul Wilhelm, Civilian Public Servants: A Report on 210 World War II Conscientious Objectors, rev. ed. (Washington, D.C.: National Interreligious Service Board for Conscientious Objectors, c. 1994); Cynthia Eller, Conscientious Objectors and the Second World War (New York: Praeger, 1991); Albert N. Keim, The CPS Story: An Illustrated History of Civilian Public Service (Intercourse, Pennsylvania: Good Books, 1990); John O'Sullivan and Alan M. Meckler, eds., The Draft and Its Enemies: A Documentary History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974); and Leslie Eisan, Pathways of Peace: A History of the Civilian Public Service Program Administered by the Brethren Service Committee (Elgin, Ill.: Brethren Publishing House, 1948).

^12. Richard Mills, "History of the Founding and Organization of the Waldport Camp, C.P.S. Camp #56, Waldport, Lincoln County, Oregon," December 31, 1944, Folder "Camp Waldport," Box 2, Camp Waldport Records.

^13. For statistical information on the number of men in CPS according to denomination, see Keim, The CPS Story, 33–34.

^14. Kermit Sheets, interview by Katrine Barber, San Francisco, California, March 12, 2005, Tape 1, Side A.

^15. Sheets interview.

^16. Katrine Barber, Jo Ogden, and Eliza Jones, ed. and comp., CPS 56: An Oral History Project, World War II Conscientious Objectors and the Waldport, Oregon Civilian Public Service Camp (Portland, Ore.: Siuslaw National Forest and Portland State University), 221.

^17. William R. Marty, "The Liberal Protestant Peace Movement Between World Wars," in Proclaim Peace: Christian Pacifism from Unexpected Quarters, ed. Theron F. Schlabach and Richard T. Hughes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 187–8.

^18. Brock and Young, Pacifism in the Twentieth Century, 113.

^19. Manche Harvey, interview by Eliza Jones, Yachats, Oregon, June 5, 2004, Tape 4, Side A.

^20. Report of the Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry (the Nye Report), U.S. Cong., Senate, 74^th Congress, 2^nd sess., February 24, 1936, 3–13, available at http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/nye.htm (accessed November 21, 2006).

^21. Harvey interview, June 5, 2004, Tape 4, Side A.

^22. Manche Harvey, interview by Eliza Jones, Yachats, Oregon, May 26, 2004, Tape 3, Side A.

^23. Harvey Interview, June 5, 2004, Tape 4, Side B.

^24. Harvey Interview, May 26, 2004, Tape 3, Side B. In this quote, Manche hints at a discomfort that her co-worker felt about revealing that her husband was a conscientious objector. Harvey's story also suggests a hidden group of pacifists, especially women, who were not drafted and who, therefore, left behind almost no statistical record of their anti-war beliefs. See Goossen, Women Against the Good War.

^25. Harvey interview, June 5, 2004, Tape 4, Side A.

As young girl, Manche Langley (Harvey) posed for this photograph.

Courtesy of the author

^26. Kermit Sheets, interview by Jackie Renn and Rhonda Refsnider, May 15, 2003, Siuslaw National Forest, Tape 1, Side A. Sheets was interviewed by volunteers as part of a U.S. Forest Service Passports in Time project. Interviews compiled as part of this project were donated to the Lewis and Clark College Archives and Special Collections to be included in the Civilian Public Service Historical Collection, Portland, Oregon. There was some debate about whether to house the school at Waldport or at the camp near Santa Barbara, California, where poet William Stafford was stationed. Waldport was selected because COs there already had a printing press. See William Eshelman, "Words on the Origin of the Untide Press," December 13, 1944, William Eshelman Papers, University of Oregon Special Collections, SFM 105, Box 1, Folder 1. See also Lee Bartlett, William Everson: The Life of Brother Antoninus (New York: New Directions Press, 1988), 59–60.

^27. The camp number indicated that it the fifty-sixth CPS camp to open. A few CPS camps focused on specific issues or ideas. Objectors and their sponsoring churches at Wellston, Michigan, and Gatlinburg, Tennessee, for example, started schools in cooperative living and race relations.

^28. CPS 56: An Oral History Project, 177.

^29. Mills, "History," 5.

^30. Sibley and Jacob, Conscription of Conscience, 121–2.

^31. Camp Waldport Constitution, Folder 4, "CPS 56 Constitution, Minutes, Rosters," Box 2, Camp Waldport Records.

^32. "Camp Roster, 1 March 1943," Folder 1, "Camp Rosters," Box 1, Camp Waldport Records.

^33. "Educational Report, July and August 1943," Folder 2, "Education Director: Reports, correspondence, statistics," Box 2, and "Statistics on CPS men, Camp No. 56," September 30, 1944, Folder 1 "Camp Rosters," Box 1, Camp Waldport Records.

^34. Harvey interview, June 5, 2004, Tape 4, Side B.

^35. Marvin Snell, "Meeting minutes regarding kitchen-camp relations," Folder 4, "CPS 56 Constitution, Minutes, Rosters," Box 2, Camp Waldport Records.

^36. Adrian Wilson to his family, December 7, 1944, in Joyce Lancaster Wilson, ed., Two Against the Tide: A Conscientious Objector in World War II, Selected Letters, 1941–1948 (Austin: W. Thomas Taylor, 1990).

^37. CPS 56: An Oral History Project, 141.

^38. Open letter to Waldport community, March 1944, Folder 1, "The Untide Press: Publications," Box 3, Camp Waldport Records.

^39. CPS 56: An Oral History Project, 111.

^40. Ibid., 15.

^41. See Wilson, Two Against the Tide, 125; and Russell Eisenbise, interview, and Nomland, interview, in Camp 56: An Oral History Project, available at http://www.ccrh.org/oral/co.pdf, pp. 48, 185 (accessed October, 6, 2005).

^42. Camp 56: An Oral History Project, 218–19.

^43. Charles E. Davis, interview by Kathleen Sander, Rhonda Refsnider, and Kate Bauer, May 3, 2002, Tape 1, Side A, Siuslaw National Forest, Passports in Time Project. An edited transcript of the interview is in Camp 56: An Oral History Project.

^44. Harvey interview, July 9, 2004, Tape 9, Side A.

^45. Paul Merchant and Jeremy Skinner, Glen Coffield, William Everson, & Publishing at Waldport, exhibit catalog (Portland, Ore.: Lewis and Clark Special Collections, 2003), 10, 12; Wilson, Two Against the Tide, 98.

^46. "Arts at Waldport: a venture in creation," Folder 1, "The Compass" (Summer/Fall 1944), 26, William Eshelman Papers.

^47. William Everson to Will Rawson, December 13, 1944, Box 1, Folder 1, William Eshelman Papers. Untide Press continued to operate in California until 1951. See Merchant and Skinner, Glen Coffield, William Everson, & Publishing at Waldport, 14. Copies of the Press's publications are held by Special Collections, Lewis & Clark College, Portland.

^48. Adrian Wilson to his family, July 30, 1944, in Wilson, Two Against the Tide, 83.

^49. [William Everson], The Compass (Summer/Fall 1944), 21, Box 1, Folder 1, William Eshelman Papers.

^50. William Eshelman, "Words on the Origin of the Untide Press," December 13, 1944, Box 1, Folder 1, pg. 1, William Eshelman Papers.

^51. Dave Hall, "Front Page Editorial!" Lincoln County Times (Waldport), March 16, 1944. The Untied Press published Everson's Ten War Elegies in 1943 and his War Elegies in 1944, after the poet added an eleventh poem to the series.

^52. Camp 56: An Oral History Project, 131, 104, 205, 202, 82; Russell Eisenbise, interview by U.S. Forest Service volunteers, May 14, 2003.

^53. Kim Stafford, "Introduction," in William Stafford, Down in My Heart, 3d ed. (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1998), xvi–xvii. See also Michael Davidson, The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

^54. Wilson, Two Against the Tide, 154.

^55. Harvey interview, June 25, 2004, Tape 7, Side A.

^56. Harvey interview, June 5, 2004, Tape 4 Side B, and July 9, 2004, Tape 9, Side A.

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