No wonder that while it was widely read, The Peaceable Kingdom was also widely panned, especially by some old-line Quakers in the Philadelphia area. (I mean, good heavens--Margaret Fell, a married woman, thinking lustful thoughts about George Fox?? How would you fit that into a sedate memorial pageant at Cape May?).

A few years ago, de Hartog told a Houston Friend, Ann Sieber, who was writing a profile of him that "when The Peaceable Kingdom was published, he was likened by the Quaker establishment to a friendly dog that comes uninvited to a family picnic – well-intentioned enough, but still capable of knocking all the carefully prepared food onto the floor with a sweep of the tail." (Sieber: 25)

Jan was being generous in that description. I know some Philadelphia neo-Orthodox Friends who still can’t discuss The Peaceable Kingdom without turning red in the face and showing signs of apoplexy. And it’s not hard to see why: a hundred or a thousand people have read of de Hartog’s rollicking, bigger than life liberal Fox for every one who searched out their querulous caviling about it in Quaker Religious Thought.

But there’s one other thing to note about de Hartog’s opus. "In his lectures on Quaker history," Ann Sieber reports, "Jan has waged a sly campaign to shift the credit for much of Quaker faith and practice from Fox to Fell." (Sieber: 40); and she also notes that in The Peaceable Kingdom it is Margaret Fell who is by far a more fully-developed character, while Fox remains something of a mystical wraith.

Jan was pointing toward a feminist reinterpretation of this history, one that scholars began fleshing out some years later. Here was another signal that the humanist phase of the liberal Age of Amnesia was beginning to show signs of strain, under an accumulating series of external pressures. Some of these were:

– the general "slough of despond" that many activist Friends, like others, fell into after the end of the Sixties and the Vietnam War;

– the rise of feminist scholarship, with its willingness to dig up and speak about aspects of our early history previously overlooked;

– the emergence and acceptance of lesbians and gays in the liberal stream; which was followed soon after by

– the impact of the AIDS epidemic, which left many in the FGC liberal constituency, straight and gay, facing a choice between yielding to despair or digging deep into spiritual resources of their tradition that had been neglected or taken for granted.

A comprehensive survey of current scholarship is well beyond my competence–not to mention your patience–but it seems evident to me that there has been a lot of it, and in addition the liberal constituency has felt strong currents of spiritual renewal and deepening in recent years, for which I am grateful. It has greatly reassured me, and greatly confounded others, to see that the liberal stream, despite its paucity of and superficiality of thought, was still vouchsafed the spiritual resources to survive its own folly and even flourish in spite of it. I guess with God all things truly are possible, even if many of us still don’t believe in Him. Or Her.

On the intellectual front of this renewal, women and outsiders seem to have been have been some of the chief contributors. Here I am reminded of Howard Brinton’s comment that he expected the revival of American Quakerism to come from the margins, "and not by the old stock which is so often decaying at the root." (Le Shana: 147) A few of these have had the comfort of stable academic appointments.

But for others, the vocation of the scholar of Quakerism within the liberal Quaker fold has been marked by penury, neglect and indifference. I well remember, while on the Pendle Hill staff, the plight of Douglas Gwyn, already an established, productive scholar who had brought keen insight to many vexed Quaker issues. He had to mop floors and cut grass to earn his keep there, while haunting the Friends Historical Library in his spare hours, and writing important new books–for the publication of which Pendle Hill to its shame paid him not a dime. I not only admired his devotion; I was humbled by his habitual cheerfulness despite all. Fortunately, Doug has gone on to better things, but he had to leave the country to do it, at Woodbrooke. But he, and we, deserved better.

But God’s rain falls on the just and the unjust, and Friends have been much favored in the current generation of scholars. I want to pay special tribute to two, whose work bears directly on our subject, and who are also among my personal heroes:

First, Larry Ingle: To me it was a moral as well as a historiographical landmark that while researching something else, Larry took the time to notice how few of the original records of the Great Separation of 1827 had ever been carefully and dispassionately examined, even by those who had written books about it. But instead of covering this up, he saw a historian’s target of opportunity and went for it, producing Quakers In Conflict. And then he did this a second time, when he uncovered equal, and much less forgivable neglect of large blocks of original sources by and about Fox, and produced in First Among Friends the first scholarly biography of Fox in 300 years.

What a refreshing and productive contrast to the diffidence of so much of the Quaker historical establishment. In and around Philadelphia I have so often heard excuses about family sensitivities and institutional interests as reasons for not digging into and writing candidly about the lives and works, the lights and shadows of some of the major figures and forces in the Society in the past century. (Thank goodness Anthony Manousos – another outsider--is going ahead with his work on the Brintons, regardless of what some folks in London or Philadelphia might think.)

And among the newest and best of these contributors is the other writer I want to recognize, Meredith Baldwin Weddle. Her still-new book, Walking in the Way of Peace, did not shrink from exposing the traditional accounts of the Rhode Island Quaker government’s neutrality in King Philip’s War of 1765, as the outright falsehoods that they largely were. (Among these discredited accounts, by the way, was one that I published in 1975.)

Why does Weddle’s work matter? Because Rhode Island was the first place in which Friends rose from powerlessness to sit in the seats of civic power. They were thus the first Friends called upon to put what we now call the Peace Testimony into practice as "magistrates." Weddle showed that, far from being neutral and pacifistic, as the traditional accounts said, they showed their Quakerism first by enacting the first provision for conscientious objectors; and then, by affirming the passage in Romans 13 that the magistrate "does not bear the sword in vain," and joined a bloody successful war on the Indians.

If this seems an obvious contradiction, let me hasten to point out, as does Weddle, that the 1660 Peace Declaration likewise affirmed the same passage from Romans, without attempting to resolve the seeming tension between it and the oft-quoted insistence that "we [Friends] utterly deny all outward wars and fightings . . . ."

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