29 March 2016
4 hours

Continuation Brünn-Harris-Watts Collection
Archive Numbers 154-177 (1 box). The cover states: ‘Dear Friends’ issues / 1968-1976.
Over the years the Dear Friends Newsletter has been issued by the New Mobilization Committee, the GI Taskforce, American Friends Service Committee and The Military Counselor. The objective of the newsletter was for service men and women to leave the army by invoking the conscientious objection clause.

Helen Garvy Papers
The archive has not been indexed. It consists of six large archive boxes.
Archive Box 1.
Archive box 1 contains 4 folders.
Folder I. The cover states: Chiefly Northern Student Movement / 1962-1964.
The folder contains material on the negro movement, racial discrimination and education and equity

Folder II. The cover states: Civil rights / 1962-1964.
- “Direct Action”
Carbon copy. Author: Tom Barton. No date [ca. 1962]. Format: A4. 7 pages.
Inventory of the various meanings and definitions of direct action, how it can be used by the peace movement, what it can and cannot accomplish, whether it actually works, whether it does more harm than good and whether it should be violent or nonviolent.
Regarding the latter question, Barton offers an overview of the possible positions in the violent versus nonviolent debate. The first position is a principal one (“Violence is morally wrong and this on principle must not occur in direct action. It would be particularly unfortunate in the peace movement, because the peace movement is opposed to violence and mass death.”), the second is a practical one (nonviolence is what the modern world is headed for anyway), the third is a tactical one (“Nonviolence is a tactical necessity”), the fourth is a limited acceptance of violence (“Violence is permissible in direct action only to defend oneself against attack) and the fifth is a principal acceptance of violence to fight the ‘structural’ violence of state suppression (“When this occurs their only defense is to fight back […] A certain amount of violence is justified during direct action projects, and always justified defensively. This is a necessary preparation for when the serious business of revolution has to occur. […] Nonviolence is a sign of weakness and can neither achieve change nor gather the support of the people.”).
Which of the positions you choose for is, according to Barton, largely dependent on whether the peace movement is in any way successful in growing from a student movement to a broad mass movement that includes the labor movement. 

Folder III and IV contain the working papers from the First Intercollegiate Conference on Disarmament and Arms Control (1964).

Archive Box 2. The cover states: Students for a Democratic Society / 1963-1965.
The box contains mostly documents and reports on poverty and social and economic exclusion.
- “Report on the Peace Research and Education Program”
Carbon copy. No author. No date [ca. 1964]. Format: A4. 5 pages.
Evaluation of the Peace Research and Education Program (PREP), which officially saw life in February 1963. “It was designed to stimulate continuously activity for peace on American campuses, by involving students and faculty in peace research, by fostering the establishment of peace related courses in college curricula and by stimulating student-faculty involvement in peace politics, particularly electoral action.” So far PREP had been successful at building a large mailing list and by issuing – to date – two newsletters and several publications: Peace, Power and the University, Toward an Effective Peace Program and The New Possibilities for Peace. Unfortunately none of these publications are included in this box.
The report criticizes PREP for not having been able to reach out to a wider audience. 

Archive Box 3. The cover states: Students for a Democratic Society / 1963-1965.
Archive box 3 contains 4 folders.
Folder II. The cover states ERAP [Economic Research and Action Program]/ June 6-11, 1964.
- “The Peace movement: New Possibilities”
Carbon copy. Authors: Tom Hayden and Richard Flacks. Date: 1964. Format: A4. 11 pages.
The article offers a short history of the postwar US peace movement and notices a new élan in, and new relevance of the peace movement ‘thanks to’ the threat of a nuclear holocaust.
The authors differentiate between the objectives of this new peace movement. Is the goal the abolition of war as an instrument of foreign policy (which can be reached through stabilizing US-Soviet relations)? Or is its goal much farther-reaching, i.e. is it “the liberation of mankind from the oppression of poverty, tyranny and backward dependence?” If so, “it is clear that this administration deliberately undertakes policies which perpetuate and exacerbate these conditions in many parts of the world. So, for disarmament and peace to be of any true value you’ll need the emergence of a new political movement in the US. It would be a movement first targeted against poverty and economic injustice. It would be dedicated to the creation of a democratic society, in terms of both the equality of rights enjoyed by its citizens and of the quality of the participation in its political life,” which should form the basis of a peaceful society.

Folder IV. The cover states: Working papers of the Conference on Community Movements and Economic Issues / April 10-12, 1964.
Folder IV contains three subfolders.
Subfolder 3:
- “The Care and Feeding of Power Structures”
Carbon copy. Author: Jack Minnis. Date: 1964. Format: A4. 7 pages.
Jack Minnis was the research director of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.
In his article Minnis offers local activists a recipe for creating social change through mapping the local power structure in order to use this knowledge to ‘nudge’ corporations to improve their behavior. It is a very practical (and by now very familiar) way of affecting social change nonviolently.
Minnis uses the example of how to force companies into desegregation, but it can be applied to any number of issues. “The men we are approaching can be depended upon to act only when they see a probability of diminished profit if they do not. And when they do act their first instinct will be to remove the pressure by attacking its source, rather than by effecting change in the society.” 
To gain the upper hand one will have to map the local power structure in which the companies operates. The first step is to visit the local Chamber of Commerce and to list corporations with many employers. The next step is to look these up in Moody’s Industrial Manual. Cross reference your findings with Poor’s Registry of Executives and Director’s and you’ll find the names and addresses of the CEO’s. Next, take the Yellow Pages and make a list of all the local banks. Through the Chain Banking Study you can determine the stock ownership of the bank and whether control is held locally or not. Do the same for all local utility companies, the publishers of the local newspapers and some of the largest department stores. Cross reference those with ownership information on valuable commercial property. And again with legal records on civil and criminal litigation. 
The resulting power structure, however opaque it may seem at first, will serve to put pressure on companies, for instance by buying stocks in a particular company and to threaten to raise damning or compromising policy decisions at the yearly stockholder meeting, or by unveiling awkward information that companies would prefer to suppress.