The Great Lakes Zephyr - Wind Energy & Hydrogen Journal

Published as "From U.S. doctrine to political reality" on Tuesday, April 20, 2004, by the Minnesota Daily (www.mndaily.com)

Published with author's permission and with pride here at the Great Lakes Zephyr...

Peace as an American doctrine: An indispensable civic ideal
By Joel T. Helfrich

Peace now!

In front of hundreds of delegates gathered at the Minnesota DFL Party's 5th Congressional District Convention on Saturday, Rep. Martin Olav Sabo (D-MN) shocked the crowd by stating that he would support a bill (H.R.2459) in the House of Representatives that calls for the creation of a U.S. Department of Peace. The bill, authored by presidential candidate Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) and introduced to Congress in July 2001, will establish a cabinet-level department in the executive branch. The bill also calls for the creation of the Peace Academy for peace education and the designation of the first day of every year as Peace Day in the United States.

If our nation's elected leaders can craft a Department of Homeland Security in a few months, we can surely create a Department of Peace in the same amount of time. In order to make peace a matter of urgency and an indispensable concept in contemporary American life, however, we need to draw critical wisdom from the founding fathers of Revolutionary America.

In 1792, the blueprint for the Department of Peace was suggested by two highly patriotic humanitarian reformers: Benjamin Banneker, a noted African American scientist, surveyor, and editor, and Benjamin Rush, a medical doctor and educator who signed the Declaration of Independence and trained Meriwether Lewis prior to the Lewis and Clark expedition.

A friend of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, Rush published articles on, among other topics, anti-slavery and capital punishment, education for women, and patriotism. In fact, he supplied his friend Thomas Paine with the title to Common Sense. Rush served as physician general during the Revolutionary War, but in 1778 he resigned his military office in protest of the treatment of soldiers in hospitals.

Among other contributions, Banneker published Banneker's Almanac for which he made all astronomical calculations, tide predictions, and weather forecasts. In his 1793 almanac, he included his correspondence with Thomas Jefferson, as well as an unsigned document (later attributed to Rush) titled "A Plan of a Peace Office for the United States."

When Banneker and Rush came together in Philadelphia in 1792 they discussed the extreme drain that war has on a nation, its resources, and its people. They were understandably concerned that although the U.S. government had established a Department of War, it made no provisions for a Department of Peace. Their goal to create a new cabinet post was not some pie-in-the-sky idea. In the text of "A Plan," Rush wrote,

In order more deeply to affect the minds of the citizens of the United States with the blessings of peace, by contrasting them with the evils of war, let the following inscriptions be painted upon the sign which is placed over the door of the War Office:

1. An office for butchering the human species.
2. A Widow and Orphan making office.
3. A broken bone making office.
4. A Wooden leg making office.
5. An office for the creating of public and private vices.
6. An office for creating a public debt.
7. An office for creating speculators, stock Jobbers, and Bankrupts.
8. An office for creating famine.
9. An office for creating pestilential diseases.
10. An office for creating poverty, and the destruction of liberty, and national happiness.

Rush continued, "In the lobby of this office let there be painted representations of all the common military instruments of death, also human skulls, broken bones, unburied and putrefying dead bodies, hospitals crowded with sick and wounded Soldiers, villages on fire, mothers in besieged towns eating the flesh of their children, ships sinking in the ocean, rivers dyed with blood, and extensive plains without a tree or fence, or any object, but the ruins of deserted farm houses." The final sentence of "A Plan" stated: "Above this group of woeful figures let the following words be inserted, in red characters to represent human blood, "NATIONAL GLORY.""

We should be alarmed by the rate at which our military and defense-related budgets are expanding, just as Banneker and Rush were appalled by the conditions created by the warfare state of post-Revolutionary America. Although their "Plan" has been rendered invisible, it is time to transform this U.S. doctrine into concrete political reality and make it central to our everyday life.

Joel T. Helfrich (helf0010@umn.edu) is an activist, teacher, PhD candidate in history at the University of Minnesota, board member for Environmental Justice Advocates of Minnesota, Kucinich delegate to Minnesota?s DFL convention, and columnist for the Minnesota Daily.

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*Note from Dan Stafford*
Please visit http://www.kucinich.us to learn more about this issue. A peaceful environment is a sound environment.