Camp William James was opened in 1940 by Dartmouth College professor, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, as a center for training youth for leadership in the Civilian Conservation Corps, which had been inaugurated in 1933 by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was located near Tunbridge, Vermont. Funding for the camp was withdrawn only a year after its founding, along with the rest of the CCC, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, which brought the United States into World War II. [1]
The camp's namesake and inspiration was the pragmatic philosopher, William James, who delivered an influential address at Stanford University in 1906 with the title, "The Moral Equivalent of War". "A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy", James argued, "Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built." To devote oneself to these martial virtues in the service of others, taking up the menial tasks of society like an army at war for the sake of peace, is a force equal to war, James argued. Rosenstock-Huessy took up this theme, calling the young men who enlisted in the Camp program, "soldiers".
In 1945, Rosenstock-Huessy wrote in his book, The Christian Future:
Our peacemakers and planners must be supported by camps all over the globe, where youth, recruited from every town and village all over the globe, serves. This service must implement the global organization as the young must experience what the old are planning before the old can have any authority.
Among those who had joined the short-lived work at Camp William James was a Dartmouth student, Page Smith, who later became an important American historian at the University of California, Santa Cruz. While on the faculty at UCLA, in 1962, Smith wrote a letter to Hubert Humphrey proposing an international version of the Camp William James experiment in the "moral equivalent of war". Humphrey passed along the idea to the US President, John F. Kennedy, and by 1963, the Peace Corps was created.
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Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy was a historian and social philosopher, whose work spanned the disciplines of history, theology, sociology, linguistics and beyond. Born in Berlin, Germany into a non-observant Jewish family, the son of a prosperous banker, he converted to Christianity in his late teens, and thereafter the interpretation and reinterpretation of Christianity was a consistent theme in his writings. He met and married Margrit Hüssy in 1914. In 1925, the couple legally combined their names. They had a son, Hans, in 1921.
Freya von Moltke was a German American lawyer and participant in the anti-Nazi opposition group, the Kreisau Circle, with her husband, Helmuth James von Moltke. During World War II, her husband acted to subvert German human-rights abuses of people in territories occupied by Germany and became a founding member of the Kreisau Circle, whose members opposed the government of Adolf Hitler.
Charles Page Smith was an American historian, professor, author, and newspaper columnist. He served in the United States Army during World War II, for which he received a Purple Heart. He was also a community activist for the homeless in Santa Cruz, California.
Out of Revolution is a book by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973), German social philosopher. The book counters conventional historiography as a “theory of history: how history should be understood, how historians should write about it,” as Harold J. Berman wrote in the introduction to the book. Page Smith, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Lewis Mumford all wrote of the significance of this work having new insights on the history of Western Civilization.
Speech and Reality is a book by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888–1973), German social philosopher and is an English-language introduction to Rosenstock-Huessy’s German-language book, Soziologie. It comprises seven essays that he wrote and revised between 1935 and 1955. Rosenstock-Huessy introduces a new form of social research in which the human subject, as speaker, displaces the subject of orthodox sociology, wherein the subject can be mute. Speech and Reality is an English-language introduction to Rosenstock-Huessy’s Soziologie (sociology) and his method of inquiry for the social sciences, which is based on grammar. Using grammar as a tool, Rosenstock-Huessy describes the preconditions of anarchy, revolution, decadence, and war. John Macquarrie emphasized the importance of Rosenstock-Huessy's language-based methods and Peter Leithart cited the scope of his thinking across the depth and breadth of society.
I Am an Impure Thinker is a book by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973), German social philosopher and is an English-language introduction to Rosenstock-Huessy’s German-language book, Soziologie. It is a collection of essays, which represents an accessible introduction to Rosenstock-Huessy’s thought. The "impure thinker" title reflects the author’s escape from the bounds set by academic tradition, his belief that thought must be accompanied by passionate convictions and engagement, and that sterile intellect is a disease. While apparently unrelated, the essays nevertheless have an underlying unity, which runs through his discussion of the concepts of William James, the Gospels, the Egyptian symbol of Ka, and other uncommon sources. Together the essays contribute to the discovery of a post-theological language. They answer Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s question: “How can we speak of God to modern man who ‘has come of age?’” It has been recognized as a summary of Rosenstock-Huessy's insights into Western culture by such thinkers as W. H. Auden, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin E. Marty, and Harold J. Berman.
Hans Philipp Ehrenberg was a German Jewish philosopher and theologian. One of the co-founders of the Confessing Church, he was forced to emigrate to England because of his Jewish ancestry and his opposition to Nazism.
The Moral Equivalent of War speech was a speech in which US President Jimmy Carter addressed the people of the United States on April 18, 1977.
Norman Fiering is an American historian, and Director and Librarian, Emeritus, of the John Carter Brown Library.
Terry Allan Simmons was a Canadian-American lawyer and cultural geographer, and the founder of the British Columbia Sierra Club. In this role, he participated in the Don't Make A Wave Committee, understood as the origin of the environmental organization Greenpeace.
A basic source for the history of the Camp is Jack Preiss, CAMP WILLIAM JAMES (Essex, VT: Argo Books, 1978, 272 pp.