 We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These words from the Declaration of Independence are familiar to many of us, and yet it took 143 years for women to get the right to vote and 189 years for black people to get the right to vote. And still today, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are still only words for many people. Here in Boston, life expectancy varies by 30 years depending on where you live. In Roxbury, with many poor and black people, life expectancy is 59 years. In the back bay, wealthy and mostly white life expectancy is 91 years. It's tough to have liberty when you are in prison. The United States incarcerates 716 people for every 100,000 people. Our rate of incarceration is more than five times higher than most countries in the world. Millions of people in our country don't have health care, a decent job, good education, a home they can afford, and that makes it pretty hard to pursue happiness. So on this show, you are going to meet people who are making it possible to have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. People today who are making the words of the Declaration of Independence come true. Hello, my name is Michael Jacoby Brown, and I'm your host for We Hold These Truths. And today, we are very lucky to have with us John Wooding. John is the author of a wonderful new book I've just read called The Power of Nonviolence, The Enduring Legacy of Richard Gregg. John is a emeritus professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, and we're very honored to have John Wooding, our guest today, author of this terrific new book about Richard Gregg, probably one of the most important people you've never heard of. So, Professor Wooding, John, could you tell us who Richard Gregg is and why he's important right now for America and the world? Yeah, happy to do that. And Michael, thank you for having me here. It's an honor to be on your show, on your program. Richard Gregg, you've never heard of. I had never heard of him six or seven years ago. It turns out that Richard Gregg was an American, labor lawyer, and who left the United States in 1925 to go to be one of the first Americans to live and study with Mahatma Gandhi and his ashram in India. He was a farmer in part. Gregg did some farming before he left, but he really had no background in the kinds of work that Gandhi developed, and he knew if he found out about Gandhi almost by accident. He was actually in a bookstore, which is a good place to be, picked up a book that was about Gandhi's activities in India back in the early 1900s, and decided he would give up his life in the United States and go and live and work in India left in 1925 and arrived in Gandhi's ashram in January of 1926 and lived there for four years. I'll get into the story later, but Gregg became a noted pacifist. He wrote a book called The Power of Nonviolence, which had an enormous influence on the pacifist movement and later on on civil rights and Martin Luther King. We can perhaps get to that at the moment, but that's who fundamentally who he was. Okay, and how did this book get started? I know you had a meeting with a friend of yours and you talked about it a little in the book, but it might be interesting for our listeners to hear a little bit about how you started to write this important book. Yeah, thanks Michael. I mean, it's one of those silly things that happened all of us, I guess. I've got a friend, a colleague, we were getting to know each other down in New Mass Boston, a professor of education down there. It works a lot on civic engagement. We were just over coffee talking about our biographies a little bit as you do. You sort of talk about your dad, and I happened to mention that my father had been a pacifist and was imprisoned in World War II because of his belief as a pacifist. The Concierge subjector, often a majority called a concierge. So I mentioned this to John and he said, well, you'd be interested in this guy Richard Gregg. I looked blankly at him because I had no idea who Richard Gregg was. And he said, well, Richard Gregg was this noted pacifist. And it so happens that I'm a personal friend of another guy, Bill Carpethwaite, who turns out as the internationally known designer of yurts living in northern Maine. And in northern Maine, John told me our whole pile of notebooks from Richard Gregg kept, and Richard Gregg was one of the first Americans to study with Gandhi became his friend. He said, since he was a pacifist, your father was a pacifist, would you be interested in looking at these things? I said, yeah, I would be. John went up to northern Maine and got 50 or more moldy old notebooks written by Richard Gregg over 30 odd years during his time in India then back in the United States. And as I say in my book, Bill, the really well-trained academic I am, I went out and googled Richard Gregg and find out that this guy actually played a pretty significant role in the development of pacifism in the work of the civil rights movement and his legacy in not only in that area, but in advocating for sustainability, organic farming, environmental justice, and in particular, promoting an idea about how we think about resisting violent attacks by aggressors and oppressors. So the story is pretty interesting. I got pictures in a book of me grabbing these old notebooks. And eventually, of course, I started to read the notebooks. And what he was saying, find out a lot more about him, which I can tell you in excruciating detail now, if you wish, why he is this sort of unknown figure in the whole history of the 20th century. He was only a friend of Gandhi, but he was also a friend of people like Alice Huxley and Nehru. He got to know most of the leading players in the Indian National Liberation Movement, especially the Indian Congress, the emerging Indian Congress, as they struggled with imperialism against the British. And as I said, he not only advocated peace, he did workshops. He was part of the movement of civil rights in the fifties and later in the sixties. He met Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King wrote the foreword for a new edition of the power of non-violence that came out in the early 1960s. And he has had this role in educating and understanding, and in particular, a particular perspective on how we think about passive resistance to violent action. And I can go into that if you wish. I mean, because that's kind of interesting as it was used by many of the civil rights movement. And very relevant today, as we struggle in the Black Lives Movement and against gender oppression, Asian oppression, Black oppression, and all the things that play out in America today, and how we deal with those kinds of struggles. And Greg really wrote the template for doing that. Well, I think that's important too. How does Richard Gregg in his life and his writings and what you learned about him relate to what many of us in America are dealing with today, both the potential for resisting violent attacks and having a strategy to increase equality in many ways. So where does Richard Gregg and what he stands for and what he did inform us today? Well, in a number of ways. Greg, as I said, was living in India for four and 85 years, and he returned there frequently. He became a personal friend of Gandhi. I've got some of his letters between him and Gandhi. And Gandhi relied on Gregg, too, for many of the things that he began to think about. But clearly, Gregg made it his cause, essentially, to take Gandhi's ideas and make them translatable and open and understandable and relevant to the West, particularly in the United States. Richard Gregg, he was not a socialist. He was a religious man, actually. His father was a congregational minister. But he was very antagonistic towards what he saw, all the negative consequences of rapid modern capitalist industrialization. And he felt the same way about the Soviet version of that, too. So he was a sudden nationalist. But what he set out to do was to take what Gandhi believed in, the only, essentially, it sounds terrible, now he's saying this, the peace and love are the critical components of building sustainable communities. So when he wrote The Power of Nonviolence, he not only tried to frame Gandhi's whole philosophy, there's not time to go into all of the depth of that. And it would be very boring for your audience, but probably. And there's last written about Gandhi, trust me. And I'm not a Gandhi specialist, by any means. But the idea behind this was the rejection of modern industrial capitalism, living a life of peace, more in particular, from your question, what Gregg did which was different and caused some conflict with the existing pacifist movements in the United States was he said, resisting violent oppression requires a kind of military level, try to start a treaty. You can't just go in there and say, you know, peace and love, man, don't hit me. You have to know how to deal with that. For him, the key of that process was what he called when he coined the term moral jujitsu, that an individual, for example, take the classic scene of the Selma Bridge and John Lewis being beaten up and not responding in any way to the awful, terrible consequences of that struggle. He said that moral jujitsu, which is not responding to violence, puts the attacker off balance. They don't know how to deal with that. That was one piece of it. The second was do this publicly. It's a kind of public theater. It brings condemnation to the attacker. Because you can't win. As you know, we can't. You can't win against armed military police forces. You can't win that fight. Passivism and what Greg framed was you stand there and you take it, but you get trained and know how to take that. Of course, that has to be done collectively. That was one piece. But it was deeply integrated into his belief about harmony with nature and how you live your life. He became an organic farmer later in life and worked with the great organic farmer, Scott Nearing. Scott Nearing lived the good life and they lived on an organic maple farm from Vermont. Nearing himself had been a communist and got thrown out of university because he was a communist. They worked together. Greg lived for five years on that farm. He even wrote a book about organic farming, but more importantly, after he wrote Power of Nonviolence, to combine this idea, which is deeply embedded in Gandhian thought. The way you live your life, your respect for nature is also the love of nature, which is the love of yourself and the love of your community. You can only build a nonviolent society if you have all those parts in place. Greg in the 1930s, when he was director of the Pendle Hill, which is a Quaker retreat, and Greg was not a Quaker, he wrote a book called Voluntary Simplicity. He coined this term, which you now see around. I came to the argument that peace for yourself and love for yourself can only be achieved if you live in a simplistic kind of way. He said it very clearly. I'm not talking about being a monk. I'm not talking about being ascetic. I'm talking about respect for nature, being anti-materialist, if you like, building peace within yourself, within your community, and then struggling against violent depression with this moral jiu-jitsu and this peaceful response. Clearly, this locates us not only in the question of things like local organic production, things slowly, global movements against climate change and advocacy for sustainability, but it also tells us that that's going on not simply to protect the environment, but because if we want to have better lives and better communities, it has to be something that I think is built around that respect for nature and the respect for getting rid of violence in our societies. That's why it's interesting to talk about him because he's a pivot point between Gandhi and Martin Luther King and then later movements as a day of sustainability, caring about the environment, concerned about climate change, and of course dealing with the important that comes from, that is attacks on workers, on exploitation of the third world, black lives matters, hatred against Asians, all of those kinds of things. So the power of non-violence is kind of a bible for all of that movement. So how would Richard Gregg relate to demonstrations that we have today? You mentioned the importance of training and many people may not know this, but the civil rights sit-ins were not just people showing up without any training. There were months and months, many months of training primarily by Reverend James Lawson in Tennessee before people like John Lewis, like Diane Nash and others engaged in that kind of moral jujitsu that you mentioned. So what would Richard Gregg say today about what's necessary from movements to be able to have that strategic moral jujitsu, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, in terms of what sort of training is really necessary? Well actually after he published the power of non-violence, he published an addendum, it's almost a book called Training for Peace and many of the things he brought out there were not only how you do this, and as I said, he used the metaphor, the analogy of military campaign. And you're right, all movements like this, Rosa Parks did not spontaneously sit on the back of the bus, she knew she was doing that, she knew she would get arrested, she would have been trained with those people to do that. And in those training centers in the South and even in like the famous Highlander Center, it's trained organizers. Richard Gregg's book was read, I mean, it was read, Bayard Rustin read it and recommended it to Martin Luther King and the Training for Peace. So he would say, not only would you need to be trained, because you've got to be able to resist. I don't know whether I have it or not, you might, but I would have the guts, frankly, to stand there and be beaten up by a cop and not respond to that. For the training for that, you've got to have a group training for that. But more than that, he very much believed in Gandhi's notion of constructive activity. And he advocated for, in that training, not only to train in a military sense and respond at the moment, but also to build community between those resisting violence by engaging in activities like farming, rehabbing houses, building, he even talked a lot about folk dancing. This did not work well in England, where they brought him over to talk about training. The British Peace Bed Union, which was really impressed by this book, brought him to England in the mid 1930s to talk about what he was trying to advocate. And they were a little bit leery of this American talking about folk dancing. This was a little difficult for them, since they were actually, basically at that point in time, looking down the wrong end of the barrel of the Nazi war machine and thinking, well, I wouldn't even deal with this, you know. But so I want to give you the impression, I'm speaking quickly, but in average time, that Greg Niley said, yes, you train with your compatriots, with your comrades to resist violence and how to do that in a peaceful way. But you also work with them to build a sense of community and love. And I feel weird using the word love, but it's something that you use all the time. And the Greg used and said, you know, love of self can only come from love with each other. And by working together and training together, you love each other and you begin to feel reassured. I mean, sort of like, I'm sure you've been on demonstrations I have in the past. And when you're with a group of people with a common purpose, you feel emboldened and strengthened. And at some level, that's a kind of love. No, I think it is. Martin Luther King Jr. often spoke of the beloved community as did the late John Lewis. It wasn't just, it wasn't just pie in the sky. It was actually a very practical part of building sustainable organizations. And a lot of young people today. And so I'm not so young people are recognizing the importance of love and trust in building sustainable organizations. I also want to refer, there's a second narrative in your book, not just the life of Richard Greg, but also the search for your own father, who was a conscientious object during in England during World War Two. And in that, these two men, your father and Richard Greg have something in common. And I wonder if you can tell us about that. I read your book and I know your dad died when you were very young. And you only heard about that later. But I wonder if you could tell us something about that, because one of the wonderful things about this book, which I love, is the personal connection. It's just not an arms length biography of someone that you never met. No, that was part of the, you know, I had no plan. I had never written a biography. I'm an academic. I wrote boring academic books and everybody buys, you know, I was spurned to do this because I was sort of going back to my father. As you said, he died when I was 16. His family in England, my dad was a coal delivery driver. Cole was then used in homes to heat the houses. And I found out much later that he'd been in prison. I mean, he spent nine months in prison as a conscientious objector, because he was not a religious man, but then plead on religious grounds. And a small side story when he was in a cottage in the prison, the Luftwaffe were bombing cottage. It's a major steel and coal production city at the time. And the prison guards shifted everybody in the prison to shelters, but they left the conscientious objectors exposed and outside because being a conscientious objector during that war is a complex thing. This World War II, it's a little murkier about being peaceful when you're facing a fascist regime, such as the Nazi Germany. But part of it was, he was a very ordinary guy. I mean, I have all these letters, and Greg wrote 365 publications, seven books. God knows how much he was. There's a big wrong record, including those notebooks up in May. My father left a couple of grocery lists and some letters to my mom, you know, and so there's a puzzle for me, which I'm sure we can end on a little bit is talking and writing about my dad and of course about his effect on me. I think that puzzle really is, why do actually pretty ordinary people do extraordinary things? About the moral compass, respect for these, the ideals, which I think in some ways in our society today is sadly lacking and not trained or thought about the people. I'm a teacher. You know, I ask students, you know, what do you believe in and what does that make you do? Why do you, where is the core moral compass of your ability to be in the world? My job as a teacher is to give you the tools to find that, right? So, for me, this was a personal journey about finding out more about my dad, but also a larger kind of existential question. Why does somebody like Greg, who was doing perfectly well, he had a Harvard law degree, he could have lived here and do his thing here and rest of it, go to India and end up, you know, in an ashram living in a cabin composting toilets, growing organic vegetables, and that kind of stuff. Why did my dad go to prison? And all the consequences that came from that, right? My mother suffered a lot of criticism from her workplace. She got fired at the workplace when he came out of prison. There was still in the 1950s, my older brother and sister were victims of, you know, people contributing, saying my dad was a conscious injector, he was a scourge and stuff like that. I mean, it was a hard period in England as it was here, because this was a terrible war, and many of the kids I was at school who had lost their fathers in the war, or they had to move their houses, got bombarded, not father. If you have a father who went to prison because he didn't believe in killing people, but he believed in that. He believed in one thing. He didn't want to rationalize it because he was religious, or he's God, you know, believing God. He said, this is wrong. You know, I mean, my father leaves no traces. I don't know much about my father. I don't know about Richard Greg at this point about my dad, but it's a question that I think we all should struggle with is how do people have that kind of sense of belief about what they do and the purpose of what they do it? I think it's a question, a good question for all of us. So now that the book just came out, what's your aim with this book of making this quietest radical, as some have called Richard Greg, more not so quiet, more visible? What do you hope to accomplish with this really wonderful book? Well, exactly that. Because, you know, Richard Greg, you know, when I started to read about him and learn about him and read all his notebooks, I'm thinking, this guy was pretty amazing. And he had a pretty amazing impact in this difficult last century. I mean, the fact that he was so connected to Alasuxley and to Gandhi and to Nehru and to lots of famous, relatively famous people. I want people to understand, and why I believe history is important, that understanding this individual and the role he played in determining how we think about living in the world, the sustainability ofologies and plus the piece of it, but also very much so how his work is being played out today in all of our reactions about how we organize against oppression, whether it's a treaty, whether it's as a Black Lives Matter, whether it says, you know, dealing with Asian hatred and racism. The way we think about peaceful demonstrations and demonstrating and getting into the street and living otherwise in decent ways and respecting our environment, an awful lot of this flows from the work of Greg. And there is no other biography out there. There's one academic article he has mentioned in a lot of books about the peace movement, about civil rights, but he has no, you know, there's no information about his life. And the book covers both his marriage and his family and his history growing up and which makes a great history. I mean, I was telling a story the other day about getting some of the letters he wrote to his mother and opening a letter on my kitchen table that he had sent in 1925 where there was a dried flower inside of it and he writes to his mother, Gandhi was by my cabin this morning, he brought me some flowers. I dried one of them for you so you could see what kinds of flowers grow in India. And this fell out on my kitchen table. That's an experience that goes, okay, that's why history is important. That's why the details are important. And I think for me to answer your question on a rather long, windy way, which I've no stunning, is to say, yeah, you know, here's, we should know about people like Greg because they, they, they show us how to live in our world today. They show us the God ideas at a timeless. And that's why I think the book is important. Yeah, this book is really important and it's not only important because it talks about written Richard Greg, an important person who brought literally Gandhi's flowers to John Wooding's table in Massachusetts, who studied with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But it also is very personal. John Wooding's book describes his father, for instance, as smelling like cold dust and brokering. It's not a dry read. And for me, and for anyone who's perhaps over 40, the book is large enough type to read it without my glasses. It's written in a very engaging, not academic ease. This is written by a real person who not only understands Richard Greg's life, but our lives. So I really encourage you to get this book. And just in closing, John Wooding, an emeritus professor of political science at U Lowell University of Massachusetts at Lowell, can you tell us a little bit about, even though the book just came out, what the responses and how you hope to use it? Yeah, I've had a great response from people who have, have some of which are persistent, amazing enough. And let it, because it's a kind of book that would be, I think, very useful on academic programs and peace and conflict. It would help people in this sustainability, climate change concerns, it would help people in the Black Lives Movement, it would help in workshops or teaching people how to respond to oppression and violence. I think that Greg's words and hopefully, and I thank you for the compliment, I hope it's an accessible style to read. It's not an academic book. It is footnoted and written in an academic way, but it's not written in an academic way, but academic style in the sense of, you know, this is sort of creative nonfiction I'm writing here, so it's accurate as far as I can make it. And it's got photographs and it's got pictures, and, but it also tells me of my life a little bit. It has a picture of Richard Greg. Yeah, it has a picture of Richard Greg with Mahatma Gandhi. It has photos, it's very accessible and as I think as anyone who reads a book and wants to understand and make history come alive, as Ella Baker, one of the geniuses who built the civil rights movement, says, we have to know and understand our history in order to understand what to do today. So if you want to know and understand the history, not only of the nonviolent movement, but of any movement for peace and justice, sustainability, the power of nonviolence, the enduring legacy of Richard Greg, a biography by John Wooding, I really highly recommend it. It'll give you an inside view of what's happened in the past, but also how it informs our present day and the struggles for equality that we face today. So, John, I want to thank you. John Wooding, I want to thank you for coming on our show.