Book Review: “The Power of Non-Violence” by John Wooding
HISTORY OF POLITICAL ECONOMY, Duke University Press
April 2023, 56 (2), pp. 570-74
A book review by Robert Leonard
The Power of Non-violence: The Enduring Legacy of Richard Gregg. By John Wooding. Lowell, Mass.: Loom Press, 2020. $20.00.
Richard Gregg, philosopher of conflict resolution and peaceful resistance
What kind of historian are you? The kind who prefers to wait in the comfort of the Bodleian while the librarian retrieves your files, or the kind who would rather lug a handcart a mile and a half through the Maine woods in order to retrieve fifty of your subject’s untouched notebooks from a homesteader’s yurt? If the romance of the latter appeals to you, then you will enjoy John Wooding’s account of the neglected American Gandhian, Richard Gregg (1885–1974).
The biographer, an Englishman and self-described ambivalent academic, who spent most of his career in administration at the University of Massachusetts (Lowell), weaves two strands in this book. The main one concerns the life of Gregg, the disconsolate young American lawyer who in 1925 headed off to India to become a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, thereafter, contributing decisively to the American civil rights movement. The minor thread concerns Wooding himself, a working-class English boy who lost his conscientious-objector father at sixteen and now, many decades later, uses his work on Gregg to explore a paternal relationship sadly cut short. The result is an affecting book, and clearly a labor of love.
The son of a patrician, Harvard-educated church minister, Gregg spent his formative years in Colorado Springs, in the 1880s a gold-rush town and high-altitude refuge for TB patients. His family lived a life of genteel poverty, placed by social status, but not wealth, at the center of the town’s elite. The father favored Harvard men and people of Scottish descent but had little time for anyone else and was no supporter of trade unions. Richard Gregg went to Harvard, like his three brothers, and inherited his father’s religious sensibility but not his political conservatism.
We are told little about Gregg’s time at Harvard, but he eventually graduated from its law school in 1911, emerging into the Progressive Era, with its great social upheaval and demands for reform in working conditions and social life. Initially working for an industrialist brother-in-law, Gregg made a visit to India, where the former was interested in setting up business in jute production. Returning to Boston, he fell under the influence of Richard Grosvenor Valentine, who awakened his interest in politics and social justice, and he became a labor lawyer, specializing in industrial conflict. Several years in this field heightened his distaste for industrial capitalism. By 1924, having forsaken the business world for agricultural classes and farm work in Wisconsin and, decisively, having stumbled upon Gandhi’s writings in Young India, he decided to seek his spiritual fortune in India. He thus wrote a dutiful six-page letter to his family indicating his interest in agriculture, his conviction that American food and cuisine were the cause of physical deterioration, his distaste for the corruption and violence of government and capitalism, and his belief in lived, as opposed to institutional, religion.
That letter—in which Gregg cited the influence upon him of the Webbs, Gandhi, Tolstoy, Veblen, the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita, Thoreau, Bertrand Russell, Franz Oppenheimer, J. A. Hobson, and William James—points to a feature of this biography that will be viewed as a strength or weakness, depending on your perspective. To the reader seeking depth, a list such as this will immediately appear as a lost opportunity for some vigorous probing. What, for example, did Gregg read by Veblen and what did he most appreciate? What did he find valuable in Hobson’s pre-1924 writings? The latter’s debt to Ruskin? His critique of industrialism? What do Gregg’s extensive notebooks, which were central for Wooding’s work, reveal about his assimilation of such influences? This was but one of several points in this book where more detailed exploration of Gregg’s world-making would have been possible. Having said that, deeper probing would have resulted in a heftier biography and, most probably, a reduced readership. Probably wisely, Wooding has aimed his portrait of the life and character of Gregg at the general reader, not the specialist.
Having written to Gandhi, Gregg took the boat from New York on January 1, 1925. His arrival in India coincided with a shift in the Mahatma’s campaign away from direct action and civil disobedience and toward the promotion of social justice and self-reliance, through village education and decentralized household production of khadi or cotton cloth, using the spinning wheel and handloom, in place of imported textile from Britain’s mechanized mills. During his three years in India, Gregg befriended figures such as Charles Freer Andrews, Gandhi’s ally and later biographer; the leader’s son, Maganlal; and, of course, the man himself. He lived at the atter’s ashram at Ahmedabad, entering fully into the life of the community, farming, gardening, spinning and weaving, and writing a simple manual on the last with Maganlal Gandhi. Traveling throughout India, he met Nehru, Tagore, and other figures in the independence movement. For several months, he taught at a school in the foothills of the Himalaya, established by an American Quaker, Samuel Stokes, giving rise to a pedagogical book, A Preparation for Science (1928). Surveying the production of khadi, Gregg wrote The Economics of Khaddar, also in 1928, in which he argued that the social and moral benefits of local hand-production—providing peasants with employment and control over their lives; encouraging personal development—outweighed the efficiency gains of machine production. These arguments would, of course, be subsequently rejected by critics of the Gandhian vision of economic development, armed with the Ricardian analysis of the gains from trade and an arguably narrower conception of well-being.
In two books, Gandhiji’s Satyagraha or Nonviolent Resistance (1930) and The Psychology and Strategy of Gandhi’s Nonviolent Resistance (1930), Gregg laid the foundation for what would later become his The Power of Non-violence (1934). If Gandhi’s argument for peaceful protest was inspired by the Hindu concept of ahimsa, and by Tolstoy and Thoreau, Gregg gave the idea a psychological twist with the notion of “moral jiu-jitsu.” By responding peacefully to violent suppression, Gregg claimed, pacifists threw their aggressors off-balance and gained the psychological upper hand. He also emphasized the element of theater or performance: pacific gestures affected observers and swayed public opinion. Finally, and controversially, Gregg saw military preparation and discipline as essential to the conduct of pacific protest. With the language barrier and loneliness taking their toll, Gregg finally returned to America in late 1928. “Don’t join organizations for reform,” he confided to his diary. “Stay hidden and quiet. . . . Don’t strive. . . . Live with commitment to ideas. Homespun, farm . . . little use of money, simplicity, friendly to all. Simplicity” (quoted on p. 126 of Wooding).
In 1930, now married, Gregg returned to India yet again with his wife, just before Gandhi’s famous Salt March, about which he later wrote in the Nation. In Gandhiism vs. Socialism, published in 1931, he argued for the superiority of the former over both capitalism and socialism, drawing on his experience in India and his wide reading. Here, again, some additional probing of that reading would have been welcome. In the mid-thirties, Gregg continued to eke out a living in the United States, and in 1936, while directing the Pendle Hill Quaker retreat center, published The Value of Voluntary Simplicity. He argued for the deliberate limitation of wants, claiming that an economy based on industrialism and consumerism could never be peaceful, and that the radical simplification of life could provide a corrective to our “feverish over mechanization” (quoted on p. 172). From Wooding’s account, we can infer that Gregg’s belief in the possibility of greater simplicity was predicated upon a more general belief in the possibility of human improvement, which stemmed from his exploration of religion and was presumably reinforced by his observing his own ethical evolution. He would have had little time for the fatalism of homo economicus. His Simplicity was overshadowed, however, by the success of The Power of Non-violence, which soon became a manual for pacifists and peace activists. Gregg was invited to England by the Peace Pledge Union (PPU), where he fell in with Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley. At the PPU, his strategic ideas were enthusiastically received, but his use of singing, folk dancing, and meditation for the promotion of unity and morale was less popular.
By 1941, Gregg had become very interested in biodynamic agriculture, reading Rudolf Steiner and the latter’s “farmer,” Ehrenfried Pfeiffer. His situation was also changing, with his older wife now increasingly incapacitated by what would prove to be Alzheimer’s disease. For a while in the mid-forties, he taught mathematics at the innovative Putney School in Vermont, but he quit, concluding that he was not a natural teacher. In 1949, he joined Helen and Scott Nearing on their farm in Jamaica, Vermont, eventually building himself a stone cottage there and staying for seven years. Nearing had been a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania but was expelled from the academy for his opposition to both child labor and US participation in World War I. In the early 1930s, the curmudgeonly Nearing and his younger musician girlfriend had retreated to a cabin in Vermont, where, thanks to their capacity for enormous labor, they lived a simple, largely self-sufficient, existence. Their Living the Good Life (1954) was initially overlooked but later became a key book for the back-to-the-land movement in the countercultural wave of the 1970s. During his time on the farm, Gregg wrote Which Way Lies Hope? An Examination of Capitalism, Communism, Socialism, and Gandhi’s Program (1951), again emphasizing the violence inherent to both industrial capitalism and state socialism.
In 1952, upset by excessive development in their area in Vermont, the Nearings moved further north to Maine. Two years later, the year in which his long-incapacitated wife died, Gregg published Self-Transcendence, which drew on Christian, Hindu, and especially Buddhist teachings on the matter. By 1956, he had remarried—Evelyn Speiden, a woman long interested in Steiner’s anthroposophy— and the couple were off to India, to spend two years teaching Gandhian economics to students working in the villages. This would soon give rise to Gregg’s A Philosophy of Indian Economic Development (1958), a book that Wooding correctly describes as overlooked but which this reviewer can confirm was influential upon E. F. Schumacher in the work that led to Small Is Beautiful (1973). These two dissenters, quite different in character, provided a bridge between the Gandhian milieu of pre-independence India and the postwar environmental/countercultural movement in the West. Returning to the United States, the Greggs moved to a biodynamic farm established by Ehrenfried Pfeiffer in Chester, New York. It was also around this time that Gregg befriended a Putney School alumnus, Bill Coperthwaite, a young idealist with a Harvard doctorate in education, greatly interested in traditional tools and crafts, and soon to become a renowned builder of yurts, inspired by the Mongolian original. In time, Nearing, Gregg, and Coperthwaite would constitute the central trio in New England’s “alternative” subculture, embracing pacifism, organic farming, manual labor, and the rejection of consumerism. The mid-fifties also saw the development of Gregg’s relationship with Martin Luther King, upon whom the Power of Non-violence was immensely influential, soon propelling him to visit India and ensuring that the energies of Southern civil rights activists were channeled toward largely peaceful methods.
By the early 1960s, Gregg’s health was preventing him from accepting further invitations to India, and the couple were finding farm life difficult. They moved to a small town in Oregon, where, for four years, they grew their own food while Gregg wrote about the Gandhian way and became increasingly pessimistic about the future of humanity. In 1967, they entered a retirement home, where Gregg soon showed signs of Parkinson’s disease. By 1972, he was confined to a wheelchair, and within two years he was dead.
Richard Gregg was a modest, generous man, giving away his things to others who, he believed, would carry the torch. These included Schumacher, to whom he sent books, and Bill Coperthwaite, to whom he entrusted his copious notebooks. In time, it was Scott Nearing’s biographer, John Saltmarsh, at the University of Massachusetts (Boston), who put Wooding on to Gregg and who made the trek through the Maine woods to haul out those notebooks. He and Wooding deposited them in the library of the Thoreau Institute in Concord, Massachusetts, and the author’s subsequent labors resulted in this handsome edition, from the small, and serendipitously named, Loom Press. Gregg’s ideas have lost none of their relevance in the interim decades of accelerating complexity, and his emphasis on voluntary simplicity has been thrown into unanticipated relief by the recent ambitions of the World Economic Forum to impose a version of sustainable “simplicity” from the top down, using the highly complex techniques of surveillance and control permitted by the mobile phone. Those who are dubious about iPhone slavery and complicity with the “Machine,” be they teachers or students, will find inspiration in this portrait of a quiet, dissenting radical. —
Robert Leonard, Université du Québec à Montréal DOI 10.1215/00182702-11055151