Volinsky: Behind The 'Bake Sale' Education Story

By ANDRU VOLINSKY, InDepth NH

A Book, an Idea and a Goat.

From ‘A Book, an Idea and a Goat,’ Andru Volinsky’s weekly newsletter on Substack is primarily devoted to writing about the national movement for fair school funding and other means of effecting social change. Here’s the link: https://substack.com/@andruvolinsky?utm_source=profile-page

Thanks also to the World Fellowship Center and its protector, Willard Uphaus

My talks about my book The Last Bake Sale continue during the summer, albeit at a slightly slower pace. Amazing things have happened. In addition to meeting a ton of people who support high quality public education, I met Justice William Batchelder’s son at one talk and a young woman who graduated from Alamo Heights High School in San Antonio. Read the book to understand why Alamo Heights is important.

Last week, I got paid back in a way.

The Sunapee Library is upcoming at 5:30p on August 14th. The Dover Dems and Dover Library are co-sponsoring a talk at the Community Room in the Dover Police Station on August 26th at 6p. Finally, I hope for a big crowd at the Manchester Public Library on September 6th at noon.

World Fellowship Center

“Where social justice meets nature.”

The World Fellowship Center (WFC) was a perfect venue last week for a talk about the inequities of school funding and the anti-democratic implications of taxpayer-funded school vouchers.

Located in NH’s White Mountains, WFC is a secular conference center and camp that has hosted “radicals” for decades. As Arnie Alpert reports in New Hampshire Radical History, WFC was founded in 1941 based on the theme, “In times of war, prepare for peace.” He continues, “World Fellowship has been a gathering point for activists in areas such as civil rights, disarmament, ecological awareness, and international understanding. At a time when many White Mountain hotels still openly discriminated against Blacks and Jews, World Fellowship’s sign on Route 16 proclaiming ‘all races and creeds welcome’ displayed for all to see that it was someplace apart.”

Last summer, the week before I visited to talk about my nascent book, there was a gathering of Clamshell Alliance alums to remember Renny Cushing. The Clams challenged the construction of the Seabrook nuclear plant on NH’s tiny seacoast over many years. After many smaller occupations, 2000 members of the Alliance occupied the Seabrook construction site beginning on April 30, 1977. 1,414 activists were arrested on May 1st. Although Governor Mel Thomson advocated for them to be held on cash bail, the presiding judge offered to release the NH residents without bail. The NH detainees declined the offer in solidarity with their out-of-state comrades and NH was forced to feed and house all of the activists in National Guard armories. “Interestingly, those armories became ‘Academies of Anti-Nuclear Activism,’ staging theatrical performances, music creation, and workshops about anti-nuclear activism. It was in an armory that Charlie King penned the song, ‘Acres of Clams.’” NH state police were assisted by state police from New York and Rhode Island in making the May Day arrests. Governor Michael Dukakis declined to send state police from nearby Massachusetts.

There’s a good documentary by Eric Wolfe about the work of the Clamshell Alliance that was screened at WFC. It’s also called, Acres of Clams. Find it here.

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Willard Uphaus: An Apocryphal Story for Our Times

Willard and Ola Uphaus became camp directors during the McCarthy Era in the early 1950s. Soon after, acting at the behest of the NH Legislature to root out communists or people who associated with them, NH’s Attorney General Louis Wyman demanded an interview with Willard Uphaus. Wyman also wanted a list of WFC guests and any correspondence Uphaus had with invited speakers.

Although Uphaus was willing to answer any questions about his personal beliefs, he refused to provide the list or the correspondence and was prosecuted for contempt. He was sentenced to a year in jail. Uphaus’ prosecution made it to the US Supreme Court, twice. The US Supreme Court upheld the NH Supreme Court when it affirmed Uphaus’ conviction. Then the NH Legislature changed the law, relieving Wyman of his authority as a little McCarthy. The US Supreme Court refused to intervene even though the law under which Uphaus was convicted had changed. The following is from Justice Hugo Black’s dissent in the second case.

Remember, Hugo Black was a US Senator from Alabama and a member of the KKK before joining the Court. Black, however, became part of the unanimous public school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education. He also wrote the decision in Gideon v. Wainwright upholding the Sixth Amendment right to counsel for people accused of serious crimes.

Black focused on the “associational rights” of the guests at WFC. The right to free association is protected by the First Amendment and Black was its committed defender. Black described Uphaus and his motivation as follows.

“He is a citizen of this country by birth. Throughout the nearly seventy years of his life, evidently from early boyhood, he has been a deeply religious person. . . He holds a degree as a Doctor of Theology. He taught religious education at Yale University, and was associated with the Religion and Labor Foundation for a number of years. Over the years, his religious faith manifested itself in an increasing opposition to war. It was this belief which led him, in 1952, to become the Director of World Fellowship, Inc., a summer camp operated, he says, in the interest of promoting the ideas of pacifism.”

In the face of an order to produce a list of WFC guests, which was upheld by NH courts, Uphaus remained steadfast in his refusal. “Dr. Uphaus . . . rest[ed] his refusal upon the following reasons, to which he has adhered throughout this long ordeal:

(1) ‘by the direct teachings of the Bible . . . it is wrong to bear false witness against my brother, and inasmuch as I have no reason to believe that any of these persons whose names have been called for have in any sense hurt this state or our country, I have reason to believe that they should not be in the possession of the Attorney General;’

(2) ‘the social teachings of the Methodist Church teach us clearly and specifically that we in the United States should stand up and uphold civil and religious rights, and, in particular, it condemns guilt by association’ and

(3) ‘I love [the Bill of Rights], and I propose to uphold it with the full strength and power of my spirit and intelligence.’”

After six years of protracted litigation, Dr. Uphaus served a year in jail for contempt. He was 70 years of age.

WFC continues to host social justice activists and summer campers. Nearby Whitten Pond is beautiful and a great pond for swimming; I can attest. WFC has also become a place to remember friends and activists. My friend, Renny Cushing, has a brick in the camp’s walkway. He was a proud leader of the Clamshell Alliance, a leading death penalty abolitionist and a state legislator.

A bronze plague memorializing the Lincoln Brigade, American soldiers who fought bravely against Franco and fascism in the Spanish Civil War, was held hostage in the bowels of the NH Statehouse for 24 years in a modern day assault on alleged Communists. It is now on prominent display at WFC.

The Origin Story

My book is called, “The Last Bake Sale.” The title comes from a bake sale that we organized after we won Claremont I in which the NH Supreme Court, for the first time in over 200 years of NH constitutional history, recognized the right to a high quality public education. We held the bake sale at a local middle school in early 1994 to raise money to continue the suit and to poke fun at NH Governor Steve Merrill. Political cartoonist Mike Marland donated a print that we copied and sold at the bake sale. Gary Hirshberg donated Stonyfield frozen yogurt.

My colleague, Tom Connair, asked Merrill to send brownies. Merrill was not pleased when the AP got wind of the request.

I came up with the idea for the bake sale when I remembered an old dorm poster that said, “Wouldn’t it be a great day when daycare centers have all the money they need and the Navy has to hold bake sales to buy battleships.” I had forgotten that the poster was published by The War Resisters League.

Two roads converged in a NH woods

Joanne Sheehan who is long-time staff for the War Resisters League has been offering trainings at the WFC with Arnie Alpert and the WFC’s co-directors, Megan Chapman and Andrew Maki. Joanne was scheduled to be at the WFC when I spoke last week and she recognized the name of my book was a reference to the War Resister’s League poster. Joanne found an old poster and a tee shirt with the graphic and presented them to me during my talk last Thursday. Thank you.

Joanne and Arnie, by the way, are alums of the Clamshell Alliance, sometimes they’re called, “seasoned clams.”

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.