“As for our purpose, it is simple enough. These are the years of destruction; we offer against them the creative act.”
The Horned Moon by Glen Coffield, Untide Press, 1944
Over the years, neither pacifism nor art has achieved mainstream acceptance in the psyche of the American people, yet the persistence of both has shaped important movements and shifts in long-held beliefs. Very few things in history happen in a vacuum. Although not always obvious, forces in one small corner of society often influence changes in other parts, sometimes years or even decades down the line. As William Everson, arguably one of the best-known pacifist poets of the twentieth century, put it, both artists and pacifists “work for ends that are of the utmost human consequence, but both do them in ways that conflict with current social mores.” In fact, it is not a stretch to see the current Black Lives Matter protests as part of a continuum with origins in other movements over the past seventy-five years.
One little-known example of this is what amounts to a footnote to a footnote in the history of the Second World War. In his seminal work, The Good War: An Oral History of World War II, Studs Terkel, to his credit, devotes a chapter (“Reflections on Machismo”) to those who refused to fight. For many Americans, this chapter was their first introduction to the concept of conscientious objection, although it has been around for as long as war itself. The footnote to this footnote is the story of the Fine Arts Group at Waldport Civilian Public Service (CPS) Camp #56 in Waldport, Oregon. Despite its size (only between twenty-five and thirty-five men), the Fine Arts Group cultivated and launched the careers of many influential avant-garde artists and paved the way for the Beat poetry of the 1950s.
Conscientious Objectors During World War 2
After the horrors of World War I, both religious and non-religious pacifists began organizing in anticipation of future drafts. Thanks to their efforts, Congress passed the 1940 Selective Training and Service Act, which recognized the rights of conscientious objectors. This Act established the Civilian Public Service to offer conscientious objectors an alternative to military conscription: “work of national importance under civilian direction.” Co-opting many of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps established in 1933 to help young men impacted by the Depression, the CPS set up 150 camps across the country to house conscientious objectors for the duration of the war, plus six months. Although the CPS was under the auspices of the U.S. government, the camps were administered by the three historic peace churches—the Mennonites, the Quakers, and the Brethren. Approximately twelve thousand men were inducted into CPS camps.
Daily Life in Waldport CPS Camp #56
The rhythm of life in Waldport CPS Camp #56 followed a predictable pattern. At any given time, the camp’s 120 or so men were engaged in one of three activities:
- Project work, that is, “work of national importance,” including fighting fires, felling trees, building roads, and other activities in the national forests;
- Overhead work, that is, administrative work needed to keep the camp running, including cleaning and cooking;
- Free time activities (usually in the evenings and on days off), including activities as part of the Fine Arts Group.
Most Waldport residents worked a fifty-hour work week, with occasional furloughs, similar to soldiers serving in the armed forces.
Occasionally, internees refused to do the work they were assigned, or they staged slow-downs that amounted to doing virtually no work at all. Kemper Nomland, Jr. was one such internee. He often worked so slowly that he was barred from Project work and accused of inciting rebellion and damaging camp morale.
Camp life was governed by a constitution drawn up in large part by the internees themselves. Elected governing positions, including president, secretary, and the committee chairs of public relations, education, religion, recreation, and health, were also held and voted upon by the internees.
Most of the men at Camp #56 were in their early- to mid-twenties, single, religious, and had completed high school. However, the men who participated in the Fine Arts Group were a decidedly different demographic, being older, from more urban and cosmopolitan areas, better educated, and less religious. Although the men at Camp #56 hailed from twenty states, most were from California and Michigan. Nearly all were white.
Although all the men in Camp #56 were pacifists, the roots of their pacifism varied. For many, religious teachings were the source; for others, their pacifism stemmed from a political or personal philosophy. The men at Camp #56 frequently debated the role of pacifism in a democracy, the function of government in their lives, and what an alternative type of community might look like.
Waldport CPS Camp #56 and the Fine Arts Group
In an effort to give conscientious objectors educational opportunities to develop skills that could be put to use after the war, the Brethren Church, which oversaw the Cascade Locks CPS Camp #21 as well as Waldport CPS Camp #56 (both in Oregon), solicited ideas from internees regarding the sorts of educational programs they would like to see. Kemper Nomland, Jr. and Kermit Sheets, two internees at Camp #21, suggested a fine arts program. After much debate as to the best camp at which to locate such a program, it was decided to house it at Camp #56.
The prospectus for the proposed fine arts program, which would eventually be referred to as the Fine Arts Group, was carefully worded to be as inclusive as possible:
“The Fine Arts School, as we conceive it, is simply to be a grouping together of the practitioners of the various art forms. These include the Literary Arts: fiction, poetry, essays and criticism; the Musical Arts: both composition and performance; the Visual Arts: painting and sculpture; the Speech Arts: dramatics and readings; and the related fine arts crafts.”
William Everson, already a published poet before entering Camp #56, was the first director of the Fine Arts Group. Under Everson’s leadership, the Group brought together three distinctive beliefs:
- The widespread destruction of the Second World War was the inevitable result of modern nationalism;
- The emergence of a mass culture and modern nationalism had eroded human potential by eliminating alternate ways of being in the world;
- New modes of collective life were needed that were not tied to a wartime culture and the formation of dutiful national subjects.
Perhaps surprisingly, considering the breadth and quality of its output, the Fine Arts Group was officially in existence for less than two years. Its end coincided with the official shutdown of Camp #56 on December 31, 1945, but much of its work continued into the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Art Produced in Waldport’s Fine Arts Group
One of the greatest strengths of the Fine Arts Group was its ability to draw men from camps across the United States. As word of its pending formation got out, men trekked from points all over the country to learn and develop a variety of skills in the arts. Some men, such as Kermit Sheets and Kemper Nomland, Jr., whose reputation preceded them, were specifically recruited to Waldport.
The art produced in the Fine Arts Group fell into all the categories identified in the original prospectus. Plays, poetry, music, paintings, sculptures, and ceramic and wooden objects were among the Group’s output. However, by far the most influential of the Group’s achievements were its publications, poetry, and plays.
Prior to the formation of the Fine Arts Group, the officially sanctioned publication at Camp #56 was The Tide, an innocuous newsletter filled with camp news. However, it was not long before a semi-clandestine journal called The Untide made its debut. The Untide, with its unsigned contributions, was notable for its frequent sarcasm and off-color humor. But it also occasionally published creative material, including a serialized version of X War Elegies by William Everson, with illustrations by Kemper Nomland, Jr. The Untide journal eventually morphed into the Untide Press, which continued for several years after the war.
Another noteworthy publication of the Fine Arts Group was The Illiterati, an avant-garde literary magazine. As the Group’s reputation grew, even well-known artists who were not conscientious objectors were attracted to its publications, among them poet Kenneth Patchen, painter Morris Graves, and author Henry Miller. There were a number of things that caught the eyes of censors in the first issue of The Illiterati, including a yellow hand with a red circle on its cover, which some outside the camp interpreted as representing Japan—our enemy! However, it was Nomland’s drawing of a reclining nude woman that particularly upset the censors.
From the Fine Arts Group to the San Francisco Renaissance to the Beat Poets
As is often and ideally the case in both art and science, one hotbed of activity ignites another, resulting in explosive creativity. Such was the case after World War II, when key players in the Fine Arts Group, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the Beat Movement converged.
When the Fine Arts Group disbanded, many of its members were drawn to California’s Bay Area, where a group of poets, including Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, and Robert Duncan, gathered around William Everson to form the core of the San Francisco Renaissance. It was in the Bay Area where many students, conscientious objectors, and political radicals found kinship with others disenchanted with society and its focus on war. In San Francisco, former Fine Arts Group members, renowned printer Adrian Wilson and actor and playwright Kermit Sheets, founded the Press in Tuscany Alley and the Centaur Press, respectively, to continue the creative printing and literary work begun during the war. Another group, including Kemper Nomland, Jr., Tom Polk Miller, and William Eshelman, moved farther south to Pasadena, California and took over ownership of The Illiterati and the Untide Press, both of which continued to be published for several years.
In 1947, the First Festival of Modern Poetry was held in San Francisco, featuring Rexroth, Duncan, and Everson, among others. It has been widely recognized as signaling the beginning of the city’s poetry renaissance, just eight years before the Gallery Six reading at which Allen Ginsberg introduced the world to Howl. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who launched the iconic City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco in 1953—a gathering spot for many Beat poets—also had direct connections to former members of the Fine Arts Group, such as Adrian Wilson. Ferlinghetti even drew the inspiration for the design of the Pocket Poets series published by City Lights Books from Kemper Nomland, Jr.’s cover design for The Untide Press’ An Astonished Eye Looks Out of the Air by Kenneth Patchen, which was published in 1945.
As for the Beat poets, like their predecessors, they rebelled against the conventions of mainstream American life, drawing their inspiration from jazz musicians, surrealists, metaphysical poets, and haiku. Key among them were Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Michael McClure.
As Steve McQuiddy succinctly summarizes it in his book, Here on the Edge:
… Ginsberg wouldn’t have written his poem without the liberating experience of Rexroth’s San Francisco renaissance, and … Rexroth’s dream would have gone nowhere without the influx of COs from the West Coast camps after the war, and … their pacifist ideals wouldn’t have achieved full articulation without the cohesion and purpose of the Fine Arts at Waldport.
A thread of three distinct themes can be found throughout the poetry of both the Fine Arts Group and the Beat poets:
- Backlash against the military-industrial complex and conspicuous consumption
- Self-expression
- Humans as free beings
Backlash Against the Military-Industrial Complex and Conspicuous Consumption
Many of the artists in the post-war period decried the limits imposed by the nation-state and the newly heralded consumerism of the 1950s, recognizing that such limits threatened democracy itself, in which power is vested in all its citizens. Much of the poetry written during this time was experimental and politically dissident. According to Mildred Edie Brady in her 1947 Harper’s article, “The New Cult of Sex and Anarchy,” it was through art that these “radicals and revolutionaries believed they could blaze a trail out from this mechanical, homogenized, dying modern world.”
The backlash against the military-industrial complex and conspicuous consumption was often seen in poems that focused on the natural world, both its calmness and its fierceness.
In his 1944 poem, “The Stars Go to Sleep so Peacefully” (An Astonished Eye Looks Out of the Air), Kenneth Patchen provides an example of this backlash, while also paying homage to nature:
The stars go to sleep so peacefully…
Their high gentle eyes closing like white flowers
In a child’s dream of heaven.
With the morning, in house after grim house,
In a haste of money, proper to kiss their war,
These noble little fools awake.
O the soul of the world is dead…
Truth rots in a bloody ditch;
And love is impaled on a million bayonets.
But great God! the stars go to sleep so peacefully
Another 1944 poem of Patchen’s, “The Way Men Live is a Lie” (An Astonished Eye Looks Out of the Air), shows the heightened sense of outrage found in much of Ginsberg’s later verse:
The way men live is a lie.
I say that I get so goddamned sick
Of all these pigs rooting at each other’s asses
To get a blood-stained dollar – Why don’t
You stop this senseless horror! This meaningless
Butchery of one another! Why don’t you at least
Wash your hands of it
There is only one truth in the world:
Until we learn to love our neighbor,
There will be no life for anyone.
The man who says, “I don’t believe in war,
But after all somebody must protect us” –
Is obviously a fool – and a liar.
Is this so hard to understand!
That who supports murder, is a murderer?
That who destroys his fellow, destroys himself?
Force cannot be overthrown by force;
To hate any man is to despair of every man;
Evil breeds evil; – the rest is a lie!
There is only one power that can save the world –
And that is the power of our love for all men everywhere.
Years later, in the 1958 poem, “Death to Van Gogh’s Ear!” (Naked Poetry: Recent American Poetry in Open Forms), Allen Ginsberg echoes a similar sentiment, although with some updated references:
I am the defense early warning radar system
I see nothing but bombs
I am not interested in preventing Asia from being Asia
and the governments of Russia and Asia will rise and fall but
Asia and Russia will not fall
the government of America also will fall but how can America
fall
I doubt if anyone will ever fall anymore except governments
fortunately all the governments will fall
the only ones which won’t fall are the good ones
and the good ones don’t yet exist
But they have to begin existing they exist in my poems
Self-Expression
According to William Everson, the poetry that came out of the Fine Arts Group was an important precursor to the confessional mode that dominated post-war poetics.
In a foreshadowing of the Beat poetry of the 1950s, Everson stood up at the birthday celebration for his month at Camp #56 and announced: “I was conceived in Bakersfield, born in Sacramento, married in Fresno, and died in Waldport.”
Lengthy discussions among members of the Fine Arts Group about deep and sometimes controversial topics were eerily comparable to the Beat happenings in Greenwich Village and San Francisco throughout the 1950s. In fact, Manche Langley, one of only a few women connected to the Fine Arts Group, likened a weekend visit to the camp to “an episode from the frantic adventures of the Beat Generation wanderers, who were yet a decade away.”
Many of the Beat poets sought to express genuine lived experience through their poetry. They steered clear of labels and were not afraid to exude over-the-top energy and excitement, sometimes driven through experimentation with drugs.
In the 1945 poem, “The Divers” (poems: mcmxlii), William Everson laments the loss of his wife, their separation accelerated by his confinement during the war:
Wifeless at thirty,
How else can he dream
In the cold bed,
In the empty covers,
But grope in his mind her known loins,
Her familiar knees?
How else can he dream
But her plundering mouth,
Her body’s beat?
Then there is the quintessential topic of introspection, which Del Vaniman, a Waldport internee, addresses in his 1944 poem, “Contemplation of my Navel on the Slope of Mt. Hood” (The Illiterati, Number 3):
Some pay you little tribute; others, none.
The puzzling philosophies of your presence
Leaves them unruffled and undisturbed.
But to me you are much; I am quite aware of you,
For you are indeed confounding.
Were man willing he could trace life’s
Purpose through the unfolding of your secrets.
In the 1954 poem, “For the Death of 100 Whales” (Hymn to St. Geryon), Beat poet Michael McClure expresses his anger at the slaughter of whales by American soldiers at a NATO base in Iceland:
The sleek wolves
Mowers and reapers of sea kine.
THE GIANT TADPOLES
(Meat their algae)
Lept
Like sheep or children.
Shot from the sea’s bore.
Turned and twisted
(Goya!!)
Flung blood and sperm.
Incense.
Gnashed at their tails and brothers
Cursed Christ of mammals,
Snapped at the sun,
Ran for the Sea’s floor.
Humans as Free Beings
Two notable post-war trends that reflected a rejection of social realism and rigid societal roles were a change to free verse in poetry and a shift to abstraction in the visual arts. These trends celebrated the freedom of individuals to pave their own path rather than conform to societal norms. Many of the poems by both Fine Arts Group and Beat poets focus on the importance of being able to express oneself freely. On the poetry side, Everson believed human dignity to be inextricably tied to the ability for self-actualization, a theme he revisited often in his poetry. On the visual side, Nomland’s use of abstract and globular human figures in The Illiterati and in the publications of the Untide Press captures the immense potential of the individual, unbound by gender, race, class, and society’s expectations.
In his 1944 poem, “Is There No Way” (The Illiterati, Number 3), Kemper Nomland, Jr. lashes out at the prevailing power dynamics that confine and threaten, impeding our ability to pursue our passions:
Is there no way
but to kill for life
must it always be hate to love
oppress for freedom
starve for plenty
can there be no peace
till all people are straitjacketed
into the stunting way of the one who
possesses the violence of victory
till all shall conform under continuous
coercion of steel
and threat of steel
must the chaos of compulsion
the rigid ring of wrath
and might be the measure of right
can we only be kind after conquering
must I bury a man
before he can be my brother?
In the 1944 poem simply referred to as “Ten” in The Waldport Poems, Everson contemplates his present lack of freedom:
From the road in the dawns we behold the sea,
In its prone slumber,
Holding the west with heavy ease.
The rock closes it out,
Narrows our sky,
In the morning thaws lets fall its sparse rubble.
We wait, suspended in time;
Locked out of our lives
We abide, we endure,
Our temporal grievance diminished and slight
In the total awareness of what obtains,
Outside, in the bone-broken world.
In the 1956 poem, “America” (Naked Poetry: Recent American Poetry in Open Forms), Ginsberg expresses his frustration at being pigeon-holed, forced to conform to a model that does not work for him:
I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious.
Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.
Concluding Thoughts
As much as we would like to view the historical record as an objective accounting of all human activity, we know from experience this is not always the case. Glaring omissions can be found throughout. Sometimes those omissions can change everything, including our world view. As we sadly know from the examples of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., two of the world’s most famous pacifists, not everyone appreciates the peacemakers, despite the Bible’s proclamation that they deserve our blessing.
Those brave souls who believed no war was a good war and were interned for their beliefs during World War II had no idea what their impact would be on post-war America. Those who saw art as the best vehicle for expressing their pacifist beliefs could never have imagined their role in launching the Beat Movement of the 1950s.
I am struck by the current relevance of the poetry of the Fine Arts Group. It is a testament to the importance of listening to all voices, a point being driven home today on streets across the nation. Demands for justice and equality—and the right to pursue happiness as enshrined in the Constitution—can be heard once again. At their core, these demands are driven by a respect for an inclusive vision of society that honors the perspectives of marginalized groups. This was the heart of the message delivered by both the Fine Arts Group and the Beat poets. The journey continues.
— Written by Erika Çilengir
REFERENCES :
- “A Brief Guide to the Beat Poets,” https://poets.org/text/brief-guide-beat-poets
- Adrian Wilson, Two Against the Tide (Austin: W. Thomas Taylor, 1990).
- Art in a Time of War (film produced in association with The Oregon Documentary Project), https://www.imdb.com/video/vi648152857.
- Bob Welch, “Waldport’s seeds of the sixties,” The Register-Guard, October 13, 2013.
- Doug Erickson, Glen Coffield, William Everson, & Publishing at Waldport, Oregon – Catalog of an exhibit at the Aubrey Watzek Library, Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Oregon, February-May 2003.
- Doug Erickson, Paul Merchant, and Jeremy Skinner, Footprints of Pacifism: The Creative Lives of Kemper Nomland & Kermit Sheets – Catalog of an exhibit at the Aubrey Watzek Library, Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Oregon, February-July 2007 (Portland, Oregon: Berberis Press, 2007).
- Doug Erickson, Paul Merchant, and John Hawk, Printing at Waldport: William Everson, Adrian Wilson and the Legacy of the Untide Press – Catalog of an exhibit at the Donohue Rare Book Room, Gleeson Library, University of San Francisco (Portland, Oregon: Berberis Press, 2005).
- Editors of the Britannica Encyclopedia, “Beat Movement,” Britannica Online Encyclopedia, https://www.britannica.com/art/Beat-movement.
- Jeffrey Kovac, Refusing War Affirming Peace: A History of Civilian Public Service at Camp No 21 at Cascade Locks (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2009).
- John McMurtrie, “An Appreciation: The cool cat with a poet’s roar,” Los Angeles Times, May 8, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2020-05-07/michael-mcclure-the-poet-whose-roar-helped-launch-the-60s-dies-at-87
- Katy Barber and Eliza Elkins Jones, “’The Utmost Human Consequence’: Art and Peace on the Oregon Coast, 1942-1946,” Oregon Historical Society, vol. 107, no. 4 (2006).
- Kenneth Patchen, An Astonished Eye Looks Out of the Air (Waldport, Oregon: Untide Press, 1944).
- Michael McClure, Hymn to St. Geryon (San Francisco: The Auerhahn Press, 1959).
- Poetry Foundation, “An Introduction to the Beat Poets: The mid-century countercultural poets who helped define a generation,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/147552/an-introduction-to-the-beat-poets.
- Stephen Berg and Robert Mezey (editors), Naked Poetry: Recent American Poetry in Open Forms (Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1969).
- Steve McQuiddy, Here on the Edge (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2013).
- The Illiterari, Number Three (Waldport, Oregon: Untide Press, Summer 1944).
- Todd F. Tietchen, “On the Waldport Fine Arts Project and the Aesthetics of Estranged Being,” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 42, no. 3 (2009), pp. 19-38.
- William Everson, poems: mcmxlii (Waldport, Oregon: Untide Press, 1945).
- William Everson, The Waldport Poems (Waldport, Oregon: Untide Press, 1944).
