Benjamin Franklin Trueblood

• Benjamin Franklin Trueblood
• Born: November 25, 1847
• Died: October 26, 1916

Educator, publicist, and professional peace activist, was born in Salem, Indiana, the son of Joshua A. Trueblood and Esther (Parker) Trueblood, Quakers. He was educated at Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana, where he earned a B.A. in 1869 and an M.A. in 1875. In July 1872 he married Sarah H. Terrell of New Vienna, Ohio, with whom he had two daughters and a son who died in infancy.

After graduating from Earlham, Trueblood became a minister of the Society of Friends. He spent the next twenty years as a scholar and college administrator at Quaker institutions, serving as professor of Greek and Latin at Penn College, Oskaloosa, Iowa (1869-1874) and then as president of Wilmington College in Ohio (1874-79) and of Penn College (1879-90).

An adept public speaker, Trueblood was master of several languages. In 1890 he left Penn to spread the Quaker faith in Europe on behalf of the Christian Arbitration and Peace Society of Philadelphia. In May 1892 he returned to the United States to assume the post of general secretary of the American Peace Society (APS), a position left vacant by the death of the Rev. Rowland B. Howard.

Founded in 1828 with an initial budget of $400, the American Peace Society had become, by the time of Trueblood’s assumption of leadership, the most prestigious peace organization in the United States. However, the APS and the other predominantly church-based peace organizations were hampered by their static and aging leadership and by their failure to form organizational ties with the emerging labor and socialist movements. APS leaders campaigned for treaties of arbitration to settle international disputes and were sorely disappointed by the Senate’s rejection in 1897 of the Olney-Pauncefote Treaty, which provided for a permanent system of arbitration between the United States and Great Britain. They favored the establishment of a world court, but one without police-enforcement powers: their Quaker pacifism and their Victorian belief in the gentlemanly character of international relations led them to anticipate that adversary nations would voluntarily comply with court edicts.

Trueblood delivered up to forty public lectures and speeches a year on these themes. He was editor of the society’s journal, the Advocate of Peace. Many of his articles and speeches were subsequently issued as pamphlets and books. Chief among these was The Federation of the World (1899), in which he predicted the establishment of cooperative government among nations. Trueblood was heavily influenced by the works of Erasmus and William Penn and by the moral rationalism of Immanuel Kant, whose Zum ewigen Frieden [Perpetual Peace] he translated into English. Trueblood maintained that peace societies should conduct a long-range education campaign to turn public opinion against war. He opposed antiwar demonstrations, proposing prayer and petition instead. He did, however, support the principle of conscientious objection once World War I broke out.

As editor of the children’s peace paper Angel of Peace from 1892 until it was discontinued in 1908, Trueblood condemned the holding of military drills in schools, the establishment of military departments in colleges and universities, and the rehabilitation of juvenile delinquents in religious paramilitary organizations such as the Boys’ Brigade. He was instrumental in fostering ties, in 1910, between the APS and university Cosmopolitan Clubs, which brought together American and foreign students.

Trueblood was an active participant at nearly every U.S. and international peace conference held during his years as secretary. In 1895 he cofounded the annual Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration, an influential convention that included politicians and businessmen as well as reformers. In private meetings, he tried to convince Presidents William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson of the efficacy of settling international disputes through the International Court of Arbitration established by the Hague conferences of 1899, at which he was present, and 1907. His efforts met with minimal success; the United States rarely turned to the court and then only over relatively minor issues.

Under Trueblood’s stewardship, the American Peace Society became active nationwide. By 1911, thirty-four branches had been added and the headquarters moved from Boston to Washington. Trueblood also expanded the society’s international contacts. He was a member of the International Peace Bureau at Bern and of the American Society of International Law, and in 1905 was elected to the executive council of the International Law Association.

After 1910, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace took increasing control of the APS, which was heavily dependent on the endowment for its funding. In June 1913 Trueblood suffered a cerebral hemorrhage that affected his speech. He relinquished his position as general secretary of the APS in May 1915 and returned to his home in Newton Highlands, Massachusetts. He died there the following year at the age of sixty-eight.

Trueblood’s essays appeared in the APS journal Advocate of Peace, and many can also be found in his The Development of the Peace Idea and Other Essays (1932). Trueblood’s letters are in the American Peace Society’s papers in the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, in the Theodore Roosevelt Papers in the Library of Congress, in the Frederick Bayer Papers in the Kongelig Bibliothek in Copenhagen, and in the files of the International Peace Bureau in Geneva. Aside from entries in Who Was Who in America, vol. 1 (1943), and The Dictionary of American Biography (1936), the only work specifically about Trueblood is C. E. Beals’s funeral oration Benjamin Franklin Trueblood—Prophet of Peace, issued in 1916. Useful works on the peace movement of the early twentieth century are C. R. Marchand, The American Peace Movement and Social Reform, 1898-1918 (1972); D. S. Patterson, Toward a Warless World (1976); and M. A. Lutzker, “The ‘Practical’ Peace Advocates: An Interpretation of the American Peace Movement, 1898-1917,” Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University (1969). Also of some use is E. L. Whitney, The American Peace Society (1928). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, October 27, 1916.