The far shore of this idyllic New Hampshire pond was, in the 1950s, the unlikely stage upon which was played out a high stakes drama of freedom and uncompromising conscience. This shore was, and still is, the home of the World Fellowship Center, an international, interracial, multicultural, intergenerational vacation and discussion center. At first, in 1953, the drama started slowly. The initial actors were only the new director of the Center (a reformist Methodist educator, Dr. Willard Uphaus, aging but vital) and an ambitious politician (New Hampshire Attorney General Louis Wyman). Then came the Manchester Union Leader  headline "Pro-Communist Takes Over World Fellowship."

Wyman was an inquisitor in the era of McCarthyism. He was leading an ill-fated, roving investigation whether communists threatened the violent overthrow of the State of New Hampshire. Uphaus was thrust into the role of a suspect, for he could be type-cast: he had for years been an outspoken proponent of labor, peace, racial, and liberal causes. He was "a Christian pacifist and a disciple of reconciliation" (Eby 1960). "That does not mean passivity," Uphaus explained to the New York Times, "It means enormous organizational activity for peace, not sitting around waiting for the Lord to do it. That means meeting the enemy, and loving him" (NYT, Dec. 15, 1959). He was controversial. He associated with radicals and thought they had a right to speak their minds. He abhorred the cold war. He had been to Warsaw and Moscow. He cared less about who sponsored a petition than he did about those in pain who had signed it. And his World Fellowship Center was also an easy target. Its idealistic goal of bringing together, as he said, "people who have nothing in common" people of different faiths, origins, and politics to promote understanding, made the ambitious Wyman suspicious.

Though he was investigated and testified fully about his own acts, Uphaus was never charged with any crime. Thus, the drama could have become a farce with Wyman the goat. But soon, under the goading of  The New Hampshire Sunday News and The Manchester Union Leader, allied newspapers gone mad, Wyman used against Uphaus the publicity weapons of innuendo and guilt by association. All insinuations were gleefully trumpeted in these newspapers.

Then, changing tactics, Wyman asked Uphaus for the names of all 600 visitors to the Center's summer sessions. If there ever had been a legitimate reason for New Hampshire to determine whether communist violent subversion existed in the state, the investigation had now become a public witch hunt. This roaming inquiry could cause real harm. Despite the absence of evidence of criminal activity, Wyman intended to feed the guests' names to the press and to circulate the names to other state attorneys-general. Thus, these guests, who would be identified as associated with "subversive" ideas or organizations, would be forced to run the gauntlet again and again. Uphaus knew them to be guilty only of holding views different from those of the majority and of exercising their right of free speech. He also knew that it would be hopeless for them to retain their good names in the face of such predatory publicity-seeking. He wrote,

"I had been harried, pilloried and branded. My actions and my motives had been publicly misconstrued. . . . To expose the good, law-abiding people who had been with us at World Fellowship would be a degrading thing to do." (1966, p.

"The solons of New Hampshire either did not know or did not care that innocent victims of Wyman's hit-and-run tactics would very likely lose their jobs, and be forced to spend the rest of their lives trying to prove their innocence." (1963, p. 154).

And so he refused. And the drama, which had moved from almost-farce to personal tragedy, suddenly escalated and became an epic confrontation. It was America-at-war (the cold war) versus one person's conscience, officially entitled The State of New Hampshire vs. Willard Uphaus. Holding a copy of the Bill of Rights, Uphaus said to a judge,

"In the final analysis, after one has prayed, after one has thought of all aspects, one must, before God, make up his own mind or his own heart and conscience as to what he shall do...I don't want to involve innocent people in the attorney general's network." (Uphaus, 1963, p. 158; 1966, p. 23).

He refused to divulge their names to Attorney General Wyman, or to the Supreme Court of New Hampshire, or to the Supreme Court of the United States. He was at one point in the proceedings sentenced  to an astonishing life sentence for contempt of court to force him to speak. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black said in outrage,

"The distinct possibility exists that this man, who, at least as far as these records show, has never committed a single crime, not even so much as an immoral act, faces imprisonment for the rest of his life."

And still he refused. The great newspapers of the nation became involved on Uphaus' behalf. For example, during 1959-60 alone, the New York Times ran thirty stories and three supportive editorials. Eventually, though, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against him by a 5 to 4 vote. It was the height of a Red Scare, and the Supreme Court majority's thumb on the scale of justice was pushed down hard. The state was perceived to be at risk from a subtle foe, said the Court, so its power to investigate need not be constrained prior to the initiation of criminal proceedings. The minority, however, got it right: exposure for the sake of exposure is impermissible, wrote Mr. Justice Brennan, who added,

"...Exposure and group identification by the state of those with unpopular and dissident views are fraught with such serious consequences for the individual as inevitably to inhibit seriously the expression of views which the Constitution intended to make free."

So, on December 14, 1959, this 69-year-old man went to jail for a year rather than cross a line his conscience had drawn in the sand. A long-time associate said at the time, "His frail and disciplined body harbors a will that does not permit him to change his mind once he is convinced that his course is the right one" (Eby 1960). In his autobiography Commitment, written in jail, Uphaus wrote of a visitor to his cell:

"One day Daniel North, a young reporter from the Claremont Eagle (NH) was allowed to see me. ... After this visit he wrote of me as a prisoner in Thoreau country. Thoreau I had known and loved since high school days in Indiana, but it hadn't occurred to me until I read Dan's article that the Merrimack River Thoreau loved wound its way in back of my jail. 'Must the citizen even for a moment or in the least resign his conscience to the legislator? . . . I think we should be men first and subjects afterward.' Here indeed was a kindred soul to rob confinement of its sting. Who could ask for better company than this? [para.] And like Thoreau, 'I saw yet more distinctly the State in which I lived,' gaining some radically different points of view as I came to know the other inmates. . . . (Uphaus 1963 p. 194)."  (Among the items in his cell was an imposing view of Chocorua by his Quaker friend John Pratt Whitman. Was it perhaps from Whitton Pond?)

Unsympathetic people mocked Uphaus for having false friends who should have, if they were innocent, identified themselves and thus freed him. Uphaus saw the trap and avoided it:

"That would have been a violation of the principle I had gone to jail to defend. They had every right to come to World Fellowship, to hear what was said there and to take part in the discussions. Why should they have to report their presence to a law officer? Such inquisitions feed upon themselves; eventually any organization in the state might then face a similar requirement" (Uphaus 1963 p. 200-201).

The following December, the drama concluded when the sentencing judge suddenly cut Uphaus's term two days short. Uphaus was spirited out of New Hampshire by friends who feared The Union Leader would succeed in its hysterical new campaign to add another year's sentence. Later, Uphaus was to tell the Thoreau Society,

"I was able at the end of the year to emerge victorious, and to say I had peace in my heart, first because I had stood firm, and second because I held no hate in my heart for any human being."(1966, p. 26).

(Though his press conference upon his release showed he had some bitterness, his autobiography recollects the note his 93-year-old mother had given him, six years before, as he went to see Wyman and first refused to divulge the names. "Willard," she wrote, "Pray for the Attorney General.")

A few years after these events, I with family and friends started to spend time at this same New Hampshire pond. We swim on the opposite shore from World Fellowship and wave to their row boats. We knew of Uphaus, but not much. People said he was an imperfect hero. My interest was piqued a year or so ago when, in my readings on Thoreau, I stumbled on the fact that Uphaus had addressed the Thoreau Society a few months after his release from jail and that, when he went to prison, he carried with him a copy of Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience" (TSB 75). I also learned that he had taught classes in Thoreau and Emerson, so he may have remembered that Thoreau had passed close to World Fellowship.

(On July 6, 1858, on his way to Mount Washington, Thoreau heard loons, described Chocorua as "ever stern, rugged, and inaccessible," and "fished in vain in a small clear pond by the roadside in Madison." He added, "the White Mountain scenery proper [fairly begins] on the high hillside road in Madison before entering Conway, where you see Chocorua on the left, Mote Mountain ahead, Doublehead, and some of the White Mountains proper beyond, i. e. a sharp peak" [longer selection quoted here].)

That discovery became my motivation to collect here on the web some materials about my almost-neighbor Uphaus. I felt the memories of his decision were slipping away from the Thoreauvian community, at least. This site is a work in progress as material is discovered.

How did Uphaus say he used Thoreau's thought?
In his address "Conscience and Disobediance," he said that, while in jail, "the sight of the [Merrimack River], and Walden, one of my valued jail possessions, made Thoreau an ever-living presence. The principles enunciated in his great essay on 'Civil Disobedience' helped sustain me." Uphaus continued,  "Like Thoreau I found my conscience coming into conflict with state authority." He explained,

"The situation in which I found myself was different from that which Thoreau faced, but the basic issues were very much alike. Would I refuse to cooperate with what I believed to be morally wrong and contrary to the historic principles on which our country was founded? Thoreau had great faith in the moral and spiritual power that one honest person can wield. In “Civil Disobedience” he declared, “I know this well, if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten honest men only — ay, if one HONEST man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this co-partnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America.” What applied to abolition of slavery when Thoreau lived, would apply in the present when the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment were in peril." [See, ed. note on Thoreau's phrase "ceasing to hold slaves," which may be confusing to modern ears.]

Later in "Conscience and Disobedience," Uphaus gave a wonderful characterization: "There was an all-outness about Thoreau."  I understand him to mean that Thoreau went all out--gave it all he had. He continued,

"[Thoreau] had contempt for mere amelioration of wrong. For Thoreau reforms 'take too much time and man's life will be gone.' 'Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence,' he insisted. 'Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything that was.' I felt, therefore, that Thoreau would have supported me in my full non-cooperation with what I believed to be a bad law even if it meant prison. This was better than to have given in just once, to have exposed innocent persons to harassment and persecution, and then to have salved my conscience by setting up a committee to work for the repeal of the law" (1966, p. 25).

Later, Uphaus said,

"Studying and teaching Thoreau, I learned anew the great lesson of the Declaration of Independence that authority must be resisted if its demands violate conscience."

At the end of "Conscience and Disobedience," he raised one matter where "I am not sure whether I understand Thoreau or enter into his experience." He is troubled by Thoreau's skepticism that "there is little virtue in the masses of men." Uphaus asks, as he recollects the thousands that rallied to his cause, if both he and Thoreau agree that there is great power in the one, why can there not be power in the many?  Uphaus believe it was those people ("the masses of men") that may have given his cause its moral and political victory despite his imprisonment:

Finally, at one point, I am not sure whether I understand Thoreau or enter into his experience. I believe with him, with my whole heart, in the power of the one, but I cannot follow, without question, his belief that “there is little virtue in the masses of men.” How can I separate the one from the many? The ones are sometimes the projection of the unspoken hopes and consciences of the many. I cannot think of the one as a leader apart. Is he simply leading, or is he being thrust forward? I cannot speak of my own experience—the long years of legal struggle and the year of imprisonment—without becoming eloquent about the everlasting “we,” knowing that any moral and political victory was won through the sacrifice and prayerful efforts of the many.

Perhaps this is more a difference in background than a real disagreement. Uphaus was a lay preacher (and apparently an incorrigible idealist) who had said the world was his parish, and having a congregation (perhaps even a world-wide one) was natural to him. On the other hand, Thoreau in "Civil Disobedience" exhorted the individual to act to deny his support to an immoral government, whatever the masses of men did. Indeed, in 1846, it was "the masses of men," otherwise called the majority, that was abetting a government that enslaved one sixth of its people and was invading Mexico to expand slave territory.

As the years passed, and the injustice of slavery pressed ever harder on Thoreau, he changed. The need to involve others changed, and his later essays suggest that change. In his "Slavery in Massachusetts!", the dilemma was more acute: now, the Fugitive Slave Law enlisted all northern states in direct support of slavery. Though a riot had almost freed a Virginia slave, Anthony Burns, from a Boston jail , the authorities had shipped him back south. The authorities had then imprisoned those who had tried to free the slave, but, Thoreau noted, no one was trying to free them. "Slavery in Massachusetts!", Thoreau exclaimed to his Massachusetts audience; he meant that the continued imprisonment of those who tried to free the slave meant that all in Massachusetts who did not act to clog and shut down this oppressive system were as morally enslaved as any in the south. He said,

"The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free. They are the lovers of law and order who observe the [moral] law when the government breaks it.....What is wanted is men, not of policy, but of probity--who recognize a higher law than the Constitution or the decision of the majority.....We have used up our inherited freedom. If we would save our lives, we must fight for them."

Perhaps he thought that in this moment of outrage a sufficient mass of men would act to "make the law free," but it didn't happen. But Thoreau did find one man who did act-- John Brown at bloody Harper's Ferry. Brown was a leader who said "Give me men of good principle--God-fearing men--men who respect themselves." At the height of anti-Brown anger, Thoreau wrote,

"Why do they dodge the truth? They are so anxious because of a dim consciousness of the fact, which they do not distinctly face, that at least a million of the free inhabitants of the United States would have rejoiced if [Brown's raid] had succeeded" (A Plea for Captain John Brown).

Thus, "Civil Disobedience" was enriched by the later Thoreau reform essays. The issues of individual or group action, and passive or active resistance, and the limits of the compact of government can be discussed endlessly and profitably. See, for a start, this link to the complete Thoreau reform essays (in a new window on the Thoreau Institute web site). But it takes a real event and a real person-- an Anthony Burns, a Jonathan Daniels, a Henry Thoreau, a Martin Luther King, or a Willard Uphaus-- among many others--to make the issues real and immediate.

Conclusion.
What continues to be troubling, decades later, is the aftermath of Wyman's investigation: the innuendos of so many years ago never went totally away. They continue even today to make World Fellowship vaguely suspect in some eyes, yet without just cause. As Mr. Justice Brennan said,

"There is no evidence that any activity of any sort that violates the law of New Hampshire or could in fact be constitutionally punished went on at the camp."

Now, in 2001, World Fellowship has survived those times and continues its mission of fellowship, but it is still a target for infrequent yet symbolic vandalism. For example, its road side sign on Route 16, which proclaims a welcome to all races and creeds, is periodically burned. This intolerance might be occurring even without the aftermath of the Wyman campaign of innuendo, but perhaps not to this degree.

In this, Uphaus was right-- someone in authority who uses the power of his office under color of law to smear a person's (or place's) reputation often causes an irreparable, life-long injury as serious as a criminal conviction. It is an outside-the-law life sentence, unrestrained by due process. Because there is no official conviction and sentence, the accused never "serves his time" and there is no officially-acknowledged societal forgiveness.

Perhaps the only remedy is like one adopted by the king of Denmark when the Nazis ordered the Jews of his kingdom to wear a yellow patch of cloth. The king's response was to wear one, also. If the sign at every establishment along this stretch of Route 16 proclaimed a visible welcome to all races and creeds, the sign-burning might stop. As Martin Luther King said, commenting on his reading of Thoreau, "I became convinced then that non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good."

Uphaus also recognized that the public official is even more dangerous if the actions in question are constitutionally-protected free speech. Then the smear becomes both a misuse of executive power to tyrannize an individual and an assault on the free speech guarantee that protects the freedoms of us all. The First Amendment is unpopular, particularly at a time of perceived national threat, because it protects the rights of the minority to express dissent. But a time of national turmoil is precisely the time when a clear, contrary, clarifying voice is most needed. As Uphaus told the Thoreau Society,

"As Americans, Thoreau and I leaned on the same tradition. 'That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government they will have,' he declared. My own conscience told me that the Attorney General was exercising authority under the law that was leading to the destruction of our civil and religious liberties, the weakening of the Bill of Rights, and bringing harm to innocent people. The state's anti-subversive law was being used to snoop into men's thoughts and interfere with their lawful associations." (1966, p.25)

Forty years later, The Concord Monitor, the newspaper of New Hampshire's state capital, recognized Uphaus as one of the hundred persons who helped shape the state in the twentieth century. The newspaper published a long article that captured the forces at play in the 1950s and the lone, unlikely figure of the elderly camp director. (It had been The Concord Monitor that, when Uphaus had been imprisoned only ten days, ran a prayer that he had composed and had sent to them from his cell. They ran it on Christmas morning, on Page One. Good for them.)

Thus, this drama played itself out on the shore of this tranquil pond. Uphaus returned to World Fellowship for five years, then founded a similar center in Florida, where he remained active until his death in the early 1980s. Attorney General Wyman was elected by the "masses of men" of New Hampshire to the United States Congress, where he continued, with the Union-Leader's support, for twelve years.

It was not the first time, and would not be the last time, that the government, feeling itself threatened, would try to restrict the rights of its citizens. But in the very last words of his autobiography Commitment (1962), Uphaus re-invoked Thoreau and added a message of hope:

"I have somehow clung to Henry David Thoreau's message to us all:

'If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music that he hears, however measured or far away.'

Could it not be that now more and more of my fellow Americans are hearing the same distant drummer call us to march together for peace and brotherhood? I pray that this be true. I so believe."

---

by Stephen F. Ells, August 1, 2001
<steveells@earthlink.net>
<http://home.earthlink.net/~steveells>
.

Uphaus' essay "Conscience and Disobedience"
Uphaus' account to the Thoreau Society of his decision to disobey

Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience"
Uphaus said its principles sustained him.

The Concord (NH) Monitor's 20th-century recognition of Uphaus
This 1999 article looks back 40 years to a time of emotion and accusation

Prior to the imprisonment
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A few hours after release
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