[Peace-discuss] Re: [Peace] FW: SPAM: Rice, Not Bombs!

[Jim Buell]

At 02:12 PM 2/14/2003 -0600, you wrote:
>All,
>
>If you ask people to send rice, you might want to ask them to write "Please
>hand stamp" on the outside of the envelope to avoid the problem described
>below.
>
>Kimberlie

>...


Hi Kim & all. Thought you might want to know the following regarding the 
rice protest. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, just that the history ain't 
as advertised. This is from the definitive hoax-debunking website, Snopes - 
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/petition/rice.asp .

BTW, at least one rice letter attracted some attention from campus cops in 
Montana - spotted this linked from Tom Tomorrow's weblog at 
www.thismodernworld.com (a highly recommended site, by the way). See: 
http://bozemandailychronicle.com/articles/2003/02/05/news/bushletterbzbigs.txt 
("MSU student's letter to Bush causes ruckus on campus")

peace,
Jim

>Claim: Bags of rice sent to President Eisenhower helped dissuade him from 
>launching an attack against China.
>
>Status: False.
>
>Examples: [Collected on the Internet, 2003]
....
>Although the current "Rice for Peace" campaign is a sincere effort aimed 
>at heading off a war between the USA and Iraq, the premise on which it is 
>based is false. The anecdote reproduced above, about the Fellowship of 
>Reconciliation's (FOR) waging a similar campaign in the 1950's which 
>supposedly influenced President Eisenhower's decision not to wage 
>(nuclear) war against China during the political crises over the islands 
>of Quemoy and Matsu in 1954-55 and 1958-59, is taken from David H. 
>Albert's 1985 book, People Power: Applying Nonviolence Theory. However, 
>Albert's book includes no annotations or footnotes to indicate from where 
>he obtained the information that the 'Feed Thine Enemy' campaign 
>influenced Eisenhower's thinking and to explain how peace activists 
>"learned a decade later that the campaign played a significant, perhaps 
>even determining role in preventing nuclear war." Presumably, Albert's 
>source was a 1974 interview with Alfred Hassler, the general secretary of 
>the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, as published in the FOR's 
>house magazine, Fellowship:
>
>Do you remember FOR's campaign in '54 and '55? There's a story we haven't 
>told very often because it was told to us in great confidence -- but that 
>was nearly twenty years ago.
>
>There was a famine in China, extremely grave. We urged people to send 
>President Eisenhower small sacks of grain with the message, 'If thine 
>enemy hunger, feed him. Send surplus food to China.' The surplus food, in 
>fact, was never sent. On the surface, the project was an utter failure.
>
>But then - quite by accident - we learned from someone on Eisenhower's 
>press staff that our campaign was discussed at three separate cabinet 
>meetings. Also discussed at each of these meetings was a recommendation 
>from the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the United States bomb mainland China 
>in response to the Quemoy-Matsu crisis.
>
>At the third meeting the president turned to a cabinet member responsible 
>for the Food for Peace program and asked, 'How many of those grain bags 
>have come in?' The answer was 45,000, plus tens of thousands of letters.
>
>Eisenhower's response was that if that many Americans were trying to find 
>a conciliatory solution with China, it wasn't the time to bomb China. The 
>proposal was vetoed
>While this interview does provide an identifiable source for the 
>information, it is also a single, unverifiable, third-hand account 
>obtained from an anonymous source and not disclosed until twenty years 
>after the fact, and as such its probative value is quite marginal. The 
>anecdote as given appears to be a garbled account of a 1954 effort 
>undertaken by the Fellowship of Reconciliation to have small bags of wheat 
>(not rice) sent to the White House for the purpose of prompting the 
>Eisenhower administration to undertake relief efforts on behalf of China, 
>where a catastrophic flood on the Yangtze River had left thousands 
>homeless and hungry. Nothing in contemporary news accounts of the 1955 
>'Feed Thine Enemy' effort mentions the campaign's being tied to an 
>anti-war cause -- the issue was that since China had declined aid from 
>international relief organizations (such as the Red Cross) and would not 
>allow private voluntary organizations from the "free world" into the 
>country to supervise the distribution of food and other supplies, the 
>Fellowship of Reconciliation's director felt that the U.S. government 
>should extend a "no strings attached" offer of assistance to the Chinese 
>government.
>
>As The New York Times reported in March 1955:
>
>The Administration has another wheat problem.
>
>This time it is hundreds of bags of wheat. They are tiny bags, weighing 
>about two ounces, and are addressed to President Eisenhower at the White 
>House.
>
>The bags carry the inscription: "If Thine Enemy Hunger, Feed Him." In 
>smaller letters are the words: "Send Surplus Food to China."
>
>The bags are being mailed to the White House from all over the country. 
>They come from citizens who have responded to the appeal of the Fellowship 
>of Reconciliation, 21 Audubon Avenue, Manhattan.
>
>This organization started its drive for the Administration to heed St. 
>Paul's injunction and send surplus foodstuffs to Red China after the 
>Yangtze River flood of last summer. The flood left thousands homeless and 
>in need.
...
>The Fellowship['s director, Alfred Hassler] stated that an offer "with no 
>political strings attached" would be hard for the Peiping Government to 
>refuse.
>
>The organization also said that distribution should be left to the Chinese 
>Government "even though we might feel that we could do it better, and even 
>though we fear that some food might be diverted to other ends."
>
>"Part of the world problem America faces is the suspicion on the part of 
>Asians and others that we think we can do everything better than they," 
>the fellowship said.
>
>That the Red Chinese Government had not asked for aid is "hardly 
>significant," Mr. Hassler wrote.
>
>"On the other hand," he said, "the fact that the United States has offered 
>help freely to 'friendly' nations stricken by similar disasters but not to 
>China, is significant."
>Herbert L. Pankratz, a helpful archivist at the US National Archives and 
>Records Administration (NARA), provided additional corroborating 
>information via e-mail:
>Report re the Fellowship of Reconciliation Food for China Campaign and the 
>Formosa Straits Crises of 1954-55 and 1958
>
>The Fellowship of Reconciliation was an organization of religious 
>pacifists whose leaders and members contacted the White House on numerous 
>occasions advocating giving food to the USSR, opposing military aid to 
>Pakistan, favoring clemency for the Rosenbergs, opposing the rearming of 
>West Germany, urging clemency for Communists convicted under the Smith 
>Act, opposing nuclear tests in the Pacific, favoring clemency for Japanese 
>war criminals, and opposing the sending of spy planes over Russia. This 
>organization had also supported efforts of the U.S. Government to send 
>food aid to East Germany and Hungary.
>
>In 1954 China suffered major flooding along the Yangtze River in some of 
>its key rice-growing areas. Life magazine (8-23-54) even ran an editorial 
>favoring the concept of food aid to Communist China. In late 1954 the 
>Fellowship of Reconciliation began a campaign to get people to send small 
>bags of wheat (not rice) to the President in order to get our government 
>interested in giving food to the Chinese. People started sending bags to 
>the President in late 1954 and continued during early 1955. The New York 
>Times (3-6-55) reported that hundreds of bags of wheat kernels, each 
>weighing about 2 ounces, had been sent to the White House. The bags were 
>inscribed with a Bible verse, "If Thine Enemy Hunger, Feed Him" and the 
>statement, "Send Surplus Food to China." The Times article indicates that 
>the White House sent the bags to the Foreign Operations Administration for 
>a response. F.O.A. Administrator Harold Stassen noted that they had sent 
>out over 4,500 such responses. The letters to individuals who had sent in 
>a bag of wheat reminded them of some Cold War realities. The International 
>Red Cross had offered assistance to China but had been turned down. In 
>addition, the Chinese government was continuing to export food to the 
>Soviet Union and other countries to fulfill trade agreements while their 
>own people suffered.
>
>There is no indication in our files or in the New York Times article that 
>this food for China campaign was intended as a protest against the 
>possibility of the U.S. going to war with Communist China. It appears that 
>it was strictly a humanitarian effort.
>
>There is a small note in the file on the Fellowship of Reconciliation 
>which indicates that it was considered a "subversive" organization. A lot 
>of the correspondence from its leaders to the President was referred to 
>the Protective Research Section of the Secret Service. With this 
>classification, justified or not, there is virtually no likelihood that 
>the President would have paid any attention to any bags of wheat or 
>letters sent in by this organization or its members.
>
>Communist Chinese forces threatened the Nationalist-held island of Quemoy 
>and Matsu on two occasions, September 1954-March 1955 and August-September 
>1958. During both of these crises various military and civilian advisers 
>advocated the use of atomic weapons if war broke out and the U.S. had to 
>intervene. President Eisenhower, while acknowledging the fact that the 
>U.S. would need to use the ultimate weapon if full-scale war with China 
>occurred, indicated that Congress and our allies would have to be 
>consulted first. He continued to work for peaceful solutions which would 
>avoid U.S. involvlement in an Asian war.
>
>We have checked summaries of discussion and memoranda of conversation for 
>various meetings Eisenhower had with military advisers and the National 
>Security Council and have found no references to the bags of wheat or food 
>for China campaign. There is no documentation in our files to support the 
>story that the bags of wheat influenced Eisenhower's decisions during the 
>Formosa Straits crisis. The documents reveal that Eisenhower made his 
>decisions based on his understanding of the strategic and diplomatic 
>considerations as well as on intelligence reports and military options. An 
>account of Eisenhower's handling of the Formosa Straits crises can be 
>found in the book, Eisenhower: The President by Stephen E. Ambrose (Simon 
>and Schuster, 1984).
>The account of the Formosa Strait crises provided in the aforementioned 
>book (by historian Stephen Ambrose) makes it clear that Eisenhower never 
>had any intention of "bombing mainland China" or launching a pre-emptive 
>nuclear strike against the Communist Chinese; no "Food for China" campaign 
>could possibly have been instrumental in dissuading him against choosing 
>options he was never considering in the first place. Moreover, it's simply 
>wrong to assert that a "Food for China" campaign prompted Eisenhower to 
>decide that "he certainly wasn't going to consider using nuclear weapons 
>against [the Chinese]," as he had already publicly stated that he most 
>definitely would use them if the Communist Chinese invaded Quemoy and Matsu:
>
>At Eisenhower's March 16 [1955] news conference, Charles von Fremd of CBS 
>asked him to comment on [Secretary of State] Dulles' assertion that in the 
>event of war in the Far East, "we would probably want to make use of some 
>tactical nuclear weapons." Eisenhower was unusually direct in his answer: 
>"Yes, of course they would be used." He explained, "In any combat where 
>these things can be used on strictly military targets and for strictly 
>military purposes, I see no reason why they shouldn't be used just exactly 
>as you would use a bullet or anything else."
>Even if Eisenhower were aware of the "Food for China" campaign, and even 
>if he made the comment attributed to him (which might have been offered in 
>jest, for all we know), it would be a very large stretch of the truth to 
>claim that his decision-making was influenced by mailed-in bags of wheat, 
>because the situation never developed to the point where he had to make 
>decisions. His strategy throughout the Formosa Strait crises was to hold 
>back until circumstances forced him to act, and they never did:
>
>Eisenhower's handling of the Quemoy-Matsu crisis was a tour de force, one 
>of the great triumphs of his long career. The key to his success was his 
>deliberate ambiguity and deception. As Robert Devine writes, "The beauty 
>of Eisenhower's policy is that to this day no one can be sure whether or 
>not he would have responded militarily to an invasion of the offshore 
>islands, and whether he would have used nuclear weapons." The full truth 
>is that Eisenhower himself did not know. In retrospect, what stands out 
>about Eisenhower's crisis management is that at every stage he kept his 
>options open. Flexibility was one of his chief characteristics as Supreme 
>Commander in World War II; as President, he insisted on retaining that 
>flexibility. He never knew himself just how he would respond to an 
>invasion of Quemoy and Matsu, because he insisted on waiting to see the 
>precise nature of the attack before deciding to react. What he did know 
>was that when the moment of decision came, he would have the maximum 
>number of options to choose from.