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The Unitarian Universalist Service CommitteeRoger FrittsFebruary 9, 1997Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist ChurchBethesda, MarylandIn the fall of 1938 Waitstill Sharp, the young minister of the Unitarian Church in Wellesley Hills,
Massachusetts, took a leave of absence. Martha and Waitstill Sharp arranged for friends to care
for their two children. Leaving their home and their church and their children was hard. Nevertheless, they were determined to do what they could to get Unitarians out of Czechoslovakia. They
boarded a ship for Europe.
Neville Chamberlain had signed a treaty in Munich giving the Nazi government control of part of
Czechoslovakia. The agreement was a personal tragedy for Unitarians in Czechoslovakia. Dr.
Norbert Capek had established the first Unitarian church in Prague in the early 1920s. The church
had 3,400 members. Also, the democratically-elected Czech president was married to a Unitarian
from New York City.
On February 23, 1939, the Sharps arrived in Prague. In that city they helped emigration by
advising people about United States emigration laws and quotas. They brought applicants who
had been unable to get interviews to the attention of the American Embassy. They helped with
communication between Czech and American government officials. They arranged transportation
to what were, at the time, safer countries. They covered some expenses connected with the
interminable red tape.
During his trips out of Czechoslovakia, Rev. Sharp traded dollars for Czech crowns at an
exchange rate well above the official one. He used the Czech crowns for relief work within
Czechoslovakia. He deposited the dollars in English, French or Swiss banks so the refugees could
pick the money up if they got out. The Sharps also gave money to the Czech Unitarian Church for
food and clothing, and to pay the church mortgage.
March 15, 1939 the Nazis took over Prague. They closed all foreign refugee offices on July 25.
Nevertheless, the Sharps stayed on in Prague working to get people with United States quota
numbers released from Czech prisons. When the Second World War began in August 1939 the
Sharps left Czechoslovakia and returned to their church in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts.
In May of 1940, as a direct result of Martha and Waitstill Sharp's work, the American Unitarian
Association announced the formation of the Unitarian Service Committee. Its purpose was:
To investigate opportunities for humanitarian service both in America and abroad, and to take
action to perform such humanitarian service as may in its judgment seem desirable, and to raise
funds to carry out its objectives.
A distinguished group of Unitarians made up the first Board of Directors of the Unitarian Service
Committee. The Chairperson was William Emerson, Dean of the School of Architecture at MIT.
Other members included Harold Burton, Mayor of Cleveland and later Associate Justice of the
Supreme Court; Percival Brundage, senior partner in the Price Waterhouse accounting firm, who
became budget director in Eisenhower's administration; and Louise Wright of Chicago, Chair of
the League of Women Voters Department of Government and Foreign Policy.
The Unitarian Service Committee opened an office in Lisbon on June 20, 1940, staffed by the
Sharps, who again took leave from their church and their small children to help refugees. The goal
was to save the lives of intellectuals and anti-Nazi political leaders. It was real life drama,
something like the drama described in the classic movie "Casablanca." Rev. Sharp wrote:
The days defy description. They were filled from seven o'clock in the morning until midnight, and
sometimes after, with interviews, searches for persons about whom the Emergency Rescue
Committee had cabled from America, or their agent had cabled from Marseilles; appeals and
interventions at the American Export Line, the Pan American Airways, the French Consulate, the
International Police (this is the police system of Portugal which regulates the relations of
foreigners to the State), the British Embassy, and, daily, at the American Consulate.
The Sharps commissioned a successful painter and musician from Paris, to paint a sign for the
Unitarian Service Committee. He painted a flaming chalice, which the committee adopted as its
symbol. Fifty-six years later, each Sunday we join with hundreds of Unitarian Universalist
communities across the United States and Canada in lighting a chalice as a symbol of our religious
tradition.
The Sharps returned to the United States at the end of 1940. Other Unitarians from the United
States came to Lisbon to continue their work. In the summer of 1942 the Director of the
Unitarian Service Committee, Robert Dexter, met with Allen Dulles. Robert Dexter agreed to
carry on espionage activities for the Office of Strategic Services, which was later to become the
Central Intelligence Agency. Dexter and other service committee staff carried large sums of
money to resistance leaders in France. They also contacted OSS agents in Madrid and in
Marseilles for information. The OSS was looking for any significant information picked up from
refugees.
One Unitarian Service Committee staff member in Europe was a woman named Jo Tempi. Ms
Tempi was a former German Communist. In June 1944 she established a Unitarian Service
Committee office in Paris, two months before Allied troops liberated the city. Tempi used the
money the Service Committee sent her in helping the victims of German occupation, mostly
Jewish people of Polish, Austrian, German or Russian background. Working in a fifth floor office
with no elevator and no electricity, Tempi wrote apologetically that she was unable to get much
done between August 18 and August 25, when warfare was taking place in the streets of Paris.
After the war the Paris office grew to a staff of twenty, and became a center for a variety of
services for refugees. Unitarian churches all over the United States sent clothing to a Unitarian
Service Committee office in New York City. There they stored the clothing in a rented building
that had once been the stable for J. P. Morgan's horses. From New York they shipped the
clothing to the staff in Paris who distributed the clothing to refugees. In Germany the Unitarian
Service Committee administered ten homes for Displaced and Unaccompanied Children.
Soon after the war ended the Unitarian Service Committee became the center of a storm of
controversy. Jo Tempi came to the United States on a speaking tour, and because of her previous
membership in the German Communist Party, the FBI followed her. Although the FBI did not find
anything subversive in her talks, they did claim that she was sexually involved with the Director of
the Service Committee, Dr. Charles Joy. An ex-FBI agent who was a member of the Unitarian
Church in Hingham, Mass, took this report to the Board of the Service Committee. Although Dr.
Charles Joy steadfastly denied any impropriety between himself and Tempi, the board fired him in
August of 1946. They fired Jo Tempi a year later. Only Fredrick May Eliot, President of the
American Unitarian Association and a member of the Unitarian Service Committee board, voted
against firing Charles Joy. Today if you visit the Unitarian Universalist offices in Boston, you will
find there a building called Eliot House after named after Fredrick May Eliot, and a building called
Joy House, named in honor of Dr. Charles Joy. They have not named a building after Jo Tempi.
The hunt for Communists during the postwar period damaged but did not destroy the Unitarian
Service Committee. In the 1950s and 60s the committee moved beyond its role of helping
refugees. It became a center for social action in our denomination. After the merger of the
Unitarians and the Universalists in the early 1960s, the Unitarian Service Committee became the
Unitarian Universalist Service Committee.
The UUSC did not escape the storm of controversy that rocked our nation in the 1960s. In the
late 60s the U.S. Agency for International Development contracted with the UUSC to run a social
work education project in Vietnam. A minority of board members questioned the propriety of this
partnership. Reports that the Central Intelligence Agency was infiltrating private agencies working
in Vietnam on AID contracts alarmed opponents. In May 1969 a group of divinity students staged
a sit-in at UUSC headquarters for five days, protesting the work in Vietnam. When the contract
with AID ended in 1971 the UUSC withdrew from this controversial project.
In 1972 Richard Scobie became Executive Director of the Unitarian Universalist Service
Committee. For the past twenty-five years, under Scobie's leadership, the UUSC has been a
strong and persistent force for social improvement.
For example, in February of 1977 a death squad massacred hundreds of unarmed citizens,
including children, in San Salvador. The people had gathered to protest fraudulent election
results. In the United States the press did not report this massacre. However, a UUSC staff
person went to San Salvador to meet with Archbishop Oscar Romero and ask what the committee
could do to help. At the request of Oscar Romero, the UUSC began a series of tours of Central
America for Congressional leaders. These Congressional delegations became the cornerstone of
UUSC's human rights program in Central America. The tours brought legislators and other
influential citizens in contact with people who speak of the political oppression in these countries.
One person who took a UUSC tour in 1988 was our representative, Connie Morella. In an
interview she reflected on the "myopia" regarding Central America produced by traditional
Congressional junkets. Morella also voiced appreciation for the chance to speak with members of
many elements of Salvadoran society: political leaders of all persuasions, the military, labor
unionists, human rights leaders, and the people--those who endure an "inch by inch kind of
living" against a background of fear. The UUSC fact-finding mission, she observed,
. . . has altered my thinking, I find that I am one of the major sponsors of resolutions . . . that have
to do with human rights abuses requiring investigations, questioning where the money that we're
sending to El Salvador is directed. Is it directed to really helping with the development of the
country? Does it go to the people? Are they able to earn a livelihood by virtue of land reform? Or
are we just saying that on paper?
Another example of the UUSC's work is in India. In the 1970s a wealthy man named Holdeen
died and, in a complex will, left tens of millions of dollars to the Unitarian Universalist Association, for the care of the poor in of India. For many years court battles tied up the money in the
Holdeen estate. However in the early 1980s some money became available and the Unitarian
Universalist Association established the Unitarian Universalist Holdeen India Fund. This foundation allocates grants to the UUSC for projects in India and Bangladesh. In India the UUSC works
with the poorest of the poor: "untouchable" women. Legal abolition of the caste system has not
alleviated the systematic oppression of these women. The UUSC's program helps Indian women
gain more self-awareness and self-confidence so they can assume leadership roles in their
communities. Two years ago Hillary Clinton visited the UUSC's project while she was traveling in
India.
Today the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee is active in many important projects.
Today the UUSC is a stable, mature organization, rooted in the values of Unitarian Universalism.
It has an annual budget of more than $3 million; More than $200,000 of the budget comes from
the Guest at Your Table program. I want to offer all of you the opportunity to participate in the
Guest at Your Table program, not only to raise money for UUSC, but also because it is a
powerful educational tool.
If you are parents, I suspect that you wish, as I do, to raise children who are not completely
self-centered. I suspect that you hope your children will grow up to be adults who will, from time
to time, reach out and help other people.
I cannot control or predict the behavior of my children when they become adults. However, I can
provide a clear model for the importance of helping others. I can put a box right there on the
dinner table. I can put a little money in it each day for several weeks.
If you do not have children at home, you might take a box and put it on your table anyway in case
any kids drop by. All adults, not just parents, serve as models for children. The boxes are available
in the back of the church after the service.
Way back in 1940, when the Sharps first arrived in Lisbon, they found out that the unoccupied
south of France was choked with refugees. They heard that the babies of the refugees were in
great need of milk. The Sharps spent the first weeks in Lisbon arranging for a trainload of
condensed milk to be shipped to Marseilles where they would distribute it. They traveled from
Portugal through Spain and they arrived at the French border on July 17. The old French
government had approved their visas before the new government in Vichy replaced it. The guard
at the border told them that the visas were considered invalid by the new government. Unwilling
to give up and return to Lisbon, Martha Sharp insisted on seeing the commander of the border
guards. She showed him the milk shipment papers and she explained that unless they let her cross
into France, she could not get the milk into Marseilles and feed the children. The commander
violated his orders and let them enter.
This is what it is all about: encouraging an ethical commitment to the plight of other human
beings. By setting an example, we do our best to raise our children so that in the future, when life
gives them the opportunity to help others, they will make the right choice.
In the words of the mission statement of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee: We affirm
"the supreme worth and dignity of every person, the interdependence of all people, and each
individual's right to peace, justice and freedom."
Primary Source:
Di Figlia, Ghanda, Roots and Visions, The First Fifty Years of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, Copyright © 1990 the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. |
Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist
Church |
