The records of the Madison American Friends Service Committee provide an important complement to the already strong holdings of the State Historical Society on the opposition to the war in Vietnam. The collection is rich with documentation on AFSC's Conscientious Objection program and on the role of Madison's religious community in the opposition to the war. It is also strong in documenting AFSC philosophy, specific issues that concerned it, and the ways in which AFSC addressed those issues. However, beyond administrative meeting minutes and general correspondence, the records offer little information on the organization's members or staff, subcommittee activities, or the internal procedures or policies specific to the Madison Area Committee.
The records consist of ADMINISTRATIVE RECORDS, PROGRAM RECORDS, PUBLICITY AND OUTREACH, and SUBJECT FILES.
ADMINISTRATIVE RECORDS contains documentation regarding the committee's founding, correspondence, and a nearly complete set of meeting agendas and minutes spanning the period from 1964 to 1971. There are also occasional minutes of subcommittees on conscientious objection, the fiftieth anniversary, and human relations. In addition, a nearly complete six-year span of Chicago Regional office minutes are also present. Taken together, these files offer insight into internal policy and functions and relations with the Chicago and national offices; as well as planning, implementation, and the results of activities. Also included are scattered financial materials and an occasional monthly report.
The PROGRAM RECORDS series is divided into five alphabetical subgroups: Community Relations, Conscientious Objection, International Affairs, Peace Education, and Youth Services.
The conscientious objection records, which are the most extensive and most important part of the collection, offer important insights into opposition to the Vietnam War in Madison. They are especially strong in documenting the committee's draft counseling activities and its Wisconsin Project, workshops that took place on campuses across the state. These records are of particular interest in that, through questionnaires and correspondence, they reveal the concerns of some of the young men whom AFSC advised and the tactics undertaken to help them. The case records are of particular interest for their documentation of the process to claim conscientious objector status.
A second program division is Community Relations. These records document local projects involving legislation, support for draft resistance, prison reform, and welfare. Although the documentation is limited and fragmentary, meeting notes, correspondence, contact lists, and news clippings provide insight into local and state concerns and the ways these issues were addressed by the Madison Area Committee. Records on draft resistance filed here show how local organizations cooperated in order to strengthen statewide anti-war efforts. Of special note is the file on support for the Milwaukee 14, fourteen Milwaukee clergy arrested for burning draft cards.
The third program division, International Affairs, documents the Madison AFSC's interest in tracking and impacting social injustice around the world, but particularly in South Africa and Vietnam. These records are very limited in scope, containing scattered notes, literature, and correspondence concerning the Vietnam Project.
Peace Education is a fourth category of records within the programs series. This section includes a file on Peaceful Alternatives through Non-Violent Action (PATNA), a group organized by AFSC member Paul Fleer in 1970 to establish contacts with and services to communities. PATNA's project focus was on landlord-tenant problems, police-demonstrator relations, and drug problems in the Mifflin Street area of Madison. Organizational descriptions, correspondence, articles of incorporation (1971), guidelines, reports, and scattered minutes provide significant insight into the PATNA program. Also of interest are records of AFSC's relationships with other anti-war organizations such as the Center for Conflict Resolution (CCR) and the Free University, both of which AFSC cooperated with in order to develop peace-focused courses in the UW curriculum. Records of the Non-Violent Film Project consist mainly of film resources, accompanied by some order forms, correspondence, and notices of community screenings.
Through planning notes, scattered minutes, correspondence, flyers, project descriptions and lists, the youth services program records provide information on the activities undertaken for high school and college students. An important file here documents support for the Friends of AFSC organization on the University of Wisconsin campus. Anti-war activities are also prominently represented within these files, as are national and international service opportunities such as Volunteer International Service Assignment (V.I.S.A.) or Summer Projects Abroad.
The bulk of the PUBLICITY AND OUTREACH series consists of organizational literature, the distribution of which was a primary function of the AFSC. Included in the files is a list of organizations who sent literature, orders, and information on sales of local author Adam Schesh's book, An Outline History of Vietnam. Despite its routine nature, the literature files have been retained intact because they document the organizational contacts of the Madison AFSC and the climate of ideas in which it operated. Publicity materials include radio spots and press releases, information on speakers for community forums, mailing lists, news clippings, an incomplete run of a newsletter issued in 1971 and 1972, and a few photographs of an incident of draft card burning that took place at the Madison City Council Chamber in 1968.
The bulk of the SUBJECT FILES document cooperation with related organizations and the collection of reference information. The majority of this material has been separated to the SHSW Library and the Archives Vertical File, although interesting files on Project Sanguine and University Religious Workers and other Madison clergy have been retained.
