Chapter 3 On Becoming a Seagoing Cowboy

Calling All “Christian Gentlemen”

Though the seagoing cowboys were recruited, processed, and managed by the BSC, they were formally employed and paid by UNRRA.⁸ The standard payment of $150 was reasonable but not extravagant given that the average annual income for a single male residing in either urban or nonagricultural regions in the United States was approximately $1,000 just after World War II.⁹ Cowboys and would-be cowboys had no direct contact with UNRRA, however; they were, in effect, subcontractors hired by and answerable to a third party, the BSC, and thus the BSC, rather than UNRRA, became the men’s primary point of reference. There was at least one UNRRA-appointed supervisor per ship (SS Mount Whitney was so large that it sailed with three supervisors); this was a managerial position that paid twelve dollars per day. The earliest shipments, in the spring and summer of 1945, did not include a specially designated foreman, but by September UNRRA requested that the BSC designate at least one cattle tender per sailing to work under the supervisor as a “foreman tender” who would act in a leadership capacity; the number of foremen depended on the ship type and size. As an incentive, foremen cowboys were awarded a payment of $250 for the trip instead of the standard $150 that cowboys received. Veterinarians were also included in each sailing; a senior veterinarian earned almost seventeen dollars per day and junior vets fifteen dollars per day.¹⁰ Sending veterinarians with animal shipments was routine and had been practiced by Americans during the wars as well.¹¹ The cowboys’ wages were collected from UNRRA by Brethren program administrators at New Windsor and were then distributed to the men upon their return to the United States.

Round trips would normally last from four to six weeks, but occasionally they could take three months or longer if the ship needed repairs, if the weather was severe, or if some unforeseen problem arose, as sometimes it did. The actual length of the trip did not affect the lump sum payment, so men took a bit of a risk by signing up; their daily pay went down as the trip length grew. Meals and lodging on the ship were covered, of course, but UNRRA did not pay for the cattlemen’s journeys to the American port of sailing or back home from that port. The total cost of these trips obviously depended on where the men were coming from and how close they were to the sailing port, and some men admitted that they could scarcely afford these costs up front.¹² UNRRA did, however, give a maintenance allowance of $2.50 per day for the regular cowboys (more for supervisors and veterinarians) while the men waited in port to ship out, and indeed sailing dates could be unpredictable, so the amount paid varied quite a bit.¹³ All together the cowboys, supervisors, and veterinarians formed an expensive part of UNRRA’s agricultural program.

More than anything else, it was the war that determined which types of men were eligible to take on the position of cattle tender. Some of the men who might normally have been interested in doing this work either were still in regular military service in 1945 and 1946 or were employed in vital military and defense industries. Men had to have been discharged from active military service before they could even consider signing up. There were a couple of additional categories of qualified men: those who had been too young or too old for conscription and so had never been in the war, and those who had farm deferments or ministerial deferments and had never been in service. The last eligible category included men who had been Conscientious Objectors during the war. These were men whose religion decreed that war is “contrary to the will of God,” that killing humans in all instances is wrong, and that helping others constitutes an important expression of faith. The majority of Conscientious Objectors came from the three historic American peace churches: the Brethren, the Mennonites, and the Quakers.¹⁴

From these pools of available men, the BSC chose who they would hire; the BSC handled the advertising as well as the selection of the men.¹⁵ The BSC recruited from their own denomination, but, given how numerically small the Brethren were and given the ecumenicalism that was part of the Heifer Project from the start, they also recruited from those other denominations.¹⁶ The final number of cowboys who came from specific religious groups is difficult to determine precisely, however. Despite the fact that each cowboy was issued a record card when he signed up with the BSC to work on the UNRRA ships, the cards were not always filled out completely or accurately, especially when it came to supplementary information like religious affiliation rather than essential details like name, address, and sailing route and date. Even when men had a strong religious affiliation to give, it was sometimes not marked on the record card. At other times recorded affiliations were distant, stretched, or tenuous. In the end, seagoing cowboys who came from the peace churches may have formed up to a quarter of the total number of men.¹⁷

Nevertheless, all of the cowboys, whether from the peace churches or not, were recruited by a self-consciously Christian organization—the BSC—and operated in a broadly Christian American context that understood mid-century American humanitarian activism at least partly in Christian terms.¹⁸ Recruiting strategies reflected these Christian foundations in that quite often the BSC placed advertisements for livestock handlers in the religious press; ads appeared in newspapers and magazines associated with specific Christian denominations.¹⁹ The Brethren weekly Gospel Messenger and the Mennonite Gospel Herald were two such periodicals. The BSC also advertised the program through notices posted on Brethren college campuses.²⁰ The men recruited for the very first sailing—to Greece in the spring of 1945—had responded to one such notice posted on a bulletin board at the Brethren-affiliated Manchester College in North Manchester, Indiana.²¹ Other college student recruits came from institutions like Oberlin, Ohio State, the University of Tennessee, and Elizabethtown College in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. These college men, some of whom were pursuing preministry programs, saw the cattle-boat trips as an opportunity to expand their knowledge of Europe’s postwar problems and the international political context more generally. Some of the Mennonite men were also motivated by the fact that, before the war, there had been a large minority of German Mennonites in Gdańsk, the port city where many UNRRA ships docked. The trips offered an opportunity for these men to connect with aspects of Mennonite history.²²

Recruitment happened in direct and personal ways as well, within congregations, and it was not uncommon for men to learn about the seagoing cowboys program through word-of-mouth recommendations from family, neighbors, and friends. Harold McNett, for example, was seventeen years old and had just graduated from high school when he got an unexpected call from someone he knew from church asking if he would consider becoming a cattle attendant; Harold made the decision that same weekend and soon enough found himself sailing for Poland.²³ The BSC liked the word-of-mouth approach to recruitment, as this made it more likely that the men were coming from sympathetic religious and social milieux, even if these were geographically distant from one another. Peace church communities were strongest in Pennsylvania as well as in the Midwestern states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Kansas, and not surprisingly many of the peace church cowboys came from these states. Sometimes several male members from one family signed up together, making the experience a truly familial one. Other times surnames revealed men’s membership in (and the popularity of the seagoing cowboys program among) specific faith communities if not the same congregations. As one supervisor remarked, “For a long time every relief ship leaving this harbor had a ‘Yoder’ on it.”²⁴ Yoder was a common surname throughout Brethren, Mennonite, and Amish circles.²⁵

To recruit the several thousands of men it needed to staff the UNRRA ships, however, the BSC had to look beyond its own and related Christian denominations, and it did so by running advertisements in a wide assortment of newspapers from across the United States, many of them rural and local. The BSC also ran radio announcements that enticed men to apply for the job.²⁶ In the end the majority of cattle-boat crews were composed of regular men who may or may not have been religiously affiliated. The seagoing cowboys were a diverse group of men. According to one description, they included “farm boys from Pennsylvania, rodeo men from Texas high schools and college teachers from the Mid-West, ministers from many denominations, wealthy farmers who can afford to hire help for a few months, [and] city men who claim farm experience” (but who sometimes did not actually have it).²⁷ Cowboy Dwight Smith broke down the composition of his Poland-bound crew: “8 high school students, 7 ex-servicemen, 3 farmers, 2 ministerial students, 2 factory workers, 1 horse dealer, 1 auctioneer, 1 truck driver, 1 CPSer, 1 taxicab driver, 1 run away, 1 college Prof., 1 chip builder.”²⁸ Smith himself had only just recently finished high school. This geographic and social diversity in the cowboy group was recognized by UNRRA too. As one UNRRA report read, “Home addresses were from nearly every state in the Union, truly as comprehensive a cross section of American life as could be found.”²⁹

Experience working with animals and a willingness to do manual labor were explicit requirements for the job of livestock attendant. But a man’s ability to do this type of work was presumed rather than spelled out in any detail, much less verified; it was consistent with the work that men (especially those from rural communities) normally engaged in anyway, had done at some earlier point in their lives, or were just expected to know how to do. There was therefore little need for an elaborate training program. One cowboy expressed his personal view that the right attitude and a willingness to learn and help were really the most important qualities that cowboys could bring to animal care in this context. For this particular cowboy, religious commitment was also important to doing the job well. His message to prospective cowboys was a reminder of just how closely work and religion would be intertwined in some of the men’s daily activities aboard the ships: “You cannot pray unless you work. Seagoing veterans [cowboys who had made earlier trips] . . . watch you work and measure your religion by your perspiration.”³⁰

A typical help-wanted advertisement from 1946 spelled out only the essential details when it asked men to become livestock attendants on UNRRA ships. It stated that the length of the trip away from home would be between four and six weeks, that the pay was $150, and that applications ought to be made through the BSC. Typically, ads also gave the eligible age range as sixteen to sixty.³¹ In the earliest postwar months and into 1946, the youngest men in this age range did in fact become cattle attendants (as long as they had their parents’ permission, like Harold McNett did). Later in 1946, however, program administrators, reacting to some problems with some of the youngest recruits, raised the minimum age to eighteen.³² Besides, as the draft ended and the pool of available labor grew, it became less difficult to recruit interested men. The increased availability of men was also reflected at the other end of the age range: Gospel Messenger reported in late 1945 that the maximum age of eligibility had been lowered from sixty to fifty. And yet despite this, there were plenty of cowboys who were in fact older than the maximum, showing that the stated age limits were sometimes simply ignored.³³

Responses to the BSC’s appeal for recruits were strong and reflected a wide array of motivations. Some men were enticed by a combination of good pay, adventure, and a genuine desire to participate, even in a small way, in an international humanitarian aid project. For some of the youngest men in particular, the appeal of becoming a seagoing cowboy was rooted in a sense of adventure and a desire to leave American shores for the first time to explore a bit of the world.³⁴ Well-known theologian Harvey Cox relayed that when he was still in high school he was “inebriated with adolescent wanderlust” and therefore jumped at the opportunity to sign up as a cowboy. Cox sailed to Poland in 1946 and would forever consider his time at “Robert Hart University” (Cox sailed on a Liberty ship known as SS Robert W. Hart) as having given him opportunities for unprecedented personal growth.³⁵ For others, the appeal included a chance to make friends and socialize with men from the same faith group: “Our motives were mixed—adventure with Christian service,” said Albert J. Meyer from Sterling, Ohio, who was just sixteen when he was part of a group of Mennonite cowboys (thirty-two in all) that accompanied 834 horses to Poland in the summer of 1946 on SS Stephen R. Mallory. (Meyer went on to complete a PhD in physics at Princeton.)³⁶ Some saw it as a chance to learn more about the war and the world the war had created, and for others it was about feeding hungry people and doing their part to “help” in what seemed like an unprecedented moment of need. But even the actively religious men were not what one might describe as typical missionaries who set out to win religious converts.³⁷ Cowboy Lawrence W. Shultz addressed the question of proselytizing using plain language: “The people in Poland want bread and not stones to rebuild their church houses.”³⁸ At any rate, as the cowboys knew, their status as would-be missionaries or international humanitarian actors was only going to be very temporary and partial, tied as it was just to this one specific experience that would see them spending only a short time in the target country.

The BSC understood that men signed up for a variety of reasons. From their perspective what ultimately mattered most was a man’s “good moral character.”³⁹ The Christian bases of moral character were assumed, as was Christian men’s unique suitability for the type of relief effort that the postwar moment demanded. This message came through in the help-wanted advertisements that the BSC placed in newspapers. One advertisement called openly for “Men with character and Christian principles.”⁴⁰ Another ad published in The Baptist Record out of Jackson, Mississippi, stated boldly that what was “even more important” than sailing proficiency or experience handling animals was a “man’s ability to conduct himself in a Christian manner so that friendship instead of enmity will result from his having been in foreign port cities.”⁴¹ Indeed, the BSC identified the potential for un-Christian behavior among some of the recruited cowboys as a key concern. As the ship’s sailing date approached, recruiters became less selective about their hires, however, and at times filled crew vacancies at the very last minute if previously recruited men had to withdraw suddenly for personal reasons. One crew supervisor called some of these last-minute hires “water front boys”: men of dubious character pulled off the street to fill an urgent and unexpected need.⁴² (This type of recruiting was perhaps more in line with how animal attendants were hired for sailings of different kinds during earlier historical periods.⁴³) According to one supervisor, these recruits sometimes showed “no appreciation of the position of the peace churches” and therefore threatened to create “disillusionment among the serious minded fellows who were expecting to be placed in the company of like-minded conscientious men.”⁴⁴

The incentive for the BSC to find the “right” kind of men for the job was thus significant, and the Christian inflections in the BSC’s approach to recruiting were repeated at various stages of the process. In a follow-up letter to men who had expressed initial interest in the job (but who had not yet sent in all of their application materials), for example, the Brethren described openly what type of man they were looking for. The ideal cowboy would be “a Christian gentleman and a messenger of Good Will . . . actively committed to living his faith . . . tolerant, patient and sympathetic in every situation.”⁴⁵ It was such men, the thinking went, who would be best able to exercise self-control and to resist the temptations that would arise during the trips.⁴⁶ In some administrative and planning documents, the seagoing cowboys were even referred to as forming part of a distinctly “Christian program of Relief and Rehabilitation.” The use here of the capital Rs on “relief” and “rehabilitation” subtly recalled UNRRA’s formal name and priorities. Devotion to God, family, and community was what ideally would motivate men to join the program in the first place and to thereby “give service” to other people—people who, program administrators noted, were part of a larger imagined Christian family.⁴⁷

Even when versions of recruiting material and follow-up correspondence did not explicitly mention Christianity, the instruction to contact the BSC in New Windsor nonetheless signaled the seagoing cowboys program’s Christian identity. Highlighting the BSC as the single point of contact for the seagoing cowboys program—as all recruiting material did, given the Brethren’s exclusive control over recruitment—arguably left UNRRA’s role just a little bit vague, just as it left vague the relationship of UNRRA to the BSC. Sometimes UNRRA appeared in the ads only as part of a description of where the men would be working: on “UNRRA ships carrying livestock.”⁴⁸

One specially recruited crew was radically unique. This was an interracial crew of African American, white, Latino, and Japanese American young men, thirty-two in all, plus two ministers and two veterinarians. All the men came from the Jim Crow South.⁴⁹ Despite objections from the BSC, UNRRA did not normally permit desegregated crews; at best African Americans were placed in all-Black cowboy crews.⁵⁰ Under some pressure to change its policy, however, UNRRA agreed to run this experiment with a desegregated cowboy crew. The men were assembled by the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, an interdenominational and interracial coalition of southern Protestants devoted to “translat[ing] radical egalitarian theologies into action.”⁵¹ The Fellowship was led by the activist and educator Nelle Morton. Dr. Benjamin Mays, mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and president of Morehouse College at the time, also played a role in setting up this experiment in what Mays referred to as extending “Christian Fellowship across racial lines.”⁵²

The recruiting process for this crew involved collecting formal and detailed written recommendations for all the interested men. References commented, in ways we could arguably describe as standard for the context, on men’s “Christian character,” but they also reflected on men’s “ability to live and work intimately with men of different racial backgrounds.” Remarkably for this specific crew, too, the referees provided plenty of evidence of the men’s experiences in handling livestock; many of the applicants were in fact taking animal husbandry courses or were studying veterinary science, suggesting that the burden of proof for showing a range of relevant skills was higher for this group than it was for regular crews.⁵³

The selected men ultimately sailed together on a Poland-bound ship, SS Creighton Victory, from Pier X in Newport News, Virginia, on July 4, 1946, with 214 horses and 590 cattle aboard.⁵⁴ During their sailing the men followed a special educational plan that focused on topics like Christian ecumenicalism, contemporary labor issues, the transformation of rural areas by modern technology, and world peace. In Poland the men bonded over their shared grief about war’s destructive capacity and their sympathy for the people. This experiment was deemed a success by the Fellowship, the cowboys, and, ultimately, by UNRRA. Cowboy crews became formally integrated after that.⁵⁵

Each man who was offered a job on an UNRRA ship as a cattle attendant had to undergo a physical exam. The exam was generally regarded as tough, and men had to pay for it out of their own pockets.⁵⁶ Men had to be free of communicable diseases, and certain medical conditions—epilepsy, asthma, and mental illness, for example—were reasons for rejection. In addition, men could not be less than five feet tall or more than six feet three inches in height, and “marked obesity” would also disqualify a man from the job. Immunizations for smallpox, typhoid, typhus, and tetanus were required. All men applying for the position of animal tender needed to possess a birth certificate and a social security number.⁵⁷

Though there were a couple of voices advocating for women to become attendants, women were not in fact permitted to work on the UNRRA ships. As Ruth Steenburgh, secretary to John Nevin Sayre of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (an interfaith peace and social justice organization that was part of the Heifer Project), commented wryly in a letter to Dan West in May 1947, as UNRRA was winding down its operations, “I still can’t help but feel that a boatload of bovines managed by such lovely (ahem) girls as we have here at 2929 [2929 Broadway in NYC, the address of the Fellowship’s headquarters] would be an asset not only to the cows themselves but to the girls.”⁵⁸ At any rate, to work on an UNRRA ship a person needed to become a nominal member of the Merchant Marine—then under the jurisdiction of the Coast Guard—and women were not permitted to be Merchant Mariners at this time.⁵⁹ The National Maritime Union, led by Joseph Curran, facilitated the special recognition that the men needed in order to allow them to do the UNRRA work; the cowboys carried Coast Guard papers. That this particular group of men, recruited and managed by the BSC, was acceptable to the Maritime Union was important; the union’s approval came easily in this instance.⁶⁰ For their service in the Merchant Marine, cattle tenders were paid a penny per month as a formality.⁶¹

Men submitted their applications for a seagoing cowboy position directly to the BSC and specifically to Benjamin G. Bushong. Bushong was the main administrator of the cowboys program, and in this capacity he worked closely with UNRRA on sorting out the logistics that the movement of thousands of men and livestock animals required. But Bushong occupied many other roles as well. He was an active layman in the Church of the Brethren, a friend of Dan West, a dairy farmer from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and a member of the Pennsylvania Guernsey Breeders’ Association who, as has been said about him, “knew cattle and the Brethren.”⁶² Bushong also served as the second executive director of the Heifer Project Committee. He occupied this role until 1951, well beyond the end date of the UNRRA–Heifer Project partnership.⁶³

It was Bushong’s name on the correspondence between the seagoing cowboys program and the men hired for the job. It was also Bushong’s name on the notes of thanks that the men received at the end of their trips along with their payment.⁶⁴ Bushong’s secretary was Carol Maxine Stine West, whose father, Ora W. Stine, played an important part in the Heifer Project’s beginnings and its evolution through the UNRRA period (and beyond). Carol—who married Kenneth L. West (a distant relative of Dan West) in June 1947—handled the administrative details of the program at the New Windsor offices of the BSC.⁶⁵

The initial letter that Bushong sent to men who had been hired as seagoing cowboys reflected the same Christian ideals that had guided recruitment efforts the whole way along. “It is the purpose of the Brethren Service Committee,” Bushong wrote, “to be creative and Christian in all its endeavors, and in this effort your interests, thoughts and actions will be guided accordingly.” Bushong continued by advising the new hires, “It becomes each member of your group to exercise a tolerant, patient and sympathetic attitude in whatever situation you find yourself. We must, first of all, practice brotherhood in our own group, then into all the world. Every attendant is expected to be a gentleman, and a messenger of good will. As such you are going forth in the name of Christ.”⁶⁶ Bushong and the BSC appealed to men’s sense of Christian service and (at least among the actively Christian recruits) assumed an understanding of the responsibilities the men owed to their faith and their religious communities—and not just to abstract notions of humanitarian relief—to do this good work. One Brethren cowboy named Wayne Brant said that, for him, the trip was in fact an expression of faith.⁶⁷ Being a cowboy was not just about usefulness and civic service and helping others; it was also about showing a supreme loyalty to God and about serving God through good works.⁶⁸

But being a Christian cowboy from the peace churches was also about showing the state what those churches were capable of in this critical postwar moment. Participation in postwar relief efforts was a choice to incorporate the service impulse, publicly and consciously, into the peace churches’ identity in a deeper way.⁶⁹ Cowboy Byron P. Royer recalled Bushong’s instructions to a group of outgoing cowboys that was about to participate in the oath ritual at the Coast Guard Office before starting their work as cowboys. Rather than swearing an oath to the Constitution of the United States to do the assigned work, the Brethren chose (as was their custom) to “affirm” their commitment instead. Bushong reminded each man to be proud of his Brethren heritage as he made his affirmation and to carry himself at that moment—with pride and resolve—in the same way that “a soldier representing the United States” would carry himself.⁷⁰

Seagoing Cowboys as Conscientious Objectors

Similar ideas about the need to fulfill obligations and to make sacrifices in ways that the times demanded had informed the peace churches’ approach to wartime conscription. That the United States introduced a Conscientious Objector status during the war, and that peace church members could apply for this classification, is directly relevant to this history of UNRRA, the Heifer Project, and the seagoing cowboys. Of the almost 7,000 seagoing cowboys, 366 (or approximately 5 percent of the total) undertook their work on an UNRRA ship while they were still Conscientious Objectors. These men were part of the Civilian Public Service, the alternative service system established by the American government. An additional number of Conscientious Objectors joined the seagoing cowboys program after they had been released from the CPS, and others still joined the program as registered Conscientious Objectors who were nevertheless not in the CPS because they were on a farm deferment or because they were registered students.⁷¹ All of this shows the extent to which the history of conscientious objection and the history of the partnership between UNRRA and the BSC (and humanitarian work more generally) intersect in revealing ways. The very fact that the government created a program for Conscientious Objectors—largely as a response to intense lobbying on the part of the peace churches—was incredibly important to those communities and shaped their conception of themselves as Americans both during the war and then, significantly, after.⁷² That the peace churches ran most of the camps for Conscientious Objectors, moreover, provided the church administrators with additional experience in organizing and mobilizing their communities. This set up the peace churches for a quick transition toward a new kind of service once the war ended; to some extent it facilitated the Heifer Project and also the partnership with UNRRA that produced the seagoing cowboys program.

Each of the peace churches had long maintained an antiwar or pacifist stand, though there were differences in how each one interpreted pacifism and what obligations came with the definition, and there were even differences within denominations. Some Mennonites, for example, subscribed to a definition of pacifism that was based primarily on a literal reading of the New Testament. Jesus’s directives to “love your enemies” (Matt. 5:39, 44) and to “put your sword back in its place” (Matt. 26:53) were (and are) taken literally by some Mennonites and applied on both the personal and the state levels. God’s word and possessing a “Christian conscience” are, for many Mennonites, the final arbiter of right and wrong; the privilege of interpretation is neither the state’s nor that of any single political voice. Others translated Jesus’s exhortations differently and argued that they applied on an individual level only or that they would be relevant only in some future time when Jesus ruled the world. Still others, particularly Quakers, tended toward a nonliteralist but nevertheless firm commitment to “the spirit of biblical teachings on love and nonresistance.”⁷³

Regardless of the specific reasons for their opposition to war, it was this opposition that, in part, had driven the Brethren, Mennonites, and Quakers out of their European homes to what was called the New World centuries ago. In North America the peace church denominations were generally loyal to the state, which they regarded as a useful mechanism for maintaining law and order for the collective, but tensions developed when the state asked the peace church members to obey the state before obeying God. War was a time when, according to the peace churches, the state overstepped its authority by asking citizens to go against their firmly held beliefs. From the churches’ perspective, the matter of conscientious objection was not addressed in a satisfactory fashion during the First World War, and though exemptions from military service were possible at that time, it was not entirely clear what the exemptions meant, and, at any rate, the alternative service options were loosely defined and extremely limited.⁷⁴

The unresolved conscription issue during the First World War, plus the simple fact that wars undeniably caused pain and suffering, sparked the peace churches’ interest in relief work. As we have seen, the American Friends Service Committee had formed in the context of the First World War, in 1917, to coordinate relief efforts undertaken by the Quakers. Quakers offered essential assistance to the war’s victims. Similarly, the Mennonites organized relief through the Mennonite Central Committee. Shortly after the committee’s founding in 1920, Mennonites worked in Russia, where a devastating famine was unfolding. During the interwar years and into the early part of World War II, the Mennonites also worked in England, France, India, Paraguay, and Spain.⁷⁵ As one prominent Mennonite explained, “Through relief service we are able to express our sense of responsibility for and our sense of unity with our fellow human beings. We feel that we need to bring food, clothing, and shelter to those in distress, but far more important than even such vital material assistance is the opportunity to share the burden of suffering of another, to aid him to recover his sense of self-respect and integrity, and to help restore a faith in love and goodwill through a practical demonstration of human sympathy and brotherhood.”⁷⁶ These sentiments would be reflected in postwar relief work as well.

The Brethren, for their part, had participated in relief efforts organized by one of the other agencies (as in Spain where the Brethren worked with the Friends in the late 1930s) before the formal establishment of the BSC in 1941. With the creation of their own relief organization, the Brethren were ready to take on independent projects, and the first major one of these would be the Heifer Project. By the time of the Second World War, then, the three historic American peace churches had already developed skills in relief provision and had formed some important links with each other and with the government. These links would grow stronger still during the war when the question of Conscientious Objector status again came to the forefront.

With the announcement in 1940 of the Selective Training and Service Act, which ushered in the first military draft in peacetime in American history, the BSC, the American Friends Service Committee, and the Mennonite Central Committee together established a National Service Board for Religious Objectors (NSBRO). The role of NSBRO was to act as the point of contact between the various churches that had members opposed to military service while also functioning as the liaison between the churches and Selective Service (that is, the US government). Instead of having to deal with multiple religious organizations, the government dealt with just a single agency: NSBRO. For its part NSBRO represented an important next step in the peace churches working together on a common goal. Paul Comly French, a Quaker, well-known journalist, and antiwar activist, was the board’s first executive secretary from the institution’s creation at the end of 1940 through to 1947. M. R. Zigler, the first executive secretary of the BSC from 1941 to 1948 and the man instrumental in organizing the logistics of the Brethren’s partnership with UNRRA, was the chairman, and Orie O. Miller from the Mennonite Central Committee was vice chairman (Miller and the MCC represented all Mennonite congregations in NSBRO as well as the Amish). Eventually, NSBRO would include dozens of other denominations (like Methodists, Catholics, and Jews, for example), in addition to its three founding churches.⁷⁷

According to the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, American men who fell between stipulated age ranges (the age ranges were adjusted once America entered the war) were required to register with their local draft board. Once drafted, there were five options: accept military service; apply for Conscientious Objector status and, if successful, agree to serve under military command in a noncombatant role, especially in medical units (I-A-O status); apply for Conscientious Objector status and refuse to serve under military command, opting instead to serve in the government-sanctioned alternative service program, CPS (IV-E status); apply for a deferment for farm work or for status as a full-time (meaning year-round) ministerial student; and, lastly, not even register with the draft board and serve a prison term instead (the majority of those who opted for this were Jehovah’s Witnesses).⁷⁸

Draft boards reviewed men’s applications and decided whether requests for Conscientious Objector status were warranted or not. It was more straightforward for men from the historic peace churches, where nonviolence and conscientious objection formed a recognized and clear part of the teachings, than it was for men from other religions that permitted but did not require commitments to nonviolence, or for those whose opposition to war was ideological, political, and broadly humanitarian rather than religious (most such objections were on the extreme political left). In fact applicants were required to demonstrate that “religious training and belief” accounted for their objection to military service; the right to conscientious objection formed a part of America’s commitment to religious freedom specifically. After all, President Roosevelt had named freedom of religion as one of the four “essential human freedoms” during his January 1941 State of the Union address to Congress, alongside freedom of speech, freedom from fear, and, as we have seen, freedom from want. Lewis Blaine Hershey, the director of Selective Service (all the way through to the Vietnam War), even if he may have been personally indifferent to the spiritual aspects of conscientious objection, nevertheless believed that the CPS system stood as an important example of American democracy and its respect for religious minorities.⁷⁹ The preamble of the United Nations Charter would similarly reflect a commitment to religious tolerance and its importance to maintaining “international peace and security.”⁸⁰

The most relevant Selective Service classification for the BSC was IV-E, which referred to alternative service under the CPS program. A total of 11,996 men were recognized as Conscientious Objectors with an IV-E classification. The classification entitled men to go into a CPS base camp and to do “work of national importance under civilian direction” as an alternative to military service.⁸¹ The government supplied the camp site, the facilities, and the equipment needed for the work projects, but it was not typically involved in daily operations of the camp, and it did not compensate the men for their work, cover the costs of their basic necessities—food, utilities, clothes, bedding, and toiletry kits, for example—or give financial assistance to their dependents.⁸² The majority of the camps were thus administered and supported financially by the Mennonite Central Committee, the American Friends Service Committee, and the BSC (though a smaller number of camps were maintained by other denominations too). Most of the men in the camps (almost 60 percent) were members of the peace churches; the Mennonites were the most numerous with over four thousand men or approximately 40 percent of the total. The Brethren constituted 8 percent of the men in CPS (over one thousand men), and the Friends 10 percent of the total number of men in CPS camps (or 951 men).⁸³

By the end of the war, the three founding peace churches of NSBRO had contributed several million dollars to sustain men in the CPS program.⁸⁴ The churches explained these enormous costs in a couple of ways. The financial burden, they believed, would show the government and the American public just how many sacrifices church members were willing to make for their beliefs.⁸⁵ M. R. Zigler of the Brethren appealed to “every family of our brotherhood” and exhorted them to “recheck their giving to discover whether or not adequate testimony has been made.” From Zigler’s perspective, contributions to the financial costs associated with sustaining peace church men in CPS camps thus became “a testimony of appreciation to the United States government.”⁸⁶ This would also ideally fend off accusations that decisions around conscientious objection had been taken lightly or that the men in CPS were spoiled and coddled while other American men died in the war effort. Instead, the peace churches hoped their management of the CPS camps would reveal that their members could be both American patriots—men who accepted fully that they had a national and collective obligation to fulfill—and pacifists simultaneously.⁸⁷

Second, the peace churches argued that a church-funded and church-administered camp system would allow for the provision of religious, spiritual, and educational programming that reflected the values and priorities of the given denomination while creating a suitable social milieu for like-minded men.⁸⁸ In practice this meant that the camps served an explicit educational purpose. For example, “specialized schools” that focused on topics relevant to the denominations (like pacifism) were set up at select Brethren-managed CPS camps to fill men’s leisure time.⁸⁹ M. R. Zigler specifically asked the men in the specialized schools to think in concrete ways about some topical questions: how to “wage peace” in times of war, how to build a just and peaceful world, and how to influence the development of a “Christian society of nations.” Zigler’s call “to settle disputes between nations and classes without going to war or using violent methods” echoed UNRRA’s frequent references to cooperation between nations as one way to foster lasting peace.⁹⁰

The men in the CPS were arguably well placed to contribute to postwar humanitarian aid programming. A special CPS unit designed to train men for reconstruction work in liberated territories was started as early as 1942, though opposition from politicians and the public to employing Conscientious Objectors as relief workers abroad thwarted the endeavor; the work was seen as too easy during wartime.⁹¹ Once the war ended, sentiment changed, and so did the needs of the Heifer Project and of course UNRRA. Men who were still in the CPS who were interested in becoming seagoing cowboys could ask permission from Selective Service to leave the posting they were already in (meaning the CPS camp to which they were assigned), seek permission to transfer to a special CPS Reserve Unit (Camp #152), and take up work as a livestock handler on an UNRRA ship.⁹²

Initially, Selective Service only considered a small number of men from CPS for a special posting with the BSC in the seagoing cowboys program: those who had joined the CPS during the one-year period from June 16, 1943, to June 15, 1944. In 1946, the rules were changed so that any man assigned to the CPS on or before October 31, 1944, was eligible to become a cattleman so long as he had completed at least eighteen months in the service.⁹³ These choices were made to limit the number of applicants in manageable ways and then to expand the number of eligible men when the need for greater numbers presented itself.⁹⁴ UNRRA and the BSC (as the day-to-day administrator of the seagoing cowboys program) were directly involved in negotiating for adjustments to the number of men released. For example, the director of UNRRA’s Agricultural Rehabilitation Division, Edwin R. Henson, was the one who asked Col. Lewis F. Kosch, the assistant director of Camp Operations in the Selective Service System, to release more men from the CPS camps when more men were needed in 1946. Kosch was in fact willing to release another one hundred men, but only on the condition that Paul French, executive secretary of NSBRO, report back to Selective Service with confirmations that the men who had already been released for the program had in fact made the intended trips on cattle ships. Men who had been released from camps to work on the cattle boats but who failed to show up for those sailings would be reassigned to another CPS camp.⁹⁵ In the end, 366 CPS men were approved by Selective Service to join the CPS Reserve Unit and to leave the United States with the seagoing cowboys program.⁹⁶ Of these 366 men, 154 were Mennonites, 62 were Brethren, 46 were Friends, and the remainder were from other denominations, including the Methodists.⁹⁷ Of the 366, 91 made two trips as cowboys, 18 made three trips, 2 made four trips, and the remaining 255 made a single trip.⁹⁸

Men in the CPS could also be discharged in the regular way, when their time came, and then they could go on to become cattlemen if they chose to do so; these men are not included in the 366 men that became seagoing cowboys while they were still in the CPS. Demobilization for Conscientious Objectors was initially slower than for those in active military service and happened in stages, with men over forty-five the first to be discharged. Like in the regular armed forces, general discharges were based on a point system and on calculations that took into account age, time served, and whether the Conscientious Objector had a dependent child. The very last discharges occurred a good year and a half after the war ended, in March 1947, when the last CPS camps closed and as UNRRA was concluding its aid shipments.⁹⁹

The CPS was a formative and important experience for the peace churches. The peace churches had cooperated with one another during the formation and execution of the CPS, and the links (both personal and administrative) that were established in setting up and administering the CPS were quickly and usefully mobilized for new cooperation in the Heifer Project and in the seagoing cowboys program in the immediate postwar period. There was also the useful hands-on experience that some of the men received in their CPS postings—on dairy farms, for example, where the work was applicable to their new temporary positions as livestock tenders.

But most importantly, the experience of the CPS shaped the churches’ understanding of their faith and of their position in American society. It also affirmed their potential to “do good” and cemented the view that “helping” formed a fundamental part of their faith. Relief work had to be handled carefully, and it needed to be undertaken for the right reasons; its primary purpose had to remain focused on helping people that needed the help. But relief work also increased goodwill and cross-cultural understanding, and it strengthened a sense of connection with others; it reflected the responsibility humans owed one another. Professor Henry A. Fast, vice-chair of the Mennonite Central Committee from the mid-1940s, contemplated the importance of the CPS to Mennonite development specifically. Fast summarized, “The CPS program has turned out to be a tremendous venture of Christian faith and Christian concern. . . . It is tremendously important now that men in CPS, as they begin to scatter, keep their vision clear, their faith burning with a steady flame, and their spirit of Christian love aglow with deep compassion and a keen sensitivity to the cries of human need. God has opened doors of opportunity to men in CPS and to the constituencies from which they come.”¹⁰⁰ There were even remarkable suggestions that the best elements of the CPS could be rebranded after the war and used to create a new CPS: a Christian Public Service instead of the Civilian Public Service. The president of Bethel College, a Mennonite institution in Kansas, proposed this idea at a conference for directors of MCC-administered CPS camps in September 1945. President Kaufman referred to “the unfinished task of CPS” and looked ahead to the many “opportunities for service” that would exist in the postwar world.¹⁰¹

That the CPS remained significant in some circles after the war was perhaps shaped, too, by the other important work that CPS men completed during the war itself. Most notable here is the participation of thirty-six men from the CPS in the University of Minnesota Starvation Experiment. The experiment ran from late 1944 until the end of 1945, just as the magnitude of the food crisis in Europe was becoming apparent. Its purpose was to learn about the physical and psychological effects of starvation on the human body and about what diets might work best to “nutritionally rehabilitate” starving people. Men from the CPS who volunteered for the experiment had responded to ads that enticed their participation with the simple and direct question, “Will You Starve That They May Be Better Fed?”¹⁰²

During the experiment the volunteers were semistarved under strict conditions for six months, such that they lost about a quarter of their body weight. The men’s moods, motivations, preoccupations, and anxieties were carefully charted. Then they were rehabilitated over a period of three months.¹⁰³ Fifteen of the volunteers (42 percent) were from the peace churches, and others came from related Protestant denominations. The Minnesota Starvation Experiment, in turn, had a direct connection to the BSC (and by extension to both the seagoing cowboys program and the Heifer Project) through seven of its participants who later became seagoing cowboys.¹⁰⁴ In a more general sense, the connection also stemmed from a shared interest in the problem of hunger. In the summer of 1946, a Heifer Project office in Southern California republished an article by a participant in the Minnesota Experiment titled “How Does It Feel to Be Hungry?” The article, written by Harold T. Lutz, appeared in a Heifer Project newsletter called Heifer Moos. Lutz described what he experienced during the experiment and indicated how proud he was of work that, he wrote, “helped the government and other agencies make the best use of the food they are sending to starving people abroad.”¹⁰⁵ The very fact that the Minnesota Starvation Experiment drew the interest of at least one Heifer Project office shored up connections between different contemporary approaches to “helping the hungry.”

Ancel Keys of the Laboratory of Physical Hygiene at the University of Minnesota was the director of the Starvation Experiment. Keys’s full scientific report on his findings would not be ready until 1950, when it was published as The Biology of Human Starvation. A preliminary manual that summarized the experiment’s general findings was published in 1946, however. Titled Men and Hunger: A Psychological Manual for Relief Workers, it was published by the Brethren Publishing House in Elgin, Illinois.¹⁰⁶ A note titled “From the Sponsors” precedes the main text of Men and Hunger and was written by none other than M. R. Zigler of the BSC; Zigler was of course an important administrator in the Brethren’s work with UNRRA on the seagoing cowboys program. In his note Zigler praised Keys’s work for showing the psychological effects of “physiological need.” As Zigler wrote, “Many of the so-called American characteristics—abounding energy, generosity, optimism—become intelligible as the expected behavior response of a well-fed people.”¹⁰⁷

Men and Hunger appeared as a tool for humanitarian relief workers to understand their subjects better and thus to do their jobs more effectively and with greater compassion. It gave imprimatur to what the manual’s authors, Harold Steere Guetzkow and Paul Hoover Bowman, referred to as “the importance of ministering to the psychological needs of people in distress.”¹⁰⁸ Bowman was himself a professional relief worker associated at one time with the American Friends Service Committee and more recently with the BSC. Guetzkow was a psychologist.¹⁰⁹ Their religiously inflected description of relief work—as “ministering”—is perhaps unsurprising given that the Church of the Brethren, the American Friends Service Committee, and the Mennonite Central Committee were all among the official sponsors of the experiment. The National Dairy Council was also a sponsor of the Minnesota Experiment.¹¹⁰

Of the three peace churches involved in the CPS, it was the Friends who expressed some reservations about postwar relief work generally and especially about linking it explicitly to expressions of faith. Already at the start of 1945, the Friends adopted the position that “relief work is not a vocation” and that after the war men from the CPS “should prepare themselves for their life-time vocation rather than for any short-term relief job.” Part of the argument was that the men’s value as relief workers would be all the greater only once they were experienced in their own professions.¹¹¹ In various statements issued toward the end of the war, the Friends were very clear about their opposition to relief work that was too technical and businesslike. They objected to using relief work for skills development as well; they did not want “human tragedy” to become a “training ground for persons wanting experience.”¹¹²

Building the Crews

Once men accepted jobs as seagoing cowboys, the program office in New Windsor got to work assembling crews for specific scheduled sailings. Men could request to be with a specific group, with other men they knew from church or from school, or with men that were in some way part of their extended families or communities. Supervisors also had the ability to weigh in on the crew composition.¹¹³

Melvin Gingerich was the livestock supervisor on SS Stephen R. Mallory’s 1946 maiden sailing as a livestock boat to Poland. Gingerich had grown up on a farm in Iowa and had experience with livestock animals; he was thus especially well placed to oversee care for the more than eight hundred horses aboard his assigned sailing. At the time Gingerich worked as a professor in the Department of History and Government at Bethel College. He was also a committed Mennonite pacifist who later in his career would write about the history of the Mennonites, the CPS, and the various postwar relief projects in which the Mennonites were involved, including the Heifer Project and the seagoing cowboys program. As part of his research on the seagoing cowboys in the late 1950s, Gingerich sent short questionnaires to some of the Mennonite men who had worked on the UNRRA ships. Men provided basic biographical information and included reflections on different parts of their trips, including the sailings themselves and the time spent in the target countries. They answered questions about any problems that they, as Christians, had faced on their trip; how the trips contributed to their religious lives; and what “instances of Christian witnessing” (meaning prayer services or Sunday school, for example) they engaged in on the trip. These questionnaires, which run a couple of pages each, help inform what we know about both the seagoing cowboys program and the Heifer Project.¹¹⁴

Both UNRRA and the BSC were eager to have Gingerich (and men like him) occupy the supervisor’s role on the live animal sailings. Members of Mennonite and related congregations also liked the choice and saw Gingerich as an exemplary role model for the younger men. In a memoir written in the late 1990s, Melvin’s son Owen (later the world-renowned astronomer Owen Gingerich) said it was “the confidence the parents had in my father” that in part accounts for their willingness to allow their teenaged sons to become seagoing cowboys in the first place.¹¹⁵ When Joe Byler, who would become the director of relief for the Mennonite Central Committee, learned that Gingerich would be leading a crew, he asked that his own son Delmar be included in the group.¹¹⁶ Delmar would eventually sail to Poland on a special all-Mennonite crew that Gingerich organized. (As it would turn out, Gingerich’s crew would be combined with another all-Mennonite crew that had been planned at the same time by Walter Oswald, a Mennonite professor from Hesston College.)¹¹⁷

Initially, the BSC had tried to find a “cowboy pastor” to accompany every animal shipment. The idea was that pastors would organize religious programming aboard the ships and act as counselors and role models for the cowboys. Recruiting for this specialized job was done through a letter from the BSC to over one hundred seminaries encouraging students of theology to apply for the position (some of the students did just that).¹¹⁸ But it proved impossible to recruit the large numbers needed. This was yet another reason that Christian husbands and fathers of a certain age (like Gingerich, born in 1902) made excellent alternatives. Men like this, as Bushong himself said, would be sure to remind the younger men of the greater purposes implicit in relief work. After all, though the primary purpose of the trips was to facilitate getting essential material aid to those that needed it, a secondary goal, when possible, was to preserve a “Christian attitude and ideal in the livestock program” and in the postwar aid effort more generally. These relief trips provided a unique opportunity to build a sense of community among the Christian men on the sailings and to reinforce their collective values; they constituted an investment in the future of Christian aid-giving.¹¹⁹

Supervisors were expected to fulfill several roles simultaneously. Gingerich described some of these: “I have had to be the first aid man, public relations adjuster, spiritual counselor, personnel manager, efficiency expert, and farm hand.”¹²⁰ Some supervisors took the initiative and prepared for their roles well ahead of time by communicating expectations to their crews well in advance, even before departure. Gingerich, for example, sent his crew detailed instructions and tips while the men were still waiting for the call to leave home. He even included a packing list, which recommended bringing work clothing and one old suit, a good padlock for the ship’s locker, a song book, a magazine, a joke book, a game, and, of course, the Bible.¹²¹ Martin Cohnstadt, another supervisor on a Poland-bound ship organized by the Fellowship of Christian Churchmen, specifically asked that the men in his group make some contribution to the recreational life of the collective by bringing games, magazines, or musical instruments.¹²²

In his correspondence with his crew, Gingerich also reminded the men of the moral dangers they would face during the trip, and he tried to prepare them to withstand temptations that they were sure to confront.¹²³ Safeguarding and protecting the moral health of the young Christian cowboys was the most worrying part of the job for Paul Erb, editor of the Mennonite Gospel Herald from Scottsdale, Pennsylvania, and a supervisor on a 1946 sailing.¹²⁴

For all these reasons and in all these varied ways, the BSC’s seagoing cowboys inhabited a very different world from the one that the more familiar “American cowboys” inhabited. Though it is not clear who first used the name “seagoing cowboys,” we do know that the men applied this name to themselves and that the contemporary press used it too.¹²⁵ The word “cowboy” comes from the Spanish vaquero. Vaquero describes a man whose job it was to ride horseback and manage beef cattle herds grazing across large tracts of land. Vaquero, in turn, comes from the Spanish vacca or cow; the cow as a species was introduced to the Americas by the Spanish. In the absence of adequate rail connections throughout much of the nineteenth century, cowboys were responsible for physically moving herds from Texas and other areas where land and cattle were plentiful to shipping points like those in Kansas and Missouri. From those destinations the animals would travel by rail to the populous northern states and meet the growing demand for meat.¹²⁶

By the twentieth century, American cowboys had become the quintessential symbols of white American working-class masculinity, and this even though about a quarter of all cowboys were African Americans. Cowboys became the iconic men of the American frontier: tough and rugged horseback-riding individualists who valued freedom and independence and who obeyed few laws (but operated under a strict if opaque moral code).¹²⁷

The cowboys recruited by the BSC, and particularly the smaller subgroup of men who were from denominations that worked with the Heifer Project, belied the American cowboy stereotype. Their farm experience, if they had it, tended to be on smaller dairy farms rather than on beef cattle farms, and this meant that they did not typically roam the American frontier in the way that “real” cowboys did. Besides, many of the recruits had never even ridden a horse and would have been lost on the frontier; the peace church men tended to come from the Midwest and the East rather than from the great open plains of the American West. The seagoing cowboys did not dress the part either; instead of cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, jeans, chaps, and bandanas, the Heifer Project cowboys wore regular work clothes and packed a suit, just in case, on their ocean voyages. They did not carry rifles or fight “Indians” in the battle for the American West in the familiar way portrayed in Hollywood westerns. And while we cannot say whether “most” of the seagoing cowboys personally eschewed violence and weapons or whether they rejected alcohol and cigarettes, we do know that the BSC leadership certainly did and that they encouraged all the men that they had recruited to do so too. The group of religiously motivated cowboys were the very opposite of the “drunken sots and beach combers” that the Brethren said usually made up cattle crews on ships.¹²⁸ These new cowboys were men who followed rules, recognized on-the-job hierarchies, and worked as part of a well-ordered team to achieve a collective goal and to “help.” Their identities as Christian men had to a greater or lesser extent motivated their entry into the global public sphere in the first place (just as at various times women’s sense of Christian duty challenged the separate-spheres ideology and facilitated their increasingly public roles).¹²⁹ Theirs was a forceful expression of modern peace church masculinity.

While seagoing cowboys were not typical cowboys, they nevertheless represented something quintessentially American. Even the name “seagoing cowboy” conveyed an adventurous and bold American spirt; the cowboys were different kinds of pioneers. UNRRA Director General Lehman had framed the success of UNRRA’s live animal program as partly the cowboys’ success; it was America, after all, that had made space for the religious convictions of the BSC and the peace church cowboys. When they crossed the ocean, the men sailed with American values, privileges, and freedoms in full view.¹³⁰ Each type of cowboy—the seagoing cowboys recruited by the BSC as well as the real and imagined cowboys of the American West—symbolized something of America’s commitment to freedom: freedom of movement on the one hand and religious freedom on the other. The best-known seagoing cowboys (meaning the ones we have records for) embodied a Christian masculine identity that, while it did not make them media celebrities and the stars of Hollywood films, nevertheless transformed them into heroes at the local or community levels and brought positive attention to the churches from which they came. The men’s stories, and the broader history of cooperation between the BSC and UNRRA, remain extremely important to the peace churches, the Brethren in particular, even today. The very fact that we know so much about the experiences of cowboys from the peace churches reflects this. Men talked and spoke frequently about their seagoing cowboy days upon their return to America. Their communities were attentive listeners.