Peace & Freedom: 2023 Fall/Winner issue

The Fearless Four
By Robin Lloyd
Burlington (VT) Branch
Two recent books by Megan Threlkeld and
Kirmen Uribe touch on one of the most
flamboyant peace activists to take part in
the 1915 International Congress of Women
at the Hague — Rosika Schwimmer. Serendipitously,
I met both authors and learned of their
books-in-progress at the Schwimmer-Lloyd collection
in the New York Public Library on 42 nd St. and
Fifth Ave, where I too was researching both Rosika
and her friend and supporter, my grandmother
Lola Maverick Lloyd.
In discussing these books, I will expand the story to include
two more women intensely committed to world peace,
world government, and each other: Edith Wynner, Rosika’s
trilingual secretary, and my aunt, Georgia Lloyd. Georgia, my
grandmother Lola’s youngest daughter, devoted her life to
furthering the ideas that Lola and Rosika had developed, as
well as to launching the Campaign for World Government.
Edith Wynner also committed her life to the cause, as well as
to writing a biography of Rosika, although it was never finished.
Taken together, the lives of these four fearless women
cover the entire twentieth century, from Lola’s birth in 1875
to Edith’s death in 2003.
Citizens of the World
In her book Citizens of the World:
U.S. Women and Global Government
(University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2022), historian Megan
Threlkeld has profiled nine women
— white, Black (Mary McLeod
Bethune), radical, moderate, liberal,
socialist — describing their ideas
for a permanent machinery to end
war. Between 1900 and 1950, they
promoted world citizenship and/or
Rosika Schwimmer,
world government. Two chapters
1914. Photo credit: Library
of Congress.
in the book tell the story of the
fearless four.
In chapter 4, she describes the feelings of dread Lola and
Rosika experienced in the 1930s as they saw the Second World
War approaching. They mourned their inability to stop the
first, and were discouraged by the weakness of the League
of Nations in controlling resurgent
nationalism.
As Threlkeld explains, in
1937 they crafted a plan to
federate the world. Envisioning
an “all-inclusive, nonmilitary,
democratic Federation of
Nations,” they launched the
Campaign for World Government
to implement it.
Lloyd and Schwimmer “had
little patience with what they saw as the capitalist, imperialist
underpinning of Wilsonianism,” she writes. “Even though
their vision was never realized, their plan is important because
it represented a vision of peace, justice, and equality far more
radical than that of other world government theorists in
the 1930s — many of whom later helped shape the United
Nations. Schwimmer and Lloyd sought a sweeping alternative
to the international status quo, one that took the needs of
ordinary men and women into account and gave them a voice
in international relations” (82).
A federation — with more central control - would bind
member nations together more firmly. Both the League of
Nations and the United Nations were designed to be confederations.
But the only way to end war permanently was
to establish a world government, the four women believed.
Their key proposal was a parliament, initially within the UN,
with representatives directly elected by the people, similar to
the US House of Representatives. Governments would have
no say in who represented their countries.
In addition, an economic commission would “plan the
regulation of the world’s production of raw materials and the
control of distribution according to the needs of all nations”
(91).
Threlkeld documents, from original research in the archives,
the arduous efforts to spread the word about the campaign,
summarized in a small pamphlet, “Chaos, War, or a New
World Order?” After Pearl Harbor and the US entry into the
war, however, support for such idealistic peace plans declined.
Lola cut her ties with WILPF in 1942 when the national board
failed to endorse her world government plank in its platform.
Rosika had resigned years earlier, in 1927, declaring that the
League did not have the courage of its convictions. Later, she
resumed her activities on behalf of and with WILPF.
Robin Lloyd with a bust of her grandmother
Lola Maverick Lloyd.
PEACE & FREEDOM FALL/WINTER 2023 | 15