Clarence Pickett journals

This collection contains typescript copies of the journals of Clarence Pickett (1884-1965), the executive secretary of the American Friends Service Committee from 1929 to 1950 and a prominent Quaker. The original journals are held at the American Friends Service Committee archives. The journals record his daily activities of note: interactions with elected officials and other notables, as well as his Quaker activities, speaking engagements, and travels. The individual entries vary from short sentences describing his location to longer entries which go on for pages, describing his activities and thoughts in detail.

During the time covered by these journals, 1933-1965, Pickett worked for a broad range of causes, working to both alleviate suffering where he found it and to address the root causes of that suffering. He attempted to address, among other issues, the plight of distressed coal-mining communities; subsistence homesteads; spiriting harassed Jews out of Nazi Germany; relief of devastated Europe and Asia; labor-management disputes; subsistence housing and cooperative farming for miners; economic assistance to African Americans living in slums and Japanese-Americans displaced after wartime internment; more humane police practices in Philadelphia; relief for Jewish, Arab, and other refugees; strengthening the United Nations and developing the Quaker program there; and shipping medical supplies to the Soviet Union.