Edward F. Snyder Papers

Edward Furnas Snyder is a Quaker lobbyist for peace, civil rights, and economic justice. He was born in 1925 in Iowa and raised in Maine. He later married Dorothy Snyder. Edward Snyder received his law degree (1951) from Yale Law School. He joined staff of Friends Committee on National Legislation in 1955 and retired in 1990 as Executive Secretary of the FCNL Snyder argued against legislation for a U.S. military draft and excessive military spending; worked for cultural and scientific exchanges between Soviet and U.S. citizens to lessen tensions of the Cold War. Edward and Dorothy Snyder have long been tax resisters; and withheld those taxes during the Vietnam War which would have gone to military purposes. In 1990 they filed suit against the U.S. government, arguing that the government was using taxpayers' money illegally to fund war in El Salvador and Nicaragua.