Popular histories of Quakers too often verge into the realm of myth, presenting Friends as larger-than-life heroes who transcended the limits of the material world as they translated their faith into practice. Such understandings, though, have also boomeranged against Quakers, setting expectations of accomplishments that are far beyond reach. The myth has also resulted in Friends being seen as little more than hypocrites who fell well short of their high-flown rhetoric. Neither is a particularly useful way of understanding Quakers and their activism in the past, of course. Historians are better served by eschewing such oversimplified understandings in favor of more complex explorations that conceive not of superheroes or supervillains, but instead of real human beings working within the constraints imposed by their historical contexts. Daniel Maul does just that in his new book, The Politics of Service, and thus makes important contributions to our understanding of Quaker history – especially that of the American Friends Service Committee – and the evolution of humanitarian aid agencies from the first through the second world wars.

Maul argues that the impact of the AFSC far eclipsed the relatively small number of American Quakers. He demonstrates this via a thorough investigation of key first-hand accounts located in a variety of Quaker holdings that allow the reader to better understand the people who worked for the AFSC as well as the range of programs that they staffed. The book thus investigates the motives and driving forces behind the foreign service of the AFSC as well as the resulting “specific humanitarian identity of Quaker aid.” (2) In doing so, Maul contends that very particular tensions – between the identity of the Service Committee as both a religious and an American organization; between the desire to provide the best aid possible and to remain a recognizably Quaker agency – helped to shape the organization’s sense of self as well as its programming. Indeed, such contradictory tensions, instead of paralyzing organizational growth, instead actually “acted as a driving force [that] shaped [the AFSC’s] identity as a humanitarian aid organization.” (297).

Maul traces such developments after devoting his first two chapters to a general history of Quakerism more broadly and in the United States as well as, more specifically, the creation of the AFSC. In the chapters that follow, devoted to specific AFSC projects – feeding children in Germany after the Great War, providing famine relief in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, attempting to aid the victims of Nazism (both inside and outside of Germany) in the 1930s, and supplying aid to those victimized by the Spanish Civil War – Maul provides a detailed analysis of the complexities of such work. These four chapters reveal, in exacting detail, repeated patterns of challenges and responses across these fields of service. Again and again, AFSC personnel had to navigate their own relief efforts “as part of an ever-growing and increasingly dense transnational network of aid that included private, governmental, and supranational institutions.” (16) At the same time, AFSC workers also had to work with individuals, including those receiving the aid as well as a diverse group of contacts who made AFSC work possible. It was a daunting endeavor, to be sure. Making such work even more complicated, AFSC leaders also had to manage relationships within the Quaker community with great care, juggling both a complicated relationship with British Friends (who often helped open doors for their American brethren but then found themselves sidelined by the insistence of the AFSC and the United States government that aid be clearly marketed as “American”) as well as the political and theological fractures among American Quakers. Service Committee leaders, in fact, began their organization in part as a means of encouraging unity among a dizzying array of Quaker groups as well as Friendly theologies. Throughout, Maul works in meticulous and careful detail, delving into rich Quaker archives and collections to illuminate not only AFSC programming but also the theological and human roots from which it sprung.

Insofar as Maul follows a generally chronological look at the AFSC’s foreign service, the book works well in presenting both its main arguments as well as important insights into Quaker history. The fifth chapter, however, works less well structurally. Wedged in the middle of his more broadly episodic history of the AFSC’s foreign service projects, Maul pauses to consider the relationship between work at home and work abroad for the Service Committee. The information here matters but feels a bit disconnected at times, and the decision to cover the 1920s and 1930s as a whole interrupts the flow of the narrative while perhaps diminishing the importance of the connections between such efforts (in terms of personnel, philosophy, and programming). A more thorough-going integration would make the broader arguments of the book even more compelling and bring us a bit further along in terms of critical studies that look at the whole of the AFSC, instead of just various parts of its program. There are advantages, to be sure, of Maul’s decision to focus on a particular aspect of the AFSC – and the book makes good use of them – but something of the larger picture remains somewhat more out of focus than it might otherwise be.

This criticism aside, The Politics of Service is an important book for the histories of both Quaker activism as well as humanitarian aid organizations and programs. In relating the story as one of religiously motivated people working within the constraints of the material world that they inhabit, Maul has written a history of both why religion matters as well as the limits upon the ways in which can be made to matter.