Robert Swann, 84, Peace Activist Who Sought Land Reform
By Tom Long, Boston Globe Staff
February 19, 2003
Robert Swann, 84, a peace activist who believed that war
could be avoided by strengthening rural communities with
land trusts and alternative monetary systems, died of lung
cancer Jan. 13 in his home in South Egremont.
''I have devoted most of my life to economic reform, and
the strengthening of small communities,'' Mr. Swann wrote
in ''Peace, Civil Rights and the Search for Community,''
a 28-chapter autobiography he posted on the Internet. ''Specifically,
my work had been in land reform (trusteeship, not ownership,
of land), monetary reform (interest and inflation-free money
and local currencies), and cooperative ownership (worker
management and ownership of the means of production).''
Mr. Swann was the founder of the E.F. Schumacher Society
in Great Barrington, a nonprofit group that espouses the
theories of the German economist and philosopher who wrote
''Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered.''
''Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex,
and more violent,'' wrote Schumacher. ''It takes a touch
of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the
opposite direction.''
Mr. Swann was raised in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, where
his sense of community was heightened by growing up on a
street on which community block parties were common and
movies were sometimes screened as part of the festivities.
When his father lost his position as an executive at the
local printing firm during the Great Depression, the family
had to let go its maid, and its standard of living dropped
considerably. ''I felt helpless to do anything about it,''
Mr. Swann wrote. ''I knew not whom to blame or whom to fight
with to make the situation change.'' But he was impressed
by the sense of community of the American people and the
feeling that ''we're all in this together.''
The Rev. Joseph Sitler, minister at the local Lutheran
Church, took an interest in his education, and under his
tutelage young Mr. Swann read such German philosophers as
Hegel, Nietzche, and Spengler, as well as novels by Dostoyevsky
and Tolstoy.
Mr. Swann attended Ohio University, paying his way through
school by working in restaurants for meals and selling mops
door-to-door.
During World War II, he notified his draft board that he
was a conscientious objector and wouldn't comply with the
Selective Service Act. He moved to a farm in Vermont, where
he was arrested, and spent two years of a five-year sentence
in Ashland Federal Prison in Kentucky.
''Prison was his monastery and his university,'' his companion,
Susan Witt, said yesterday. ''He was introduced to this
extraordinary group of people and had plenty of time to
think about the root causes of war.''
At the beginning of his prison term, Mr. Swann spent much
time in solitary confinement because he refused to comply
with many prison rules.
He occupied himself by rolling bread into golfball-sized
portions, letting it harden, and juggling and playing basketball,
using his shoe for a basket.
Conditions improved for Mr. Swann and his fellow conscientious
objectors when civil rights leader Bayard Rustin became
their cellmate and a sympathetic warden gave them new privileges,
such as allowing them to form a study group. Among the books
they studied was engineer-educator Arthur Morgan's treatise
''The Small Community.''
''He went in a young man and he came out educated about
what he felt were solutions to the problems of war: building
strong local economies, land reform, local currency—and
those are the causes to which he devoted the rest of his
life,'' said Witt.
After he was released from prison with $20 and a new suit,
Mr. Swann took a bus to Washington, D.C., where he worked
in a hospital before joining Arthur Morgan's nonprofit group
Community Service in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
He then worked at Circle Pines Center, a cooperative adult
education camp in Michigan, where he was introduced to architect
Frank Lloyd Wright, who was working on low-cost homes. For
a time, Mr. Swann helped build these ''Usonian'' homes in
Kalamazoo, Mich.
Mr. Swann was instrumental in the formation of many community
land trusts throughout the country and helped develop alternative
money sources, such as Deli Dollars, issued by a Great Barrington
delicatessen owner. Each ''dollar'' was worth $8 and could
be redeemed for $10 if the holder waited six months to redeem
it, in effect allowing the owner a six-month loan.
''He was the type of guy who always had a project,'' said
Witt, ''whether it was setting up an alternative monetary
system, or working with farmers in India.''
''He was shy and didn't enjoy being the center of attention,''
she said, ''but he had a passion for ideas and an eagerness
to discuss them that drew people to his world.''
Changing the world did not always pay the bills. Mr. Swann
was also a carpenter and contractor for many years.
Besides his companion, he leaves three daughters, Barbara,
Carol and Judy; a son, Scott; a brother, James; and a grandson.
A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Saturday in
First Congregational Church in Great Barrington.
This story ran on page F14 of the Boston Globe on 2/19/2003.
©Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
E. F. Schumacher Society, 140 Jug End Road, Great
Barrington, MA 01230, (413) 528-1737, www.smallisbeautiful.org
