Chuck Matthei Peacemakers Oral History Collection

Background on Chuck Matthei

Chuck Matthei was a pacifist, civil rights and anti poverty activist who believed that economic justice was rooted in the construction of alternative models of land management and economic development. Matthei was born in 1948 in Chicago, where he brought Martin Luther King Jr. to speak at his high school. Rather than go to college, he became involved in the draft resistance movement during the Vietnam War, where he met Dorothy Day and became involved with the Catholic Worker and larger peace movement and integrated "ahimsa", the Gandhian practice of integrating nonviolent practice, into his everyday life. Matthei eventually became interested in land, affordable housing, affordable farms, and community-supported agriculture and served as director of the Institute for Community Economics (ICE) in Greenfield, MA from 1980-1990. ICE pioneered the modern community land trust and community loan fund models of economic development. Despite living a life of voluntary poverty, Matthei was a skilled fundraiser, who was able to build the alternative economic development movement from the ground up. In 1991 he moved to Voluntown, CT to form Equity Trust, which focused on alternative models of land tenure and economic development across the U.S., Central America, and Kenya.

In the early 1980s, Matthei, in collaboration with Gail Daneker, Cheryl Fox, Mark Reeve, and Diane Engber conducted several dozen oral histories, with the founders of the revolutionary pacifist and tax resistance group, Peacemakers. The interviewees included: Ernest and Marion Bromley, Maurice McCrackin, and Wally and Juanita Nelson.

The interviews discuss the founding and development of Peacemakers, a decentralized, self-described "revolutionary pacifist" organization which believed in economic and social community uplift through resource sharing and cooperation as a way to dismantle capitalistic lifestyles. They spread the idea of peacemaking and developed non-violent methods of opposing war through various forms of non-cooperation and to advocate unilateral disarmament and economic democracy. The group manifested this through tax resistance, refusing to serve in the armed forces, refusing to make or transport weapons of war, and refusing to pay taxes for war purposes.