Allen, Devere

ALLEN, DEVERE (1891-1955). Longtime managing editor of the pacifist and Christian socialist journal The World Tomorrow, Allen Devere was a Socialist Party leader and candidate, who along with wife Marie Allen created a global news service covering peace movements.

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Allen met Marie Hollister in high school in Connecticut, where the life paths of both were influenced by the example of her father, a pacifist Congregationalist minister. Allen attended Oberlin College, graduating in 1917 just months after the United States entered World War I. During the build up to war during his final years of college, Allen founded and edited an anti-war periodical, The Radical Patriot, and endured personal and political backlash for his views. He claimed conscientious objector status but was later disqualified from military service due to marriage and poor eyesight.

In 1921, Allen began a long tenure editing The World Tomorrow, which was tied to the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation. In 1930, he published a well-received history of peace movements, The Fight for Peace, and later affirmed his pacifist commitment by publicly opposing US involvement in World War II.

As a Socialist Party activist, Allen served on the National Executive Committee from 1934 to 1939. He was the primary author of the Party’s Declaration of Principles, which rejected violent revolution but embraced a general strike, and ran as the Party’s candidate in Connecticut for U.S. Senate and Governor. Allen eventually opposed Soviet communism while still publicly condemning the McCarthyite anti-communist witch hunts.

In 1933, Allen and Marie created an independent news service with a focus on global peace activism. The service, originally called No-Frontier News Service, was later renamed Worldover Press. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, Worldover Press had more than 600 correspondents in forty-seven countries, issuing reports in three languages to more than 700 subscribing newspapers. Allen himself interviewed global peace figures including Mohandas Gandhi and Albert Einstein. The service was discontinued shortly after Allen’s death in 1955.

“Allen hoped to create the infrastructure of a transnational, popular movement for peace,” historian Charles Chatfield wrote three decades after Allen’s death. “More than any other peace advocate, he projected the future of peace efforts from his own close study of their past and, beyond that, he linked the various issues and approaches of peace to one another.”

Addison, Barbara. Biography of Devere Allen. Swarthmore, PA: Swarthmore College Peace Collection.

Allen, Devere. The Fight for Peace. New York: MacMillan, 1930.

Chatfield, Charles. “The Apostles of Peace: The Connected World of Devere Allen,” Peace Research, Vol. 17, No. 3 (September 1985), pp. 51-59.

Devere Allen Papers, 1910-1955. Finding Aid. Swarthmore College Peace Collection.