Nelson Antrim Crawford

A Kansas Portrait

"There is less will to war and more to peace now than there was 20 years ago. It is untrue to say that a peace psychology cannot be built up." This strikingly contemporary thought was penned in 1937 by Nelson Antrim Crawford, then editor-in-chief of Topeka's Household Magazine.

In his book Your Child Faces War, Crawford firmly denied the inevitability of war and set out guidelines for educating children to peace. Placing responsibility for building a peace psychology squarely on the shoulders of parents, Crawford urged them to raise their children in a calm, loving, helpful environment. He stated that parents should supervise what their children read, watched, and listened to and should encourage informed and unemotional discussions of international affairs in the home, guiding their children toward peaceful rather than violent solutions to problems.

Teacher, author, lecturer, editor, and journalist, Crawford, who born in Miller, South Dakota, on May 4, 1888, was a far-seeing renaissance man with many interests. In addition, during is career, he published several books, edited numerous magazines and books and contributed articles to Encyclopedia Britannica, the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, and the Dictionary of America Biography. He died in Topeka on June 30, 1963.