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The Club reverted to a Zoom-only meeting for a talk with the intriguing title, ‘The Keokuk Peace Pipe Letters’. Founded in Chicago in 1905, the Rotary movement soon spread around the world and held its third international conference outside the USA in Vienna in 1931. One of the delegates, Jewett Fulton, was from Keokuk, a small town in Iowa, on the Mississippi, which takes its name from a Native American Chief. After witnessing for himself the economic and political tensions that would later lead to a second world war, Fulton sent letters to all the non-English speaking Rotary Clubs inviting them, to “follow the old Indian custom” by smoking the Pipe of Peace as an expression of international goodwill and fellowship. The more than 200 replies, from 44 countries, constitute a fascinating archive, which lay buried in a bank vault until its recent rescue by Tony Conn, a current member of Keokuk Rotary Club. Sadly, some of the Clubs that welcomed the Peace Pipe initiative, went on to betray it, notably in Germany where Jewish members were expelled by their peers under pressure from the Nazis. By contrast, the Rotary Club of Jerusalem described itself as a living Pipe of Peace, where Zionists found common ground with anti-Zionists and the author of the reply was a close friend of a German who had faced him across the trenches in World War One. George Finley, who has been honoured by Rotary for promoting ties with part of the former Soviet Union, thanked Tony Conn and his co-presenter, Thilo von Debschitz, for their fascinating and thought-provoking talk.
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