What One Person Can Do

"What One Person Can Do" is an article published in the magazine World on February 27, 1973. It features a photograph of the article's subject, Erica Anderson, by Jill Krementz.

Summary

Albert Schweitzer, 1955

Documentary filmmaker Erica Anderson purchased a farm in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, converting the barn into a film theater and library devoted to the ideas of her friend Albert Schweitzer, the "physician, theologian, philosopher, and musician" who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952. Called the Albert Schweitzer Friendship House, it has hosted fifty thousand visitors since it opened in June 1967, supported entirely by public donations. Many visitors have returned to help, even if just to do chores. When Vonnegut visited, she was showing children a film about Schweitzer's hospital in Gabon and invited them afterwards to ring a large bell while they promised not to kill any animal if they could avoid it. Meanwhile, beavers had denuded an area Anderson set aside for a "philosopher's walk", flooding it. Several signs with quotes had to be saved, including one about how one day humans will not kill for amusement. This is a radical thought in a place like New England where hunting and fishing are primary pastimes.

Anderson had made films of Henry Moore, Tom Dooley, and Carl Jung, but when she went to film Schweitzer she stayed for fifteen years. Due to her belief that her English is bad—having been born in Austria—and that her enthusiasm is "so schoolgirlishly intense", she feels she could not tell Schweitzer's story as well as other books that exist. Instead, her "intelligence and warmth" animate the Friendship House in way Schweitzer's ideas alone never could. Schweitzer only visited the United States once and had little to say about it, but despite a common American obsession with "arrogant nationalism and firearms", many individual Americans have been inspired by his life to attempt "to serve humanity better". Some have criticized him as "the last of the old-time colonialists, a great white father" serving helpless blacks. Nowhere in his writings is there evidence of racial superiority, although he did think some humans had better access to information than others. Perhaps what's most offensive to some, is that Schweitzer was not ignored by the world but instead respected and praised, fully aware of the good he was doing. In short, he didn't suffer enough to be heroic. The Friendship House which now bears his name is not to keep his memory alive, but to teach reverence for all living things, regardless of who first taught it.