Gene Keyes

Gene Scott Keyes (October 24, 1941 – May 24, 2025) was an American activist, cartographer and linguist. He achieved considerable attention for his peace activism when his mother wrote an essay about him in McCall's titled "Suppose They Gave a War and No One Came". The title phrase, based on a quote from a Carl Sandburg poem, became part of the anti-war movement lexicon. His cartography work has won two awards. He also promoted the international second language Esperanto.

Biography

Early life Keyes was born on October 24, 1941, to Charlotte Keyes (née Shachmann) and Scott Keyes. His father was a Quaker and his mother was Jewish. Both were pacifists. They had been anti-militarists in the 1930s though they both supported American involvement in World War II as they believed Adolf Hitler had to be stopped by force if necessary. After the war they became more involved with the Quaker movement. Young Gene absorbed his parents' pacifism even to the point of worrying about the insects his mother killed as she cleaned house.

Polaris Action After graduating high school, Keyes was accepted to Harvard, class of 1963, and during his time there joined demonstrations at Woolworth's in support of desegregating their stores in the American South (inspired by the February 1960 Greensboro sit-ins). He taught Spanish at the local jail, leafleted about nuclear weapons, and joined a variety of liberal groups. His activism led to a deterioration of his grades. Polaris submarines were nuclear-ballistic-missile firing boats now supplanted by the Trident fleet. He wrote his parents that "the business of Polaris Action is mostly leafleting, speaking, clerical, canvassing, with infrequent melodramatic and physically dangerous moments of submarine boarding. It's the Gandhian idea of lying across the railroad tracks, except we're lying across the Polaris submarines."

Draft Card burning When he turned 18 during university, Keyes was required to register for the draft. He requested conscientious objector status from the Selective Service Commission. But he felt uneasy about it, thinking this was still part of the war system. "All the hospital work a conscientious objector could do in two years would not make up for a single day of napalm and pellet bombs," he wrote.

From 1962 to 1963, he enrolled at Pendle Hill, a Quaker study center near Philadelphia, to research ideas for unarmed military forces.

In March 1963, he went to Washington to testify before a Senate subcommittee against the bill to extend the induction provisions of the Universal Military Training and Service Act and urged "establishing an integral strategic nonviolent national defense system...What is suggested is a basic reorientation of the defense posture of this nation".

By 1965, draft card burning had become so popular that the U.S. government passed a law making it an offense to knowingly destroy or mutilate a draft card. There had been a draft-card burning event in 1947 when conscription was re-established after World War II, but Keyes was one of the earliest draft card burners of the Vietnam War era.

After finishing the contempt sentence, Keyes was sentenced to three years in prison in 1965 for failing to report for military service. He served one year of the sentence. In all, Keyes served four prison sentences for civil disobedience from 1961 to 1965, including a 27-day hunger strike in the Albany, Georgia, city jail in February 1964, when an integrated peace march was forbidden to march through the middle of town.

In 1966, his mother, Charlotte Keyes wrote about Gene's pacifism and activism culminating in his draft card burning in an essay for McCall's magazine called "Suppose They Gave a War and No One Came". That article gained wide attention and made the title a slogan of the anti-Vietnam war movement. Rephrased as "What if they gave a war and nobody came?", it became a popular bumper sticker of the era. A 1970 anti-war movie adopted the same title and The Monkees recorded a song called "Zor and Zam" (1968) based on the idea.

Education and career In 1969, Keyes returned to university, and completed a Bachelor of Arts in 1971 with a Special Major in Government (War-Peace Studies) at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He wrote the first senior thesis of the President's Scholar Program (on unarmed military forces). He stayed at SIU-C for an MA in Government in 1973.

One of his interests was Fuller's Dymaxion Map, an attempt to show in a flat projection "all continents uninterrupted and with minimal distortion". Keyes viewed geography as a way of illuminating war and his 1973 Master's thesis looked at a conflict between Russia and China over a tiny island on their river border, a conflict that almost led to a nuclear war. He called the thesis "Six Principles for a Unified Map System (Applied to the China-Russia Situation)". In it Keyes used Fuller's map as the basis of the new system he proposed.

As a political science professor, Keyes continued to promote the idea of an unarmed military and wrote extensively on the subject. He also pursued an interest in the international second language Esperanto and in world map design.

Cahill-Keyes projection map Following his M.A. thesis, Keyes had concluded there were inadequacies with Fuller's map. Further studies later in 1973 led him to discover Bernard J.S. Cahill's Octahedral Butterfly World Map. Created in 1909, Cahill's map had been largely forgotten, but Keyes judged it to be a better map than Fuller's, and he spent much of the next forty years tweaking and improving upon it.

Cahill's map looked like a butterfly, but it had some anomalies Keyes did not like. In a eureka moment he realized he was not confined to Cahill's butterfly shape. So he redesigned it into an M shape. He also coined the term "geocell" to define an area bounded by one degree of latitude and longitude, because he felt that world maps should have a resolution of at least five degrees and preferably one degree; whereas most world maps and globes do not.

While working on his doctorate in Toronto, he also continued to work on his map. "I was unable to locate large-scale reproductions, drawings, or computations," he wrote, "so I set about drawing my own Cahill from scratch".

In 2014, Duncan Webb published a five-foot wall poster Cahill-Keyes map, which won Best Map, Other Category, in the 42nd Annual CaGIS Competition.

Esperanto In 1980, Keyes learned Esperanto.

Strategic nonviolent defense and unarmed military forces Keyes's 1978 Ph.D. thesis was Strategic Nonviolent Defense in Theory; Denmark in Practice. A condensed version appeared in The Journal of Strategic Studies as Strategic Nonviolent Defense: the Construct of an Option. In this work, he identifies morale as the center of gravity for a country non-violently resisting an invasion by an enemy.

The latest version of Keyes's long-term interest in a nonviolent military was published as a chapter in the book Nonkilling Security and the State, Joám Evans Pim, ed., 2013 and as an illustrated stand-alone pdf, To Give Life: A Nonkilling Military: Precedents and Possibilities. In it, he elaborates ten kinds of missions for unarmed forces, including such obvious ones as Humanitarian Assistance / Disaster Relief (HA/DR), and hypothetical ones such as Defense in the spirit of Brazil's great national hero, Major-General Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon (1865-1958), who fostered the motto "Die if you must, but never kill." ' Shared parenting advocate After Keyes lost his battle for shared-custody of his children in 1984, he led a shared parenting advocacy group in Nova Scotia. In 1998 he testified on shared parenting before Special Joint Committee on Child Custody and Access of the Government of Canada. "I think that situation, where 60,000 children a year are forcibly denied any kind of equal parenting time with their fathers, is one of the worst state-enforced abuses of human rights in Canada today," he told the committee. "The court ordeals we go through are sickening and unbelievable. Abusive lawyers are rewarded by adversarial, winner-take-all courts. We have debtors' prison for fathers only. We have children moved away at the mother's whim. We have shattered families, devastated fathers, and scarred children. These are the dark ages of family law in Canada." Keyes submitted a 17-page brief called Family Rights for Children of Divorce, a document his Nova Scotia advocacy had created.

Personal life Keyes had two brothers and one sister. His brother Ralph Keyes is the author of the best-seller Is There Life After High School? which became a Broadway musical.

In 1968, Keyes married his girlfriend Jane Gordon. They moved to Canada in 1973 when Jane found employment there. They have two children, Jeremy David, born in 1976 and Rachel Elizabeth, born in 1979. In 1980, Jane filed for divorce demanding sole custody of the children. Without a lawyer, Keyes fought for equal-shared-parenting all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada but was only given limited "visitation" rights when the divorce was finalized in 1984. He has lived in Canada since 1973 but retained his American citizenship.

He lived with his partner, Mary Jo Graça, from 1989 until his death in 2025.

Books We Won't Go: Personal Accounts of War Objectors, Alice Lynd, ed., 1968 (contributor) Nonkilling Security and the State, Joám Evans Pim, ed., 2013 (contributor) . The Me Clone, La Mi-Klono'' - self-published novel in English and Esperanto side by side, 220 pages, 1988