Margaret Mead’s Most Famous Quote; or, What Has Paliau to Do with Plutonium?

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.” Although there is no evidence that anthropologist Margaret Mead ever said these words, they accurately convey a hope that she gleaned from her field research on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, in the early 1950s. Mead journeyed to Manus to investigate a rumored cargo cult. What she found instead was a visionary leader, Paliau, who, along with a small group of disciples, had taken what American WWII servicemen left behind—physical objects, but also ideas about society and religion—and constructed for themselves a new culture, practically overnight, with indigenous integrity but able to interact with a global society. Mead, a semi-lapsed Episcopalian at the time, saw in Paliau’s achievement a foretaste of “a world which would have the outward and visible forms of European life and the inward spiritual grace of Christian ideals, brotherhood of man, shared resources, peace” (New Lives for Old, 1956).

Inspired by this vision, Mead renewed her membership in the Episcopal Church and threw herself into church committee work at the denominational, national, and international levels. She saw church committees as small groups with vast potential to change the world. Her last major committee service of this sort was as co-chair of a National Council of Churches study group on the plutonium economy, in the 1970s. Against the grain of nuclear-energy optimism in Europe and Washington, D.C., Mead insisted that the technology was inimical to brotherhood, shared resources, and peace. Fellow progressive Christian President Jimmy Carter valued Mead’s voice, so her report played a role in slowing United States investment in this area. U.S. energy policy is not a place where one would expect to find Third-World influence mediated by American Protestant globalism, but the connection was there, through Margaret Mead.