For many centuries, war was a game rulers played. Peace movements, unimaginable for most of human history, would have been seen as a gross interference with princely power and an attempt to stop rulers pursuing the purpose for which they existed: the aggrandizement of their royal house. The attempts to restrain the savagery of war by Aquinas, by Islamic law and in Grotius’s work On the Law of War & Peace (1625) were wholly disregarded.
Today, attitudes are different: for over a century, war has been seen as the ultimate failure of policy – the very opposite of civilisation. This approach has been ratcheted up by two interrelated developments. First, the existence of ever more powerful weapons with unlimited destructive potential – war has become an existential threat to everybody involved; second, the growth of the concept of war crimes in international law. Whether it is a state-on-state attack, ethnic cleansing, genocide, an armed insurgency or a campaign of terror, any case of organised state (or private) violence runs the risk of falling foul of human rights law. Unfortunately, the law has no battalions of its own and the idea of averting war prior to the start of hostilities foundered with the League of Nations. The space vacated by this failure has now been occupied by peace campaigners. The peace movements are complementary to international law.
America has a long history of anti-war sentiment beginning in the 1700s with Penn, Woolman and Benezet. The eschewal of violence by such men was a private view and it was intensely felt but their chief concern was ending slavery. Furthermore, non-violence never commanded widespread support. This was clear from the fewness of Americans who refused to fight in 1776 – on one side or the other.
It was in the early/mid-nineteenth century that peace movements proper began to emerge. In 1846, Elihu Burritt, originally a blacksmith, founded the League of Universal Brotherhood. This was the first secular peace organisation, one in which religious faith was not the central idea. Burritt advocated an international peacekeeping body and an international court to try miscreants. But matters were complicated for peace campaigners by the anti-slavery cause. When the war came in 1861, they faced an acute dilemma: should they withhold support from the war as the Quakers and Mennonites did; or should they, like William Ladd’s American Peace Society, back the Union cause? Even Garrison fell into line.
Peace campaigning achieved a higher profile in the early twentieth century with Jane Addams, Carnegie, the Hague Peace Conferences and Debs’s Socialist Party. Debs brought the peace movement into mainstream politics. There was a lot of activity but let us be realistic about what the movement achieved: in these years America fought Spain, Russia fought Japan, the Balkans fought Turkey and in 1914 the entire developed world went to war. When the fighting was over, America adopted isolationism as a way of keeping out of war. Isolationism was related to the peace movement but only indirectly and it might just as well have resulted in unilateral military action as in peace.
Since 1945, conflicts have been more plentiful than ever. Today, it helps if a peace movement has a tight focus: Dr King’s SCLC was essentially a peace movement focused around black civil rights; being anti-Vietnam war was another single-focus movement. The tightest focus of all is an individual’s unwillingness to fight in war. In US v. Seeger (1969), the Supreme Court ruled that opposition to fighting on grounds of “sincere and meaningful belief” can be valid even without God. But in Gillette v. United States two years later, it ruled that the opposition must be to all war. Pacifists cannot pick and choose.
The editor of this book, Mitchell K. Hall, (Professor of History at Central Michigan University) has had the help of 130 contributors. The book includes roughly 400 entries each with a bit of further reading at the end. Over half the entries are biographical going from the seventeenth century to the present day.
As an outsider, I do not readily associate the USA with peace movements. H Rap Brown reckoned that “violence is as American as cherry pie” and it is certainly true that many of America’s most famous episodes are violent ones. Violence captures the headlines and it is difficult to make conciliation spectacular. Nonetheless, peace campaigning is as old as the Republic. It was practised in each of America’s wars and they are all covered here. Naturally, this includes the two great wars, Korea and Vietnam, but other campaigns are covered as well: opposition to the Mexican war in 1845-1848, the Spanish–American War and the Revolutionary War.
The personal entries cover nineteenth century peace campaigners like Ladd, Burritt and Alfred Love, through Debs and Bryan up to their more recent brethren, the Berrigan brothers and Daniel Ellsberg. Also included are figures at one remove from the campaigners proper. They include Henry David Thoreau, theologians Walter Rauschenbusch and Reinhold Niebuhr and modern critics of public policy such as Noam Chomsky and Linus Pauling. There is also the anti-war music of Joan Baez and Peter Seeger. They all get an entry. The great world figures of the peace movement, Gandhi and Tolstoy, receive attention largely because of their inspirational value.
In the 1840s, Elihu Burritt had tried to give his campaigning an international flavour but forging links abroad was difficult. Even in later years, peace movements campaigned mainly in their home countries: Bertha von Suttner and Alfred Fried in Austria, Frederic Passy in France, George Lansbury and Norman Angell on Britain. When America emerged from the Great War, there was an overwhelming desire to keep out of world affairs and any possible future war. But we must be clear about America’s motives. On balance, war was bad for business, and peace would help secure America’s position as the world’s leading economy. Therefore, when President Coolidge signed the Kellogg–Briand Pact outlawing war, it was based pragmatism rather than principle. The pact of 1928 deserves its entry but the editor surprises us by offering nothing on the League of Nations, the Geneva Protocol, sanctions and their relationship to the American peace movement – if any.
Professor Hall’s book approaches the subject narrowly. First, it is regrettable that he has confined himself to state-on-state violence – that is, war. He could usefully have considered civil commotions, insurgencies and private violence as well – even the question of gun ownership. In all, 30,000 deaths a year by gunshot makes guns a peace issue. However, the title announces the scope of the book loud and clear and we must live with that.
Second, there is the question missed opportunities. In 1756, Quakers formed the quaintly named Friendly Association for Regaining and Preserving Peace with the Indians by Pacific Measures. The Association did not last long. American–Indian relations between 1860 and 1890 became a tangled mass of raiding, land grabbing, genocide and treaties made and broken. White America spent decades dispossessing the native tribes of virtually everything they had, either by fraud or the use of force. Yet these relations afforded a perfect opportunity for conciliation. Untroubled by such thoughts, General Sherman, Commander of the Missouri Division after the war, “solved” the Indian problem by organizing the mass slaughter of bison, thereby destroying the mainstay of the Plains tribes’ economy. This tragic and bloody story, later sanitised as “the winning of the west”, should have had a place in this book.
Another case in point relates to America and the Caribbean. America has sent troops innumerable times against regimes it perceived as a threat: Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Mexico, Grenada – it is a familiar list. The most notorious of these was the invasion of Cuba by US-sponsored Cuban dissidents in 1961. Almost certainly an act of war, it marked the beginning of a conflict within America between anti-Castro hawks and people who sought “constructive engagement” with Cuba. This idea was the government’s policy toward Apartheid South Africa but it never got much traction where Cuba was concerned.
Third, there is the question of context. What were the attitudes of mainstream America to the peace movement – of churches and business groups? Did peace campaigning penetrate the Democratic and Republican parties? These questions are not answered. We needed material on the response of national leaders and legislators to the peace movement. Were peace campaigners a serious force for change or just a fleabite on the government’s hide? Most leaders mouth the rhetoric of peace: LBJ wanted to “talk of peace in Vietnam” and Nixon liked the title of “Peacemaker” but they negated it by laying down impossible preconditions.
In sum, this is a useful list of entries but I think the basic concept of the book is quite blinkered. It concentrates on individual campaigners and specific movements. The wider contextual articles one looks for are absent. This review is based on the electronic version; I have not seen the hard copy.
