Averting the War to End War

According to Georgetown historian Michael Kazin, World War I was a "bad" war. That is, that monstrous bloodletting was, for the United States, a war of choice rather than for the safety and security of the nation. In that sense, the first worldwide conflict of the 20th century was like so many U.S. military excursions that came later: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, the catalogue goes on. U.S. entry into the European conflict, which had nearly exhausted the original participants by the time we got "over there," looks inevitable in hindsight -- and certainly set the pattern for U.S. world power.

But intervention wasn't inevitable.

War against War: the American fight for peace 1914-1918 is about the vigorous, broad-based peace movement which opposed U.S. participation.

There's little doubt that, in 1914 when the carnage began on European battlefields, most people in the U.S. didn't give a whit and didn't think this was their nation's business. The belief was common that wars were only ploys by capitalist munitions sellers to increase their profits. Many citizens distrusted and feared militarism and glorification of armed conflict, though former President Teddy Roosevelt yearned for heroics. Large immigrant pockets, still incompletely melted into Americanism, identified with combatants of their former nations. Quite a few of those were of Germans-origin. People from English-speaking backgrounds identified with the Allies, with Britain and France -- but hardly anyone much cared for the tyrannical czarist Russian empire.

Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, in office 1912-1920, was a wily bird, managing his unwieldy coalition political party. He gave ear-room to its many pacifist, isolationist, and internationalist socialist elements, while gradually moving the country toward coming in on the side of the Allies in accord with the party's mercantile and industrial factions. He ran for re-election in 1916 on the message "he kept us out of war" and then asked for a declaration of war in April 1917.  Meanwhile he was still uttering idealistic promises about peace without victory, a war to end war, and the promise of a more just international order that the United States would midwife when the guns stopped. (We didn't do any such thing, but that's not Kazin's story here.)

Kazin recounts the efforts of a parade of anti-war leaders who were both celebrities and true opinion leaders in their day, though our memory of them has dimmed: the religious pacifist politician Democrat William Jennings Bryan, the Wisconsin Republican progressive Robert LaFollette, the capitalist isolationist Henry Ford (yes, the car magnate and later Hitler-sympathizer), the socialist humanitarian Jane Addams. He also records the persecution Wilson's Justice Department unleashed against anyone who might have challenged conscription for the army or "patriotism" in general.

Kazin concludes with a thoughtful observation that succinctly captures something I've had to learn in a lifetime of opposition to our "bad" wars. Our forebears who opposed World War I set us a significant example of ingenuity but also of compromises in an inherently complex political endeavor.

Anti-war movements are not like other collective attempts to change society. In contrast to those who seek to win rights and a measure of power for women or workers or people of color or gays and lesbians, peace organizations have no natural constituency. Neither can their movements grow slowly, taking decades to convince ordinary people and elites to think differently and enact laws to embody that new perspective. A massive effort to stop one's country from going to war -- or to stop a war that it is already waging -- has to grow quickly or it will have little or no influence.  

What's more, it has to lure talented activists away from other, more enduring political commitments. Every new war also requires peace activists to create a new movement and then find partners for a coalition that might be capable of pressuring the government to end it. There have always been pacifists in the United States. But during periods of peace or brief conflicts, they endure on the margins, unknown to most of their fellow citizens. 

The Americans who fought a war against war from the summer of 1914 until the Armistice fifty-one months later managed to surmount all these obstacles ... [Their challenge to their war remains relevant:] Can one preserve a peaceful and democratic society at home while venturing into the world to kill those whom our leaders designate, rationally or not, as our enemies?

Kazin thinks, and I concur, that the late 20th and early 21st century United States lost its way in part because, in the aftermath of the inconclusive 1914-18 European war, we ended up fighting a "good" war in 1941-1945 in which real challenges to national and civilizational survival were at issue. (This analytic framework elides the concurrent race war in the Pacific between U.S. and Japanese empires -- we routinely erase that experience mentally, though we may learn to do so less these days as China "rises.")

Because of the horrendous -- life or death -- experience of that one "good" war against Nazi barbarism, we have ever since been confused in a way in which early 20th century citizens were not when our leaders call us to "bad" -- unnecessary -- wars. We, broadly, have become more easily roused to believe a present call to war is another "good" war.  There are very few "good" wars -- and all wars are still wrong, cruel, and terrible.