Few in the unwieldy peace coalition were willing to go so far as O'Hare, but as Kazin documents, two more basic anti-war rationales resonated with broad swaths of the American people. An idealistic vision of world peace animated some, ranging from Social Gospelers who believed the Kingdom was coming in their day to feminists convinced that the demise of patriarchy would bring an end to international violence as well.
Still others sought to safeguard the (somewhat more) peaceable republic against the corrosive effects of militarism and war profiteering. It's hard to fathom now but at the outset of hostilities in Europe, the United States army was anything but formidable, numbering fewer than 100,000 men. It was only in June 1916, more than a year after the Germans sank the Lusitania, that President Woodrow Wilson signed the National Defense Act, which almost doubled the army's size, empowered the president to federalize the National Guard, created the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC), and authorized the White House to resort to conscription in case of war.
Even at that point, the anti-war movement's claim upon the popular imagination remained strong. Wilson won reelection, after all, with the slogan, "He kept us out of war." As late as January 1917 he gave a speech insisting that armies and navies should not grow so large that they could be used as "an instrument of aggression or of selfish violence." But then, within a matter of months, the United States declared war on Germany and registered 24 million men for armed service. Four million of those donned the uniform. 116,000 died.
If the Allies, led by France and Great Britain, had not won a total victory, there would have been no punitive peace treaty like that completed at the Palace of Versailles in 1919, no reparations that helped bankrupt the Weimar Republic, no stab-in-the-back allegations by resentful Germans, and thus no rise, much less triumph, of Hitler and his National Socialist Party. The next world war, with its fifty million deaths, would never have occurred.
Americans, who have tended to overlook the Great War altogether, have not often dwelt in recent years on the perils of victory. But especially given President Trump's suggestion that "major, major conflict with North Korea" could be on the near horizon, such reflection is urgently needed.
Christians who have taken on the seemingly Sisyphean task of practicing nonviolence "within a culture linked to war" can ill afford to perceive one another as the enemy.
Whereas Kazin illumines a singular turning point, two other recent books underscore the breadth of the American anti-war tradition. Myles Werntz's Bodies of Peace: Ecclesiology, Nonviolence, and Witness explores four varieties of nonviolent Christian response to the Vietnam War. Sorting through the different ways that John Howard Yoder (Mennonite), Dorothy Day (Catholic), William Stringfellow (Episcopalian), and Robert McAfee Brown (Presbyterian) envisioned the church and its call to nonviolence, Werntz argues persuasively that such diversity reflects not a scandalous disunity but rather "a common work of the Holy Spirit." Christians who have taken on the seemingly Sisyphean task of practicing nonviolence "within a culture linked to war" can ill afford to perceive one another as the enemy.
Each should instead seek to learn from the distinctive insights of the other.
All would moreover do well to peruse the rich trove of sources collected in Lawrence Rosenwald's edited volume, War No More: Three Centuries of American Antiwar & Peace Writing . While heavily weighted toward the 20th century, this thick tome also includes a wealth of earlier pieces by John Woolman, William Lloyd Garrison, Julia Ward Howe, and many more besides. Represented, too, are a staggering array of genres, ranging from poetry, fiction, letters, and prose essays to gospel songs, autobiographical reflections, and even a Supreme Court dissent. Rosenwald recounts that Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was eighty-eight when in 1929—appalled at his colleagues' opinion that Rosika Schwimmer could be denied American citizenship based on the fact that "she would not bear arms to defend the Constitution—he wryly declared, "I had not supposed hitherto that we regretted our inability to expel [our citizens] because they believed more than some of us do in the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount." Gems such as this abound in a book full of thought-provoking turns and unlikely company (it's not often that you find Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, radical anarchist Emma Goldman, and former president Barack Obama listed in the same table of contents). There is something for everyone to disagree with here, but there is plenty of wisdom too.
Whether any of it will penetrate as far into the national conversation as Guardians of the Galaxy seems doubtful. But for the sake of a world still riven by war, virtual and otherwise, one can certainly hope.
Heath W. Carter is the author of Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago (Oxford Univ. Press) and the co-editor, most recently, of Turning Points in the History of American Evangelicalism (Eerdmans).