Peace Movements

PEACE MOVEMENTS

PEACE MOVEMENTS. Aspects of peace culture existed in North America before European colonialism and settlement. The Iroquois had modes of mediation, as did the Quakers later on. William Penn's peace plans preceded organized political movements for peace, which were very much a post-Enlightenment, post-industrial phenomenon. Immigrant peace sects such as the Amish, Hutterians, and many others had religious peace doctrines, often refusing military service and leading nonviolent lives. Nevertheless these groups did not constitute social movements in the way that the term is used in the social sciences: mobilized public groups that take action for social change.

Such peace movements emerged as a response to the Napoleonic wars of the early nineteenth century as the members of various economic and social classes engaged in political debate and publication. Usually taking the form of specific organizations (for example, labor or peace societies), these groups in the United States were often initially linked to similar groups in Europe. Although the first local peace society was formed in New York in 1815 by David L. Dodge, expanded in 1828 into the American Peace Society by W. Ladd (both were reformist, liberal pressure groups that opposed standing armies and supported worldwide peace), firmly establishing a starting date or founding leaders is difficult. The United States has never had a single mass movement or an overarching, unified peace organization.

Not until the later decades of the nineteenth century did broad-based social and political mass movements concerned with peace arise. Earlier, individuals like Ladd, Dodge, the itinerant blacksmith Elihu Burritt (who had popular backing and a broader base as well as an English branch for his League [1846]), and later Alfred Love, who formed The Universal Peace Movement in 1866, and William Lloyd Garrison, as well as individual peace prophets like Henry David Thoreau were the main promulgators of the peace message, the latter introducing ideas of civil disobedience. Churches espousing pacifism, such as the Society of Friends (Quakers), Mennonites, and the Church of the Brethren, were already well established and utopian societies with pacifist views grew in the mid-nineteenth century. Although all these elements were often informally in touch with one another, they did not constitute a true social movement (compare the abolitionist movement).

U.S. peace movements, like those of other industrialized democracies, were composed of overlapping groups, organizations, and individuals that formed temporary coalitions and alliances. The peace movement did not have a single unifying principle, although opposition to war appears to be an obvious one; however, such opposition was often based on isolationism, national chauvinism, economic self-interest—motivations that had little to do with peace. The various peace groups, rooted in a variety of traditions, methods, and ideologies, regularly disagreed—especially on the issue of pacifism or about ideologies such as socialism, communism, feminism, or religious doctrines.

Not until about 1900 did several parallel social movements against war and militarism and for pacific inter-nationalism emerge. These included organizations such as the American Union Against Militarism, the Emergency Peace Federation, and the Women's Peace Party, all formed after 1914 to keep the United States out of the European maelstrom. Together with socialist and syndicalist agitation, this represents the first genuine peak of mass peace and antiwar movement activity (1900–1915). Yet with the exception of Jane Addams (who was a key founder of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in 1920) and Eugene Debs, head of the Socialist Party, there were no prominent founders of the movement, although Randolph Bourne, Norman Thomas, and Emma Goldman were important critics of war. Out of this activity emerged such organizations as the inter-denominational Fellowship of Reconciliation and the largely secular War Resisters League. This activity also spawned the U.S. Communist Party with its ever-shifting peace fronts; the Communist Party's relationship with the peace movement was problematic and often disruptive, though undoubtedly individuals held genuine antimilitarist views. A. J. Muste, who later became a major pacifist leader, was an active Trotskyist in the interwar years.

Ebb and Flow

Like many major social movements, peace movements worldwide are cyclical, often responding to the build up to, conduct of, and aftermath of major wars. In addition, peace movements have tried to forestall war and stop or decelerate arms races. Before 1917 and 1936, the United States had several peace groups working to prevent war or American entry into war. American women helped organize an international women's conference in The Hague in 1915 to try to promote an armistice to end World War I, and by 1936 the League against War and Fascism had a large and stable base, especially on U.S. college campuses. After 1940, however, the U.S. peace movement experienced a long and dramatic decline, with both internationalists and pacifists becoming isolated.

Peace movements have also tried to prevent U.S. entry into wars on other continents and have worked to achieve ceasefires or armistices. Additionally, peace movements have been involved in trying to bring about reconciliation and, especially at the end of the world wars, the establishment of institutions, such as the United Nations, that would provide a venue for settlement of conflict and differences between nations that did not involve going to war. The peace movement in the United States was influenced in character and organization by the late entry of the United States into World Wars I and II and its early ventures in Indochina.

Peaks of peace activity can be seen in U.S. history. The first stretched from the late nineteenth century to the United States' entry into World War I; the second was in the early 1920s, fueled by disillusionment with the outcome of the "war to end wars" and associated with the failure of the League of Nations and other international organizations; the third came in the 1930s in response to the accelerating arms race. The fourth, beginning in the late 1950s was concerned mainly with nuclear weapons and served as the base for the fifth, which arose in the mid-1960s in response to the escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The antiwar peace movement of the 1960s and 1970s included massive demonstrations and mass draft refusal with many young men emigrating to

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Canada and other countries to avoid the draft. The sixth peak of peace activity came after 1979 and focused on preventing nuclear war; it also included feminist and ecological concerns from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. At first nuclear energy was a key issue; but by November 1982 the campaign to stop the nuclear arms race had organized strong local groups and could mount large demonstrations and get referenda on local ballots. This coalition formed the "Nuclear Freeze" campaign, led by Randall Forsberg and Randy Kehler; prominent spokespersons were Benjamin Spock and Helen Caldecott. It was at this time that distinctive women's peace movements emerged. Since this final peak, the peace movement continued episodic patterns, and overlapped with the anti-globalization movement of the 1990's and beyond.

At all times the interaction between U.S. and European peace movements was important. From Burritt's League of Universal Brotherhood(1846), which sponsored two European congresses (1848 and 1853) to the Hague Appeal of 2000, peace movement members in the United States have supplied financing and strongly influenced European movements and meetings. American industrialist Andrew Carnegie's gift of the Peace Palace at The Hague as the seat for the International Courts of Justice symbolized the continuing role and influence of the United States. Equally significant was the importation of peace ideologies and strategies into the United States with the migrations of the later years of the nineteenth century.

Post–World War II

At times in the post–World War II years, when peace movements could have given significant support to Eleanor Roosevelt and Ralph Bunche in their work with the newly established United Nations, the movements became isolated and were stigmatized as "Red Communist" or traitorously pacifist. Often, as in 1918, peace movement leaders were imprisoned. After 1940, many peace movements found that their organizational supports had evaporated. However, a viable remnant in the form of small organizations and key activists, speakers, and organizers remained. Termed the "prophetic peace minorities," they resurfaced in key roles at the start of each new phase of peace activity, sometimes as initiators.

In the mid-twentieth century, small pacifist groups raised the issue of nuclear weapons and conducted non-violent direct action at military bases; these groups also engaged in peace marches in Cuba and Moscow and sailed into nuclear testing areas. These groups tended to be strongly reinforced by the Japanese movement in the early 1950s and, after 1959, by their European counterparts. The emergence of the opposition to the Vietnam War after 1965 strongly influenced the rise of similar radical (often student based) movements in Europe and the rest of the world. In 1979, however, as opposition to the development of a neutron bomb and to placement of intermediate nuclear weapons in European nations grew in Europe, the peace movement in the United States again lagged that of Europe; the character of the U.S. movement was much more moderate, endorsing gradualism and shunning unilateralist policies.

Peace Movement Defined

What then defines the peace movements, given their individualistic and largely discontinuous character? Peace movements appear to be independent of states or governments, they are autonomous groupings of civil society, and though nonaligned with any nation's foreign policy, they are not necessarily neutral in conflicts. In addition, their methods are actively nonviolent. What then are their goals?

Peace movements have tended to coalesce around goals related to preventing or stopping specific wars, abolishing certain weapons or weapons systems, or opposing military conscription. Peace movements have always had a pacifist dimension, opposing all war. They have also had a radical, socialist, or liberal dimension that critiqued the links of capitalism to imperialism and militarism. Often there was a commitment to refusing to participate in specific wars. The political left—anarchist, syndicalist, social democrat, Marxist—has often taken an antiwar and antimilitarist stances, often in alliance with more traditional peace groups.

Until World War I, refusing military service was motivated primarily by religious belief, but the reasons for conscientious objection grew more secular in the years after 1917. Conscientious objection on nonreligious grounds evolved during and after World War II; by 1970, pacifism was a major force within American society in general. Peace movements, however, had found a new religious constituency: Roman Catholic peace activity following the 1970 papal encyclical, Pacem in Terris, ranged from opposing death squads and intervention in Latin America to actively opposing nuclear weapons. The Roman Catholic group, Pax Christi, evolved from a tiny pressure group in 1960 to a significant part of the overall peace movement.

From World War I onward radical pacifists used the social gospel to advance political change. Also inspired by Gandhi's use of nonviolence, active pacifists such as A. J. Muste and Bayard Rustin engaged in direct action against military bases, racial injustice, and civil defense, advocated for Civil Rights and the nonviolent transformation of a militarized and often unjust society, and supported positive peace (for example, racial justice).

At times radical pacifists adopted anticapitalist and anti-imperialist positions. In the 1960s, socialist critiques reemerged in the New Left in organizations like the Student Peace Union and the Students for a Democratic Society. At times large peace coalitions were infiltrated, manipulated, or even led by members of left-wing political groups. At other times, in the two decades before 1917, for example, socialist agitation against militarism was largely separate from other peace activity. (Such isolation left socialists very vulnerable to repression; the International Workers of the World and the Socialist Party under Eugene Debs were savagely suppressed.) In the 1920s and 1930s communists and Trotskyists often practiced "entrism" (covert participation) in peace organizations, moving peace alliances into an antifascist or later even isolationist or pro-Soviet position. After 1946, pro-Soviet "peace fronts" helped stigmatize the rest of peace movements. Thus, the massive 1950 Stockholm Peace appeal, which involved millions of noncommunists, was made less effective by its support of the Soviet Union.

By the early 1960s, however, growing political nonalignment, or a "third way" position, in peace coalitions allowed transnational linkages with other independent movements to grow. After 1959 these linkages were encouraged by A. J. Muste, Dave Dellinger, and Liberation Magazine. By the 1980s, these coalitions included groups opposed to communist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Boundaries

Boundaries of the peace movement are hard to establish. It has played a key role in disseminating the theory and methods of nonviolent action and conflict transformation; many peace movements were broadly programmatic and its members participated in community organizing and civil rights campaigns. The American Civil Liberties Union emerged from the defense of the freedom of conscience and speech during and prior to World War I. Much of the inspiration for the civil rights movement came from peace leaders and activists from World War II and the decade following.

What kind of relationship to have with oppressive governments and violent liberation movements has always vexed peace movements. Pacifists have been divided on the issue of just wars. Although at moments of mass peace mobilization those in disagreement have joined together in large demonstrations or days of action, the ideological differences remain. Some peace lobbying groups prefer educational or pressure group work and conferences as methods to achieve peace.

Success and Failure

What criteria can we use to assess the successes and failures of the American peace movements? While few stated goals have been achieved, their support has significantly aided international peace organizations. Cultural dimensions of peace have entered mainstream culture, not so much politically as in music, literature, art, theater, and film. The growth of peace research, peace studies, and peace education in schools, colleges, and universities since the 1970s has started to legitimate the interdisciplinary fields of peace and conflict studies as an area of inquiry and pedagogy. More peace programs exist in the United States than anywhere else in the world; most of them reflect concerns of the early 1970s (Vietnam) and early 1980s (nuclear war). Without a peace movement such programs almost certainly would not have been developed. In the 1950s, for example, a "conspiracy of silence" and censorship surrounded the nature of nuclear war—peace groups took on the role of public education. The peace movement has also brought to light and into question U.S. military or paramilitary intervention in various parts of the world.

As for specific impact on government policy, domestic successes include the expansion of the legal right for individuals to declare conscientious objection to participating in war and the humane treatment of conscientious objectors. They also include the signing of a partial, atmospheric nuclear test ban treaty of 1963,the decision to end the ground and then air wars in Vietnam, the suspension of the peace time draft, and the increasing reluctance to incur casualties in combat by the United States.

Over the years the peace movement has accumulated ideas, organizations, and traditions while rarely having more than 10 percent of the public supporting its positions. The peace movement, however, has succeeded in weaving its ideas, symbolism, and styles of action into American culture. Following the acts of global terrorism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a transnational peace strategy may begin to make sense to a far wider constituency.

Such traditions as religious pacifism and conscientious objection, Gandhian nonviolence, liberal and socialist internationalism, and anticonscriptionism have been enhanced by the special role of women's peace activity, conflict resolution, mediation, and dispute settlement as well as a growing belief in international law, justice, and arbitration through transnational bodies and nongovernmental organizations. All these have become an accepted, if sometimes contested, part of normal political life in America even if they are often minority positions. The peace movements of the past one hundred and fifty years have made this transformation and evolution possible.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brock, Peter, and Nigel Young. Pacifism in the Twentieth Century. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1999.

Chatfield, Charles. The American Peace Movement: Ideals and Activism. New York: Twayne, 1992.

DeBenedetti, Charles. The Peace Reform American History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.

Peterson, H. C., and Gilbert Fite. Opponents of War, 1917–1918. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957.

Wittner, Lawrence S. Rebels against War: The American Peace Movement, 1933–1983. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984.

Nigel J. Young

See also Antiwar Movements ; Arms Race and Disarmament ; Conscientious Objectors ; Peace Conferences ; Utopian Communities ; Women and the Peace Movement ; and vol. 9: Peace and Bread in Time of War ; Statement by Committee Seeking Peace with Freedom in Vietnam .