Peace Movements

Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy

Peace Movements

Robert H. Ferrell

The idea of peace is ancient, reaching back to the beginnings of organized society and perhaps even earlier; but until the Renaissance it had not passed beyond the stage of individual thought. Society was rural, save for a few towns and cities. Nationalities, while recognized, were not well formed. International relations did not exist. The relations of the Greek city-states were casual and unorganized, moving from hostilities to lack of hostilities without much of a dividing line. The very basis of international organization—existence of different peoples, organized in states, usually speaking different languages, was not present in the Greek world. Nor was it present in the world of Rome, where a single city, through extension of citizenship, recognized no equals in the area of the Mediterranean. To the Romans the people with whom they came in touch were either to submit to the domination of the empire or forever remain barbarians. There was no such thing as interstate relations. The same lack of international relations marked medieval life, where princes and principalities might fight or not fight, for whatever reason, conducting warfare as if it were a natural state of affairs and halting it when convenient, without much or any formality. In such disorganized relations between the peoples of Europe there was, to be sure, little reason to try for a better order of affairs when all that people knew was chaos or domination. In any event, the generality of the citizens or subjects was not consulted in advance of fighting or its conclusion.

The appearance of peace movements awaited both the formal division of Europe into nation-states and a notable intellectual development often overlooked by analysts of modern European history—the division of international relations into times of peace and times of war. This latter change came during the Thirty Years' War in the seventeenth century, and did not occur so much in the statecraft of the time as in the thinking of jurists and students of law, who began to see not merely that the primitive international customs and traditions of the era must be ordered but also that the task of ordering involved division into laws for fighting and laws for peaceful existence. In this regard the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius proved most influential. A citizen of one of the major maritime states of the era, and therefore interested in the freest possible trade on the high seas, he found the military forces of his countrymen outnumbered by the professional armies of the monarchs whose territories surrounded the States-General. The convenience of trading with many European states had fascinated the Dutch, and they wanted to continue this commerce. At the same time they needed guarantees of freedom of trade. Life during the Thirty Years' War was almost insufferable for so rich a group as the Dutch burghers. Grotius was imprisoned, and friends contrived his escape in a large chest. With reason he wished to try to order the international relations of his time, and the result was De jure belli ac pacis (1625). In it he drew a sharp line between what was war and what was peace. It was, incidentally, a line that was not recognized until the nineteenth century, when there were no major European wars except the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871). Grotius's distinction between war and peace would be blurred by the statesmen of the twentieth century, who through cold wars and other such undeclared conflicts pushed international relations back toward the pre-Grotian chaos. In any event, the drawing of a war-peace line—however theoretical, and thereafter slowly accepted and eventually violated—set the stage for popular peace movements. In a real sense Grotius and his supporters among the legal theorists were the originators of peace movements.

The essentially theoretical nature of peace movements was observable from the outset, and it may well have been one of the reasons why the innumerable drawings of ideal international societies, the perfect renderings of international relations, have never been translated even approximately into reality.

The first designs of men of peace in modern times, which themselves were not characterizable as the programs of peace movements but received a good deal of attention during their periods of interest, were markedly theoretical. One of the leaders of France in the early seventeenth century, the duc de Sully, was the author of the "great design" of King Henry IV, which, though it stipulated an international force, asked for one so small that it amounted to disarmament. Much notice was taken of this hope for peace, and it was speculated upon for years thereafter. The supporters of later peace movements were also accustomed to cite the hopes of Benjamin Franklin, who was convinced that standing armies diminished not only the population of a country but also the breed and size of the human species, for the strongest men went off to war and were killed. He pointed out obvious waste in the maintenance of armies. His analysis made sense to many Americans who themselves, or whose ancestors, had come to the New World to escape the constant wars of the Old. The Farewell Address of President George Washington in 1796 was plain about the need for peace and the wastefulness of war: "Overgrown military establishments are, under any form of government, inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty." Here was another rationale that would recur in the pronouncements of the nineteenth-century peace movements in both the United States and Europe.

The intellectual foundations of peace movements were laid in the years prior to 1815. Beginning in that year, with the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon at an end, and the emperor of France on his way to St. Helena in a British frigate, it was possible to bring together the formalities of the international lawyers and the philosophical hopes of Sully, Franklin, and Washington, and to enlarge upon and systematize ideas about how American or European—or even world—peace might be achieved.

The years from 1815 to 1848 saw major developments in organization of peace groups in the United States. For a while it appeared as if they might carry everything before them. Peace seemed secure between the United States and Great Britain. In the Rush-Bagot Convention (1817) the two English-speaking nations undertook a virtual disarmament of their borders upon the Great Lakes, across New York State, and along the northern borders of the New England states. Why could not such an arrangement between erstwhile enemies spread to the entire world? This was the era of the founding of the American Peace Society in 1828 and of state peace societies. It was an ebullient time, often characterized by later historians as an age of reform: the antislavery movement, prison reform, insane asylum reform, experiments in communitarian living, and the rise of reformist religions such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Members of the new peace organizations advanced their ideas with unwonted vigor and with a very considerable intellectual precision. The principal organizer of the American Peace Society, William Ladd, arranged for distribution of tracts and advocated a congress of nations, together with the riddance of war through treaties of arbitration. Elihu Burritt established the League of Universal Brotherhood in 1846, which soon was claiming an American membership of twenty thousand and a similar number of British members; Burritt's organization was largely responsible for a series of "universal peace congresses" held in European cities over the next years.

The peace groups of the first half of the nineteenth century took interest in international law, as Grotius had two centuries before, and the American Peace Society in the person of Ladd, as well as the reformer Alfred Love, founder of the Universal Peace Union (1866), looked to a stronger law of nations that, they were certain, would make war more difficult, perhaps even impossible.

As for precisely how influential the peace groups were, during the years from Waterloo to the revolutions of 1848 and the Crimean War (for Europe) and to the Mexican War and the passing of the slavery issue into national politics, and ultimately the coming of the Civil War (for the United States), it is impossible to say. The problem of analysis here is that during an age of reform there was goodwill in so many directions, often expressed by the same individuals, that its forcefulness or lack thereof cannot be easily determined. Moreover, the absence of even fairly small international conflicts was probably not a result of the peace movement, but of contemporary circumstances in the international relations of Europe—the unpopularity of war after the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon, and the momentary sense of community among the great powers known as the Concert of Europe. To many people of the time, peace nonetheless seemed a logical outcome of the peace movement; and the workers for peace tended to pursue their plans and purposes—abolition of standing armies, development of international law on land and sea, organization of peace congresses—with a confidence that was unjustified by the international relations of the time.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, peace workers began to have a new sense of urgency because of an armaments race that at first was not very noticeable but later became highly evident. By the 1860s and 1870s the stresses and strains incident to the rise of a Prussia-dominated German state in Europe began to send armament expenditures on an upward trend that continued into the twentieth century. The sharpening of nationalisms everywhere, and the increasing authority of national bureaucracies, impelled nations to increase their armaments. Weapons also began to increase in complexity and costliness. Muskets gave way to rifles. Smooth-bore cannon were replaced by rifled guns, and projectiles went farther and penetrated deeper. The navies of the world converted from sail to steam. They armored their ships. Transport—first the railroad and then, after the end of the century, motor transport over paved roads—made land armies mobile in ways unknown to generals during the age of Napoleon, Gebhard von Blucher, and the duke of Wellington.

The Industrial Revolution allowed nations with heavy industries to produce arms for themselves and sell arms to their agricultural neighbors in exchange for foodstuffs. Introduction of such weapons as the French 75, a new field gun, forced all the leading European states to purchase the new ordnance. By the 1890s men of goodwill everywhere were alarmed at the dreadfully costly battles and campaigns of any new war, given the new equipment. They were alarmed at the talk about military might by the leaders of Germany after Bismarck. The surge of imperialism in the 1890s momentarily took European and American energies into the Far East. Earlier the Europeans had devoted themselves to the imperial task of dividing Africa. Shortly after the turn of the century, there was no more territory to divide, and rivalries began to concentrate in Europe, as they had just before outbreak of the Napoleonic wars. It was a vastly troubled situation; and peace groups began to look for solutions, to try to do what statesmen seemed incapable of doing—to contrive some kind of international arrangement of ideas and interests so that war could be prevented.

Limitation of armaments was the task of the peace movements prior to 1914, and the result was disappointing. Calvin D. Davis has justly remarked that a strange dichotomy of thought existed in the United States and Europe. International rivalries never had burned so brightly, and never had there been so much talk about national interest; yet never had there been more popular interest in peace. Peace groups received broad public support, even from statesmen, who perhaps saw them as so important, so obviously influential, that it would be best to join them, at least in appearance. Universal Peace Congresses began to assemble, the first such meeting being held in 1889. The men and women who attended these meetings favored disarmament and the advance of arbitration through treaties. The Dissenting churches of Great Britain heartily supported disarmament during the 1890s, before the British army and navy were modernized on the eve of World War I. British members of these groups looked anxiously to their American cousins, hoping that from unity of language could come unity of national purposes. The English-Speaking Union was a reflection of this hope. During the years from the turn of the century until 1914, a rapprochement became apparent between the two countries and was much remarked upon. The two countries together could join their European friends in a peace movement that would overwhelm the forces for war. It was thought by people who were interested in peace that the two English-speaking nations might well be considered impartial in urging a disarmament conference because of their separation from Europe by water—not very much in the case of Britain but a vast expanse in the case of America.

The pre–World War I years seemed to promise a great peace reform. Baroness Bertha von Suttner in 1889 published a book titled Die Waffen Nieder (Lay Down Your Arms). It was perhaps the greatest peace novel of all times and was translated into almost every known tongue. The British journalist W. T. Stead reprinted it in English in 1896, and sold the book at the nominal price of one penny. The Russians appeared to be interested in world peace, or at least it was clear that the great novelist Leo Tolstoy was fascinated by the idea. At the suggestion of Baroness von Suttner, the inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel, became devoted to the peace movement. Nobel, who believed that he could cooperate with the baroness through making dynamite, wrote to her on one occasion, "Perhaps my factories will put an end to war even sooner than your Congresses; on the day when two army corps may mutually annihilate each other in a second, probably all civilized nations will recoil with horror and disband their troops." Little did Nobel know that this day to which he looked mystically, albeit seriously, would arrive in the latter twentieth century, but civilized nations not only would fail to recoil with horror and disband their troops, but also would prove willing to allow the weapons of destruction to proliferate.

Nobel characterized the hopes of his generation by endowing a peace prize that was to go annually "to that man or woman who shall have worked most effectively for the fraternization of mankind, the diminution of armies, and the promotion of Peace Congresses." This was the spirit that produced the most notable product of the peace movement of the turn of the century, the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907.

Unfortunately, the first conference did little for peace. The czar of Russia called it in the vain hope that it would limit adoption of French 75 rifles by the armies of Europe, so that the Russian government could put available funds into modernizing its navy. This purpose was well understood by representatives of the nations meeting at The Hague, and nothing came of it. Evidence of how little the administration of President William McKinley expected from the First Hague Peace Conference could be seen in the composition of the American delegation, which included Captain William Crozier of the U.S. Army and Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, who had recently retired from the U.S. Navy. Crozier was coinventor of an ingenious disappearing gun carriage, and Mahan was the philosopher of a large American navy; neither was about to let the czar's government get away with anything. The first conference did, however, define the rules of civilized warfare. It arranged for an international tribunal that nations thereafter promised to use, albeit excepting so many of their national interests that such use was virtually a symbol of the court's uselessness.

The Second Hague Peace Conference was delayed until after the Russo-Japanese War, by which time the European armaments race was so far developed that the conference's prospects were almost zero. President Theodore Roosevelt knew that 1907 was not a good year for peace, yet felt that he had to do something, for many of his Republican friends in New England were members of peace societies and anxious for achievement. He sent the American fleet around the world that year, and later wrote that the voyage was the best thing he had done for peace. He considered doing more, and urged the British government to limit the size of battleships to fifteen thousand tons displacement. Apparently he was seeking to halt the naval arms race begun by the British with the launching of the battleship Dreadnought the preceding year. But then Roosevelt's idea disappeared, as naval architects pointed out to him that fifteen thousand tons was too small a platform for the best combination of the essentials of fighting ships—guns, armor, and propulsive machinery. Neither the British nor the German government wished to do anything serious about disarmament at the Second Hague Peace Conference, and so the idea languished and the conferees contented themselves with tidying up the projects for judicial settlement and international law advanced at the initial conference. The Third Hague Peace Conference was scheduled just about the time World War I broke out; and the Hague idea, as it was called, then blended into the larger notion of a League of Nations.

The American peace groups in these years concentrated not merely on congresses and conferences but also on a national program of bilateral treaties of arbitration and conciliation. Secretaries of State Richard Olney, John Hay, Elihu Root, Philander C. Knox, and William Jennings Bryan sought to negotiate such treaties, and Hay, Root, and Bryan concluded several dozen. The only way that this program of the American peace groups could have ensured world peace was for the United States to have signed up every nation—and the other nations would have had to arrange their own treaty networks. Because of the outbreak of World War I there was not enough time for so many instruments to be signed and ratified. Although the American network remains on the statute books, nothing came of the hope for peace through treaties of arbitration and conciliation.

THE INTERWAR YEARS

World War I marked the end of the program of the peace movement of preceding years. The war was a chilling experience. Although statesmen had anticipated the war, they and people everywhere were shocked when it did not end quickly, like the Franco-Prussian War, and lasted more than four years. The United States intervened. It became necessary, so it seemed, for the New World to redress the balance of the Old. It was necessary, Americans believed, to get the Europeans off dead center, to move them toward peace.

The principal accomplishment of peaceminded Americans during the war and in the months of negotiations afterward in Paris was to draw up the constitution, or Covenant, of the League of Nations. Participation in the war convinced many Americans that they had not merely repaid their debt to the marquis de Lafayette but that their country, as President Woodrow Wilson said, comprised all nations and therefore understood all nations, and American organization of the peace would ensure a decent future for mankind.

But then came another shock for the millions of Americans who looked forward to world peace—rejection of the Treaty of Versailles and thereby of the Covenant, which constituted the first twenty-six articles of the treaty, by the Senate in 1919–1920. President Wilson had told everyone who would listen that Article X, which promised international action to prevent war, was the "heart" of the Covenant. To the millions of League of Nations supporters in the United States, it seemed that the Senate had broken the heart of the world.

The American peace groups of the interwar era divided over the wisdom of establishing a League of Nations, and perhaps the best way to understand the division is to characterize it as pro-league and anti-league—or conservative and radical—because of differing outlooks on the organization of peace. Most conservative peace groups—including the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the World Peace Foundation, the League of Nations Association, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation—had originated in the eastern portion of the country. They possessed financial strength—at its foundation in 1910 the Carnegie Endowment received $10 million in bonds of the United States Steel Corporation. Those bonds had been insured by the profits of World War I, a situation presenting the odd picture of a peace organization operating on the profits of war. The World Peace Foundation had also begun its work in the same year, with $1 million. The Woodrow Wilson Foundation, created in 1923, received initial contributions of nearly $1 million.

The work of the conservative wing of American peace organizations varied, for their members realized that all sorts of activity could come under the general heading of peace. The Carnegie Endowment annually spent $500,000 sponsoring such projects as a monthly bulletin, International Conciliation, and "international mind alcoves" in small libraries throughout the United States. Its publishing program included the monumental Economic and Social History of the World War in one hundred volumes. It financed smaller peace organizations in the United States and abroad, maintained the Paris Center for European Peace, rebuilt the library of the University of Louvain in Belgium, endowed university chairs in international relations, and advanced codification of international law. The World Peace Foundation worked in favor of the World Court and distributed League of Nations publications in the United States. The Woodrow Wilson Foundation worked to perpetuate Wilsonian ideals.

Radical peace organizations of the interwar era were far less staid and restrained. Almost all had come into existence as a result of World War I. Names of these groups changed as finances and memberships waxed and waned, but altogether there were perhaps forty operating at the national level, with many more local organizations. These were groups of believers in world peace, filled with hope for their programs. Often their purposes were revealed in their names: the American Committee for the Outlawry of War, the American Committee for the Cause and Cure of War, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the National Council for the Prevention of War, the Committee on Militarism in Education, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Parliament of Peace and Universal Brotherhood, the Peace Heroes Memorial Society, the War Resisters' League, the Women's Peace Society, the World Peace Association.

Operating procedures of the radical peace organizations, the evangelists among the peace workers, varied markedly. Some were virtually one-man operations, such as the American Committee for the Outlawry of War, financed by the Chicago lawyer Salmon O. Levinson, who spent $15,000 a year to spread the idea that war should not be permitted under international law—it should be outlawed. The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom had as many as six thousand members and thousands of dollars each year for expenses, much of the money provided by friends of the Chicago social worker Jane Addams. The National Council for the Prevention of War was the creation of the Congregational minister Frederick J. Libby to work against arms manufacturers during the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–1922, and after the success of that meeting Libby continued his group in support of other causes. It acted as a Washington lobby for peace groups, but always reflected the pacifism of its founder. It spent $100,000 a year; in 1928 its office roster included twelve secretaries and eighteen office assistants. Among other radical groups the Women's Peace Society had two thousand members; the Fellowship of Reconciliation, forty-five hundred; and the War Resisters' League, four hundred. Their financial situations were relatively modest.

How, one might ask, could even substantial groups (in terms of finances) like the conservative organizations, or small groups such as the radical peace organizations, hope to influence the millions of American citizens in the years after World War I? How can one speak of the peace movement in America when the organizations for peace, affluent or otherwise, were composed of such disparate groups and often of committees dominated by a few persons or even one individual?

An important reason for their influence was their ability to act through a maze of supporting peace groups and interlocking committees. Membership of the radical peace organizations was astonishingly small, and within it the core of full-time peace workers was less than one hundred individuals in Washington and New York. But individuals could join more than one group or otherwise obtain cooperation between peace organizations. And the ardent peace worker Carrie Chapman Catt federated organizations not primarily interested in peace; she brought together as many as a dozen of these national organizations—such as the American Association of University Women and the Young Women's Christian Association—into the American Committee for the Cause and Cure of War.

Peace organizations were influential because of their frequent claim to represent the female voters of the United States. After World War I the franchise had been extended to all American women. Their voting preferences were highly uncertain, and Catt was able to threaten the nation's political leaders with a unified female vote in support of whatever she was advocating.

Still another reason for the extraordinary influence of American peace groups during the 1920s and 1930s perhaps needs to be explained. Elected officials of the time were sensitive to pressure from voters advocating a program. Of course there has always been pressure upon officials. But to leaders of the postwar period a new force, an aroused public opinion, seemed to be at work. Participation in the war had brought interest in propaganda, and in turn produced much learned and unlearned speculation about public opinion. Walter Lippmann published a book on the subject during the early 1920s. The science of persuasion, as applied to mass consumption, came into vogue, with advertising taking on the proportions of a national industry. Political leaders felt that they were being watched, their actions scrutinized, as never before. Any individuals or small groups who could claim to represent larger groups or great organizations received instantaneous attention. It was a nervous, rather unsophisticated era in which claims to importance, carefully advanced, could propel their bearers toward success in whatever they were advocating.

American peace organizations indulged in a pressure politics that for years proved far more successful than it should have been—because of the hypersensitive political climate. They did everything possible to give the impression that their programs represented the thoughts of the American people. In their letter-writing campaigns to members of Congress, workers for peace learned early on that it was advisable to make each letter appear different, even if it was for the same purpose and said the same thing; the technique was to have separately written appeals, individually signed—never should there be forms that, apparently, had been signed without much thought or purpose. They also engaged in the tactic of presenting petitions, and in the time-honored activity of interviewing members of Congress. In the latter work Catt was an expert; she warned one of her workers that she never believed a senator's attitude was sincere unless he had been interviewed by several people and said the same thing to each one.

As for the ideas of American peace workers during the period from the Armistice in 1918 to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in December 1941, ideas about world peace, or peace for the United States, proliferated but most Americans interested in peace found a reason for advocacy of one of several major plans or purposes. The League of Nations was the greatest source of hope for peace, and many Americans looked to the future, if not immediate, membership of their country in that organization. The force of the league idea owed a great deal to its novelty. The United Nations has never captured the imagination of Americans in the way that the League of Nations did. The idea of a league had not been a part of earlier American peace programs, which had looked either to the codification of international law, including treaties of arbitration and conciliation, or to a working out of more diplomatic arrangements through periodic congresses like the Hague Peace Conferences.

Only during World War I did the idea of a more political League of Nations find favor in the United States. Interest had risen to a considerable height by the summer of 1919—so far, indeed, that Senator Henry Cabot Lodge found himself forced to temporize during hearings of the Foreign Relations Committee until popular sentiment lessened. During passage of the Treaty of Versailles through the tortuosities of Senate maneuver, Lodge always avoided criticism of the league idea; if he criticized, it was because the League of Nations was Wilson's league, not because of the idea itself. As the years passed, it became evident that American membership in the league was, practically speaking, impossible, because the league seemed too concerned about the smaller points of European politics. But many Americans—Wilsonians, they frequently called themselves—continued to feel that the Senate amendments of the League Covenant had broken the heart of the world and that the turning of the world toward war during the 1930s was a direct result of failure of the United States to join the League of Nations.

A second program for American peace workers during the 1920s and 1930s was membership in the World Court. Advocates of the League of Nations often were advocates of the court, which, though technically separate from the league, was actually one of its organs. The World Court reflected the traditional American concern for codification of international law. Its protocol stated, in classic form, that among the sources of this law (in addition to treaties, decisions of international conferences, and writings of publicists) were decisions of jurists. It seemed sensible to assist in codification in this way, just as municipal law was organized through daily work of the courts. Yet connection of the league with the World Court, the proviso that the court could give advisory opinions to the league's council, encouraged the league's enemies in the Senate to affix so many onerous conditions to membership in the World Court as to make it impossible. Peace organizations did their best to secure membership, but failed to anticipate the importance of the league connection.

Disarmament was a popular program, and at least in the realm of naval disarmament (a better term would be "limitation" of armaments) there was some progress. As is now fairly evident, limitation of American, British, Japanese, Italian, and French naval arms was a useful activity during the 1920s. In the next decade it made less sense. It was not a major support of peace, for the peace of Europe was conditioned upon the size of armies, not navies. Germany and the Soviet Union were unaffected by the naval conferences sponsored by the allies of World War I. Germany and the Soviet Union attended the World Disarmament Conference held at Geneva in the early 1930s, and the Soviet spokesman, Maxim Litvinov, was eloquent in support of proposals for peace. But these two powers placed little trust in disarmament. Peace workers in the United States never really understood the peripheral importance of disarmament. It seems safe to say that they attached far too much meaning to it, spending too much time and energy working for it. Like the World Court, disarmament acted as a magnet, drawing their attention away from German and Japanese aggression that in the 1930s brought the collapse of world peace.

Another fascination of Americans interested in peace after World War I was the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), in which almost all nations of the world promised to renounce and outlaw war. The pact was the crowning achievement of American peace groups in the interwar period. Despite Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg's initial and private feeling that peace workers were "a set of God-damned fools" and "God-damned pacifists," the groups managed to coerce and then convert Kellogg to support the Pact of Paris. The secretary received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1929. Unfortunately, the Kellogg-Briand Pact was too ethereal a creation, too impossible in terms of practical world politics, to assist world peace. It was an illustration of the traditional American liking for pronouncement, for doctrine and dogma. Peace movements, by their nature doctrinaire, were much attracted to formulas officially announced. Insofar as American groups occupied themselves with Kellogg's pronouncement, they failed, as in other programs, to work realistically for peace.

In the interwar years Americans continued to adhere to their traditional faith in freedom of world trade—in a trade largely unrestricted by tariffs, quotas, and other regulations. The American peace groups frequently championed this path to peace, although the idea of freedom of world trade failed to attract them in the manner of such programs as the League of Nations, the World Court, naval disarmament, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact, for it seemed to be a less direct attack on war. Secretary of State Cordell Hull was fascinated by the problem of lowering tariff barriers. An old Wilsonian, he received much favorable public comment by promoting what to his mind was almost a substitute for American membership in the League of Nations, the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (1934).

In the late 1930s, with war beginning to be talked about in Europe and then becoming a reality, many Americans interested in peace restricted their concerns to their own country's neutrality. The idea of neutrality flourished, an ancient American hope embodied in belief in a New World and an Old. There was a desire to restrict the merchants of death, the dealers in the international arms trade. Another belief of the time was that President Wilson's interpretation of neutral rights to include the right of Americans to travel aboard belligerent ships had taken the country into World War I; and if this interpretation and other latitudinarian views of neutrality were avoided, with the nation seeking only the most narrow of rights upon the sea, then the forthcoming European war would not touch the United States. The series of neutrality enactments beginning in 1935 attracted immense attention from American workers for peace. Congress eventually changed this legislation to permit American trade with the democratic nations of Europe, but the changes were made in gingerly fashion so as to avoid offending the predominantly isolationist peace organizations.

AFTER 1939

To speak of an American peace movement in the years after 1939 is to look to a far more complicated effort to preserve the peace of Europe and the world than had been made in the years before. Americans interested in peace realized the need for much more organization and much more money. The number of peace groups proliferated beyond the imagination of workers during the 1920s and 1930s. A survey of peace groups in 1988 found that there were 500 with budgets of more than $30,000 annually, and 7,200 groups with budgets of less.

The programs to which the new and old peace groups turned were remarkably diverse. Most groups took interest in the United Nations, notably the surviving conservative groups of the interwar era, which easily changed their support from the League of Nations to the United Nations. During World War II the country concentrated on victory, but there was much interest in the Department of State's plans for a United Nations, which were well advanced by 1944, when the Dumbarton Oaks Conference met to draw up a draft of the United Nations Charter. Undersecretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., carefully encouraged the formation of a network of committees and organizations across the country that was to give advice on the structure of the new world organization. He provided for public representation at the San Francisco Conference (1945). The resultant charter and the constitutions of its many supporting organs showed that the people of the United States this time considered the maintenance of peace to be more than a political task, and that it comprised social, economic, and intellectual concerns.

In the immediate years after World War II, peace groups found an almost dizzying group of issues to focus upon, but principally their concern was the developing Cold War with the Soviet Union. This turned attention to the American and Soviet buildup in armaments, both conventional and nuclear.

After such foreign policy developments as the Truman Doctrine and support of Greece and Turkey against the Soviet Union; Soviet explosion of a nuclear test device in 1949; the Korean War; the Suez crisis of 1956, involving intervention in Egypt by Britain, France, and Israel; and continuing troubles in the Middle East, notably American occupation of Lebanon in 1958, there came the intervention in Vietnam, which for a dozen years in the 1960s and early 1970s, until withdrawal in 1975, brought a coalition of American peace groups in strident opposition.

When the issue of the Vietnam War arose, could it be said that the many youthful dissenters represented a revival of the older peace movements, which were generally against war rather than advocating special causes? Some of the anti-war protesters generalized their feelings about Vietnam to include all wars. In the 1960s young people everywhere, not merely in the United States, found war distasteful. It might have appeared that they were reconstituting the world peace movement of the interwar years. Or perhaps they were harking back to the views of Tolstoy and other philosophical pacifists at the end of the nineteenth century. Yet in the United States the antiwar protesters focused on involvement of the country in Vietnam. Their special cause set them apart from older peace movements. Their tactics also were markedly different; they took inspiration from the Indian protest movement of Mohandas K. Gandhi, a generation and more earlier, against British imperialism. Gandhi's movement had been a means of registering dissent and forcing change. In the United States the civil rights protesters in the South were employing civil disobedience, with marked success. The Vietnam protesters similarly employed it to persuade the American public to stop supporting the Vietnam War.

Americans interested in peace after World War II were necessarily attracted to the problems of nuclear disarmament, but here the technicalities proved so complex that no single assemblage, such as another Washington Naval Conference, and certainly no campaign by private individuals, could hope to resolve them. The contentions of the 1920s over gun calibers and tonnage and the thickness of armor plate now appeared to represent an antediluvian age. In the years after 1945 much initiative passed to the federal government, which sponsored nuclear disarmament programs and organized the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Private organizations assisted in its work. The atomic physicists organized themselves through the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and through the Federation of Atomic Scientists.

Such efforts tended to attach to aspects of nuclear disarmament, and in the early years after World War II peace groups in America concentrated on an end to nuclear testing, once the dangers of tests became evident. The limited test ban of 1963 appeared to be the initial result—although it might be argued that for the nuclear powers testing by that time no longer was of advantage. Another factor, seldom mentioned, in passage of the test ban treaty through the U.S. Senate was an arrangement for Republican support in exchange for a promise by President Lyndon B. Johnson not to undertake an investigation of the income tax returns of President Dwight Eisenhower's chief of staff, Sherman Adams—a deal negotiated by former president Eisenhower.

In the early 1980s the groups in the United States concentrated on limitation of intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Europe, and the success of this endeavor raised a question as to what tactics—those of the movement in America and Europe, or the competitive rearmament sponsored by the Ronald Reagan administration vis-àvis the Soviet Union—were successful. The administration sponsored the B-1 bomber, the MX missile system, and the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars"). The last sought a defense against Soviet missiles by an antiballistic missile system. The movement cited the enormous cost of competition over many years, and it was easy to show all the alternatives, peaceful alternatives, available for the same price: construction of schools, of roads and dams, of rail lines between cities, of new or improved airports; better health care; housing for the poor. Groups cited the risk of destruction of cities and national infrastructures, not to mention the millions of people who would die in a nuclear war.

The attack against the nuclear programs of the Reagan era led to the nuclear freeze campaign, an issue that appeared on ballots in many states during the November 1982 elections, and 11.5 million people, 60 percent of those voting on the freeze issue, voted in favor. State legislatures, city councils, and national labor unions declared themselves in favor of a freeze on testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons. All this resulted in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with the Soviet Union in 1987. Not long afterward the Soviet Union collapsed, and with it a considerable part of the world's nuclear competition, although the remaining nuclear powers constituted a considerable threat to peace and a very real complexity in negotiating further arms cuts.

Continuing concerns meanwhile were arising over threats to peace of a conventional sort, including American actions in scattered places around the world. Each threat or action gathered its groups in opposition. Here one speaks of interventions in Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), and Somalia (1992), the last two occurring during the George H. W. Bush administration. The Reagan administration's support of the contras in Nicaragua led to clashes with peace groups opposing sponsorship of right-wing partisans against a left-wing government.

In 1990 another opportunity arose for protesting intervention, again in the Middle East, where the U.S. government and the United Nations sought to press the regime of the dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, whose troops had invaded and occupied the neighboring country of Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia. The immediate concern of the movement during the time of negotiation, prior to the UN military attack, Desert Storm, was to give sanctions time to work rather than rushing to war. Some American groups supporting the need for time believed that it was also an opportunity to spread their message and recruit new members. Most groups simply desired more time than President Bush and his increasingly supportive UN allies were willing to offer.

The older generation of peace movement supporters, one should remark, was not altogether pleased with the diffuse concerns of the younger generation, and beheld weakness rather than strength in the much larger numbers of American groups and their far larger finances. Their criticisms perhaps had a point, and are worth mentioning. The historian Arthur Ekirch, who had been a conscientious objector during World War II, was disgusted with the postwar peace workers. He wrote of the factionalism, self-examination, and debate over alternatives after 1945. He thought that the only purpose of a peace movement was opposition to militarism and war.

And what to say of this criticism? Of the factionalism there could be no question, for each of the bewildering number of American groups, numbering into the thousands, had its purpose. A Canadian group in the 1970s began publication of a periodical—a digest of peace books, articles, and conference papers—on the principle that chemists and other scientists possessed such digests, and so should the peace movement. The span of the books, articles, and papers was almost unlimited, displaying the way in which the post–World War II groups had edged into subjects never hitherto deemed of much, if any, interest to a peace movement. One conference participant advocated tourism, because seeing other cultures would produce tolerance, and therefore understanding, and maybe peace. The confusion of purposes, the welter of what Ekirch described as factionalism, was evident in the categories of the digest's editors, who changed their categories every few years, to the confusion of readers.

In the factionalism of the post-1945 movement it was evident that only two general distinctions, which might be described as organizing principles, marked the new movement. The authors of the survey of peace groups in 1988 wrote that pacifist groups tended to lead the entire movement; in times of slumps of interest in peace, they tended to stay together and offer new ideas. Pacifist groups served as "halfway houses" to ensure the movement's survival during the doldrums. They were especially persistent during troubling experiences, as when in Iran they sought to "do peace" but found the task difficult in the midst of violence. Their task of testimony was also difficult. How could they be heard when the United Nations engaged in peacekeeping, and its proposals and programs dominated public attention?

According to the analysts of the movement, the nonpacifist groups sought to change foreign policy by working within the political system. In the United States this entailed proposing legislation to halt development of particular weapons or generally cut spending for programs, creating support for such efforts through lobbying, and making positions known during elections.

Another point made in the survey, somewhat countering the accusation of factionalism, was that constituents of groups were not themselves divided into a few factions: women, students, and professionals. Constituents were more diverse than expected, among both pacifist and nonpacifist groups. With the exception of religious persons, the often cited constituent groupings were small proportions of any of the peace groups. Students were found in small-budget groups and professionals in nonpacifist groups, but differences otherwise were not large.

Self-examination also was a characteristic of the post–World War II American groups. Interviewers of "persistent peace activists" developed a theory of sustained commitment that included creating an activist identity, integrating peace work into everyday life, building beliefs that sustain activism, bonding with a peace group, and managing burnout. Ekirch's third criticism, that the American peace advocates were fond of debate, was undeniable, as all readers of the Peace Research Abstracts could see.

But in retrospect one might conclude—despite present-day factionalism and self-examination and debate over issues, and the failure of peace movements of the past—that groups everywhere have done much good. In the United States they have had public support based on the nation's history. The resort to colonies in the New World was in part to escape the incessant wars of Europe, including enforced military service. Through experience involving the exploitation of a great new continent, Americans became hopeful people, and the age-old hope of peace naturally appealed to them. The very success of the American experiment in democracy raised the possibility of changing the ways of other peoples. E pluribus unum has succeeded beyond all expectation in the United States, and Americans have expected this motto to have meaning for Europe and the world.

Another factor has entered into support for the peace movement in the United States that was not present in earlier years. The American people have come to realize that the bounties of geography and the rivalries of other nations have given their country protection for many decades longer than they could have expected, and it is time now for them to take part in the organization of world order. Jules Jusserand, France's ambassador to the United States (1902–1920), was fond of saying that America was bordered on north and south by weak nations, and on east and west by nothing but fish. During the American Revolution, and throughout the nineteenth century, the United States benefited from what President Washington described as the ordinary combinations and collisions of the European powers. The noted twentieth-century historian of American foreign relations, Samuel Flagg Bemis, was accustomed to write regarding this era that "Europe's distress was America's advantage." C. Vann Woodward aptly labeled it a time of "free security." Beginning with World War I, this remarkable period was no more. After World War II most Americans realized that fact. When the nuclear age opened, the problems of world peace became so omnipresent, so persistent, that they no longer were possible to ignore.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alonso, Harriet H. The Women's Peace Union and the Outlawry of War: 1923–1942. Knoxville, Tenn., 1989.

——. Peace as a Women's Issue: A U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women's Rights. Syracuse, N.Y., 1993.

Brock, Peter, and Thomas P. Socknat, eds. Challenges to Mars: Essays on Pacifism from 1918 to 1945. Toronto, 1994. Half of the twenty-eight essays are on the interwar period.

Buckley, Thomas H. The United States and the Washington Conference: 1921–1922. Knoxville, Tenn., 1970.

Chatfield, Charles. For Peace and Justice: Pacifism in America, 1914–1941. Knoxville, Tenn., 1971.

——. The American Peace Movement: Ideals and Activism. New York, 1992.

Cooper, Sandi E. Patriotic Pacifism: Waging War on War in Europe, 1815–1914. New York, 1991. Emphasis on the peace movement between 1889 and 1914.

Curti, Merle. Peace or War: The American Struggle, 1636–1936. New York, 1936.

Davis, Calvin D. The United States and the First Hague Peace Conference. Ithaca, N.Y., 1962.

——. The United States and the Second Hague Peace Conference: American Diplomacy and International Organization, 1899–1914. Durham, N.C., 1976. Relates the history of "the Hague idea" until World War I.

DeBenedetti, Charles. The Peace Reform in American History. Bloomington, Ind., 1980.

Doenecke, Justus. Discerning the Signs: American Anti-Interventionism and the World Crisis of 1939–1941. Lanham, Md., 2000.

Early, Frances H. A World Without War: How Feminists and Pacifists Resisted World War I. Syracuse, N.Y., 1997.

Ferrell, Robert H. Peace in Their Time. New Haven, Conn., 1952.

Foster, Carrie A. The Women and the Warriors: The U.S. Section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, 1913–1946. Syracuse, N.Y., 1995.

Howlett, Charles F. The American Peace Movement: Reformers and Resources. New York, 1991. Annotated, 1,600 entries.

Joseph, Paul. Peace Politics. Philadelphia, 1993. Peace movement of the 1980s.

Kleidman, Robert. Organizing for Peace: Neutrality, the Test Ban, and the Freeze. Syracuse, N.Y., 1993. Covers the years 1936–1937, 1957–1963, 1979–1986.

Marullo, Sam, Alexandra Chute, and Mary Anna Colwell. "Pacifism and Nonpacifist Groups in the U.S. Peace Movement of the 1980s." Peace and Change 16, no. 3 (July 1991): 235–259.

Patterson, David S. Toward a Warless World: The Travail of the American Peace Movement, 1887–1914. Bloomington, Ind., 1976.

Peace and Change. Vols. 1–16 (1975–2001).

Peace Research Abstracts Journal. Vols. 1–38 (1964–2001).

Schott, Linda K. Reconstructing Women's Thoughts: The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom Before World War II. Stanford, Calif., 1997.

Small, Melvin, and William Hoover, eds. Give Peace a Chance: Exploring the Vietnam Anti-war Movement. Syracuse, N.Y., 1992.

Tracy, James. Direct Action: From the Union Eight to the Chicago Seven. Chicago, 1996. Half the book addresses racial conflict.

Wells, Tom. The War Within America: America's Battle over Vietnam. Berkeley, Calif., 1994.

Wittner, Lawrence S. Rebels Against War: The American Peace Movement, 1933–1984. Philadelphia, 1984.

——. One World or None: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement Through 1953. Stanford, Calif., 1993.

——. Revisiting the Bomb: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1954–1970. Stanford, Calif., 1997.

Ziegler, Valarie H. The Advocates of Peace in Antebellum America. Bloomington, Ind., 1992.

See also Arbitration, Mediation, and Conciliation; Dissent in Wars; Gender; Ideology; Internationalism; International Law; International Organization; Isolationism; Neutrality; Pacifism; Peacemaking; Public Opinion; The Vietnam War and Its Impact; Wilsonianism.

FROM THE KELLOGG-BRIAND PACT (1928)

"The president of the German Reich, the president of the United States of America, his majesty the king of the Belgians, the president of the French Republic, his majesty the king of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the seas, emperor of India, his majesty the king of Italy, his majesty the emperor of Japan, the president of the Republic of Poland, the president of the Czechoslovak Republic,

"Deeply sensible of their solemn duty to promote the welfare of mankind;

"Persuaded that the time has come when a frank renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy should be made to the end that the peaceful and friendly relations now existing between their peoples may be perpetuated;

"Convinced that all changes in their relations with one another should be sought only by pacific means and be the result of a peaceful and orderly process, and that any signatory Power which shall hereafter seek to promote its national interests by resort to war should be denied the benefits furnished by this Treaty;

"Hopeful that, encouraged by their example, all the other nations of the world will join in this humane endeavor and by adhering to the present Treaty as soon as it comes into force bring their peoples within the scope of its beneficent provisions, thus uniting the civilized nations of the world in a common renunciation of war as an instrument of their national policy;

"Have decided to conclude a Treaty…. and for that purpose have appointed as their respective Plenipotentiaries … who, having communicated to one another their full powers found in good and due form have agreed upon the following articles:

Article I The High Contracting Parties solemnly declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.

Article II The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means."

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