Peace Movements

Peace Movements. From the early nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, a series of disparate peace movements arose from temporary political coalitions that coalesced around a core group of peace organizations in response to specific national issues. The mobilizing issues have varied—from arbitration and international law to the nuclear‐arms race—but all have had in common the goal of replacing warfare with the peaceful resolution of conflict.

The American peace movement started with small, religiously based peace societies in New York and Massachusetts (1815). The pacifist New York group totally renounced war; the Massachusetts organization pursued all forms of peace advocacy. The latter, broader approach also characterized the American Peace Society (1828), whose leaders Alan Ladd and Elihu Burritt advocated international law, a congress of nations, and the arbitration of international disputes. Arbitration and international law attracted some U.S. and English political leaders and by the turn of the century had become the fulcrum for the first large peace coalition. These were the issues of choice for prestigious peace societies founded by businessmen like Andrew Carnegie and directed by intellectuals like Elihu Root, John Bates Clark, and Hamilton Holt.

The outbreak of World War I in 1914 gave currency to the idea of an international security organization. Combined with arbitration, this goal was promoted by the League to Enforce Peace (1915) and became the centerpiece for President Woodrow Wilson's peace policy. But acceptance of Wilson's League of Nations foundered on U.S. political divisions. The established peace movement split on the question of U.S. league membership, a remnant emerging in 1923 as the League of Nations Nonpartisan Association (in 1929 renamed the League of Nations Association, or LNA).

Meanwhile, as U.S. neutrality had become a salient issue in 1914–1917, progressive reformers, Social Gospel ministers, women suffragists, and social workers had created a second peace‐movement coalition. Such groups as the Women's Peace Society (1915, subsequently the American Branch of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, or WILPF); the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR); the American Union Against Militarism; and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC, 1917) promoted U.S. leadership in peacemaking but opposed intervention in the European war.

With the U.S. declaration of war in 1917, this new constituency shrank to a few uncompromising pacifists like Jane Addams, Emily Green Balch, Dorothy Detzer, Frederick Libby, Kirby Page, Nevin Sayre, and A.J. Muste. After the war they spearheaded a broad, politically active peace movement that, however, promoted contending programs, including arms limitation, outlawry of war, and international organization.

In the 1930s, the threat of renewed European war generated a third coalition, the Emergency Peace Campaign, that mobilized public and legislative support for neutrality. James T. Shotwell and Clark Eichelberger of the LNA broke with the movement's pacifist wing, however, to campaign for aiding the European democracies and, during World War II, to mobilize a fourth peace coalition that rallied support for the United Nations.

The next peace coalition coalesced around the 1950s campaign to ban atmospheric nuclear tests. Leaders from the FOR and AFSC created the 1957 Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) and the Committee for Non‐Violent Action (CNVA), which organized protests such as sailing into Pacific test zones. SANE, with Women Strike for Peace (WSP, 1961), mobilized public opinion and lobbied in Washington, contributing to the 1963 Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

The largest and most tumultuous of all peace coalitions was the Vietnam‐era antiwar movement. Core peace groups initially included the FOR, AFSC, WILPF, SANE, and WSP. New constituencies were quickly added, including Students for a Democratic Society, Clergy and Laymen Concerned, and business, professional and civil rights groups. Within this shifting coalition arose tension between the liberals' goal of ending the war and the radical objective of exploiting the war and cultural conflict to promote broader economic and social change. The movement's radical phase peaked in 1968–1970, after which a liberal antiwar constituency became dominant.

When the nuclear‐weapons issue again arose in the 1980s, peace groups helped mobilize still another large political coalition: the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign to halt the U.S.‐Soviet arms race. Although Congress compromised the freeze proposal, and its popular support dissolved after President Ronald Reagan proposed his Strategic Defense Initiative in March 1983, the campaign revived arms‐control pressures and strengthened support for détente.

The historian Charles DeBenedetti has aptly described the peace movement as a social‐reform movement in the area of foreign policy. Indeed, American peace advocates have been integral to a transnational social movement that has interacted with international agencies and national governments to create institutions and procedures that offer alternatives to war.
See also Antinuclear Protest Movements; Antiwar Movements; Collective Security; Internationalism; Nuclear Arms Control Treaties; Nuclear Weapons; Sixties, The; Vietnam War.

Bibliography

Warren F. Kuehl , Seeking World Order: The United States and International Organization to 1920, 1969.
Charles DeBenedetti , The Peace Reform in American History, 1980.
Charles Howlett , The American Peace Movement: References and Resources, 1991.
Charles Chatfield , The American Peace Movement: Ideals and Activism, 1992.
Harriet Hyman Alonso , Peace as a Women's Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women's Right, 1993.
Lawrence Wittner , One World or None: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement through 1953, vol. 1 of The Struggle against the Bomb (3 vols.), 1993.
Warren F. Kuehl and and Lynne K. Dunn , Keeping the Covenant: American Internationalists and the League of Nations, 1920–1939, 1997.

E. Charles Chatfield