Pacifism

Pacifism is the principled rejection of war. It has found expression in American history through individuals who acted upon basis of personal conscience and through groups who acted out of a corporate sense of peoplehood. Pacifism has involved the refusal to participate in war or military service, as well as organized activities to promote peace and to give witness to the power of love in social and political relationships. Degrees of pacifist expression and commitment have varied widely, from a total renunciation of war by separatist religious sects to a general secular bias against militarism. Pacifism has had a role both at the sectarian fringes and at the public center of American life. By the broadest definition of the term—the desire to avoid war—in the words of John Dewey in 1917, “the American people is profoundly pacifist.”

Some Native North American tribes had developed corporate pacifist traditions before contacts with the Europeans. In the early fifteenth century, Deganawidah, semimythical founder of the Iroquois confederacy, taught a gospel of disarmament, social cooperation, and the rule of law. Sweet Medicine, legendary founder of the Cheyenne, established a “Peace Chief” tradition that counseled chiefs to suffer nonviolently rather than to take violent revenge. The Lenni Lenape (Delaware) had traditions of peacemaking and mediation which, together with the pacifism of William Penn and the Quakers, helped the colony of Pennsylvania for seventy years to avoid the scourge of war that afflicted Indian‐white relations elsewhere.

The pacifist Quaker movement began in the mid‐seventeenth century in the separatist wing of the Puritan dissent against the Church of England. The Quakers taught that all people, not just “the elect,” could be saved and live a life of righteousness through the guidance of the “inner light” from God, without the mediation of priest or sacrament. The Quakers took the Bible seriously, especially the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament, but gave primary emphasis to the universal light within. William Penn made liberty of conscience and the renunciation of war central to his “Holy Experiment” in social and cultural pluralism in the Delaware Valley. Social order in Pennsylvania was not guaranteed by militia, imposed creeds, or social hierarchy, but by an ideal of social harmony and mutual forbearance among different groups. From the founding of Pennsylvania in 1682 to the withdrawal of Quakers from political control in 1750, this experiment evolved a set of pacifist‐oriented social ideals and institutions that worked a lasting influence upon American life. After 1750, Quaker pacifism became a more marginal and perfectionist movement, but it remained a continuing source of humanitarian reform impulses for movements against slavery, militarism, and other social ills.

Among the groups Penn attracted to his colony were German‐speaking pacifists of Anabaptist and Pietist origin, notably the Mennonites, Amish, and Dunkers (Church of the Brethren). The Mennonites originated in the left wing of the Protestant Reformation on the European Continent and held to a doctrine of two kingdoms that separated church and state. The state was “outside the perfection of Christ” and ordained by God to maintain order in the world. The church was a body of disciplined adult believers who literally followed the teachings of Jesus, including the commandment to love one's enemies. Mennonites and their cousins, the Amish, generally stayed aloof from politics. The Dunkers, of eighteenth‐century radical Pietist origin, expressed a warmer evangelical piety than the Anabaptists, but also maintained a strictly disciplined church life of nonresistance, simplicity, and separation from the world. The Quakers, Mennonites, and Brethren eventually became known as the “historic peace churches.” Other church and communitarian groups also developed pacifist stances based upon varying apostolic, eschatological, and reform visions (Shakers, Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh‐Day Adventists, Churches of Christ, Church of God in Christ, and others).

The classical republican political philosophy that guided the founders and leaders of the early American republic contained significant elements of pacifist antimilitarism. Classical republicanism, derived from scholars of the French Enlightenment and from English Whig opponents of monarchy, assumed that warfare resulted from the alliance of the ruling aristocracy with their national military forces. This alliance produced standing armies, which encouraged despotism and threatened the freedoms of the people. To maintain public order, classical republicans counted upon the superior virtue of citizens in a republic and upon the efficacy of well‐regulated local militia. Classical republicanism, in its acceptance of militia and of defensive wars, was far from absolute pacifism. But it was a “halfway pacifism” opposed to professional military training academies, to a standing army in peacetime, and to national military conscription in wartime. In the early American republic, it also informed peace initiatives such as President John Adams's decision for peace with France in the wake of the XYZ Affair (1799–1800) and President Thomas Jefferson's use of a trade embargo as an alternative to war (1808). Also in the classical republican tradition were rapid disarmament and reduction of the army after wars, strong opposition to military conscription in the Civil War and World War I, and alarm over the power of the military‐industrial complex in the Cold War.

The first nonsectarian peace societies in the United States emerged in the wake of the War of 1812. In 1828, the local and state peace societies joined to form the American Peace Society. The peace societies were deeply religious and primarily Christian, believing that God was revealed in Christ, and that Jesus' ethic of love required the rejection of violence and war. The relationship of the peace reform to movements against slavery and for women's rights was especially important in this reform‐minded era. In 1838, some radical pacifists, led by William Lloyd Garrison, formed the New England Non‐Resistance Society and called for righteous people to separate themselves from an evil world, particularly the slave‐owning South. The peace societies opposed the Mexican War (1846–48), but when the Civil War broke out (1860) they nearly all supported the North's military effort as a justifiable police action to end slavery and preserve the Union.

Between the Civil War and World War I, the pacifist‐anarchist teachings of the Russian author Leo Tolstoy added a new dimension to the peace movement, even as the movement adapted to the new challenges created by urbanization and industrialization. Tolstoy taught a universal nonresistant gospel based upon a law of love common to all world religions. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the secular theme of internationalism became especially prominent, with proposals for international law and for arbitration of disputes. In 1910, the philosopher and psychologist William James wrote an influential essay, The Moral Equivalent of War, which argued that the apparent opposites, killing and service, were both expressions of a universal impulse to heroic self‐sacrifice. James's essay gave new psychological depth to pacifist thought and fostered alternative service programs to military service. Jane Addams, founder of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, envisioned benevolent social work on a grand scale as a means of achieving world peace.

Pacifism in the twentieth century addressed the problems of total international warfare and ultimately of a thermonuclear arms race. During wartime, the historic peace churches continued their conscientious objection to war and refused military service. The numbers of men who went to prison or to alternative service programs remained small, reduced through acculturation to American patriotism. But the peace church precedent of conscientious objection provided a wedge for massive challenges to the military draft during the unpopular Vietnam War, when the Selective Service System almost broke down. Some pacifists worked together with socialists and labor movement leaders in direct action for social justice—sometimes involving civil disobedience.

The nonviolent teachings and methods of Mohandas K. Gandhi, expressed in the popular movement for Indian independence from British imperial rule, influenced American pacifists with their integration of personal and social ethics, their unity of means and ends, and their combination of Hinduism and Christianity. Martin Luther King, Jr., adapted Gandhi's methods in leading the civil rights movement from 1956 to 1968 as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King's pacifism extended to opposition to the Vietnam War at a time when that stance seemed to threaten the civil rights coalition. A boycott on behalf of striking grape pickers in California, organized by Cesar Chavez, (1965–70), was a form of pacifist nonviolent direct action.

During the Cold War, pacifist activity waxed and waned according to recurrent crises in the competition between Communist powers and the West. The threat of atomic destruction produced a position known as “nuclear pacifism”—reflected in the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, and held by people who could justify winnable or “just” wars but who in principle opposed nuclear warfare because of its consequences. Pacifist ideals gained expression through activist organizations as well as through the growing academic discipline of peace and conflict resolution studies. A government agency, the United States Institute of Peace, was founded in 1985. National problems of escalating violence led to creative new movements for peer mediation in public schools and victim‐offender reconciliation programs in local communities. These new initiatives drew upon a long history of pacifist idealism in the American experience.
[See also Just War Theory; Militarism and Antimilitarism; Nonviolence; Nuclear Protest Movements; Peace and Antiwar Movements; Vietnam Antiwar Movement.]

Bibliography

Peter Brock , Pacifism in the United States: From the Colonial Era to the First World War, 1968.
Charles Chatfield , For Peace and Justice: Pacifism in America, 1914–1941, 1971.
Charles DeBenedetti , The Peace Reform in American History, 1980.
Lawrence S. Wittner , Rebels Against War: The American Peace Movement, 1933–1983, 1984.
Valarie H. Ziegler , The Advocates of Peace in Antebellum America, 1992.
Charles Chatfield and and Robert Kleidman , The American Peace Movement: Ideals and Activism, 1992.
Matthew Dennis , Cultivating a Landscape of Peace: Iroquois‐European Encounters in Seventeenth‐Century America, 1993.
Louise Hawkley and James C. Juhnke, eds., Nonviolent America: History Through the Eyes of Peace, 1993.
Charles C. Moskos and John Whiteclay Chambers II, eds., The New Conscientious Objection: From Sacred to Secular Resistance, 1993.
Staughton Lynd and Alice Lynd, eds., Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History, 1995.

James C. Juhnke