War Against War

The American Fight for Peace, 1914-1918

Michael Kazin

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781476705927
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War I
• Index: History

A dramatic account of the Americans who tried to stop their nation from fighting in the First World War—and came close to succeeding. In this "fascinating" ( Los Angeles Times ) narrative, Michael Kazin brings us into the ranks of one of the largest, most diverse, and most sophisticated peace coalitions in US history. The activists came from a variety of backgrounds: wealthy, middle, and working class; urban and rural; white and black; Christian and Jewish and atheist. They mounted street demonstrations and popular exhibitions, attracted prominent leaders from the labor and suffrage movements, ran peace candidates for local and federal office, met with President Woodrow Wilson to make their case, and founded new organizations that endured beyond the cause. For almost three years, they helped prevent Congress from authorizing a massive increase in the size of the US army—a step advocated by ex-president Theodore Roosevelt. When the Great War's bitter legacy led to the next world war, the warnings of these peace activists turned into a tragic prophecy—and the beginning of a surveillance state that still endures today.Peopled with unforgettable characters and written with riveting moral urgency, War Against War is a "fine, sorrowful history" ( The New York Times ) and "a timely reminder of how easily the will of the majority can be thwarted in even the mightiest of democracies" ( The New York Times Book Review ).

ONE

EVER WIDENING CIRCLES

August 1914 to May 1915

“We must be impartial in thought as well as action, must put a curb upon our sentiments as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a preference of one party to the struggle before another.”

—President Woodrow Wilson, August 1914¹

“As women, we are called upon to start each generation onward toward a better humanity. We will no longer tolerate without determined opposition that denial of the sovereignty of reason and justice by which war and all that makes for war today render impotent the idealism of the race.”

—Woman’s Peace Party, January 1915²

“The nation which stifles its martial spirit breeds a race of vassals. It has always been so. It always will be so.”

—Representative Augustus Gardner (R-Mass.), April 1915³

“The people of the United States have arrived at the parting of the ways. They will have to choose between embarking on an adventurous and exhausting policy of militarism or staking their future on a rigid determination to maintain peace and social progress.”

—Morris Hillquit, April 1915⁴

WOMEN ON PARADE

One cloudy afternoon at the end of August 1914, some fifteen hundred women strode two miles down Fifth Avenue in a silent protest against the growing war in Europe. Many dressed in black to symbolize mourning; muffled drums intensified the mood. Ten times as many New Yorkers massed five deep along both sides of the wide boulevard, their own silence reflecting the solemn tone of the occasion. “I was more than surprised at the reverential attitude of the spectators,” remarked Fanny Garrison Villard, the sixty-nine-year-old leader of the Women’s Peace Parade. “It was only a feeble effort really, we have simply cast a pebble into the water. I hope there may be many ever widening circles that perhaps will make men realize what a crime it is to send thousands of husbands and fathers and sons to a useless slaughter.”⁵

As the eldest daughter of the great abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, Villard embodied the history of several intertwined crusades on the American left. Before 1914, she had agitated for suffrage and black rights, preaching, like her father, the gospel of absolute nonviolence—“a willingness to lose one’s life in a good cause, while refusing to take the life of another.” As the widow of railroad baron Henry Villard, Fanny could also help finance her cherished causes.⁶

In taking to the streets on August 29, Villard and her fellow activists were employing a tactic the anti-war movement had never used before. A change seemed urgent. The outbreak of war in Europe had exposed the legal paternalism of the existing peace groups—to which few of these women belonged—as an utter failure. Their male officials who had scorned female moralism as “ineffectual” now could only sputter their dismay at the mounting bloodshed with earnest editorials and private letters. The onset of war so shocked Andrew Carnegie that, as his wife, Louise, recalled, the once vigorous philanthropist “became an old man overnight . . . his face became deeply indented”; he lost his “zest for mere existence.” The prime benefactor and entrepreneur of the prewar peace movement withdrew abruptly from what now seemed a pointless struggle. For the duration of the conflict, his Endowment for Peace funded hardly any peace initiatives at all.⁷

The exclusion of women from the inner, now passive circle of the prewar movement freed them to assemble a new kind of coalition. It drew from the remarkable variety of progressive initiatives then blooming in New York City, where, at least in reform circles, gender equality was more advanced than anywhere else in the country. Notable members of the parade committee included the pioneering social worker Lillian Wald; Frances Perkins, the industrial safety expert (and future secretary of labor); prominent unionists Rose Schneiderman and Leonora O’Reilly; suffrage leaders Carrie Chapman Catt and Harriot Stanton Blatch; and the popular feminist authors Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Gertrude Atherton, and Mary Beard.

Coverage of the women’s protest in the big city’s ardently competitive newspapers was lengthy and positive. The World, jewel in the crown of the Pulitzer empire, noticed everything from the couture of the participants to the sight of Villard, walking by herself, “a gray-haired little lady . . . whose step was as steady for the whole length of the march as that of any younger woman in the line.” Its arch-rival, the Journal, owned by William Randolph Hearst, displayed large photographs of several attractive, and wealthy, young marchers. The Times described the small contingents of African-American, Indian, Chinese, and French women—most of the latter were refugees—walking “not as nations, but as sorrowing women together” and mentioned that the display of any national flag—including the Stars and Stripes—was prohibited. The Socialist Call featured a contingent of “women comrades” who pinned red ribbons to their black dresses and published a poem the German-American feminist Meta Stern had composed for the occasion. The last lines predicted: “For the cannon will be silenced / And the bloody banners furled, / When, to guide the fate of mankind, / Come the women of the world.”⁸

The internationalism of the prewar movement had been fashioned by men of economic substance and political title—most elected, a few inherited. The ethnic and social diversity of the women’s parade revealed a bond of a more egalitarian kind. Villard’s hastily organized committee dissolved just weeks after the march down Fifth Avenue. But the vision of mothers and daughters as the vanguard of a peaceful world—the antithesis of “isolationism”—continued to gain new converts. The following January it would take larger and more durable form as the Woman’s Peace Party.

The feminist mode of activism developed alongside the more traditional style practiced by male politicians and dissidents on the left. While women like Fanny Villard spun visions of a more harmonious world in which mothers from every land would stop sons from killing other sons, their male counterparts fought over more immediate questions: whether to peddle munitions to belligerents and/or boost the size of the military. They proposed new laws to stop both actions and sought to win the battle for public opinion at home—while downplaying any desire they might have for a radical new order. In contrast, pacifist women, most of whom were still barred from voting, nurtured a community of idealists that spanned the Atlantic.

Not until the middle of 1915 would exponents of the two ways of making war against war unite in a common endeavor, muting while never abandoning their differences. Together they mounted an impressive challenge to Americans—whether ordinary men and women or members of the political and economic elite—who wanted the United States to tilt toward one side or the other in the European conflict. Their words and actions also helped stiffen President Wilson’s resolve not to intervene.

A COMPROMISED NEUTRALITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Behind the universal acclaim for the New York women’s parade lay widespread revulsion at the war itself. “This dreadful conflict . . . came to most of us like lightning out of a clear sky,” North Carolina congressman Robert Newton Page wrote that fall to his brother Walter Hines Page, the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain. “The horror of it all kept me awake for weeks, nor has the awfulness of it all deserted me, but at first it seemed a horrid dream.” By September, French and British forces had stopped the German advance well short of Paris. Meanwhile, Russians battled the armies of Germany and Austria-Hungary for control of the Polish plains. On the Western Front, a bloody, exhausting stalemate set in, as the belligerents built opposing systems of trenches extending 475 miles from the North Sea to the Swiss border. The standoff—punctuated by spasmodic shelling and failed offensives that sacrificed tens of thousands of lives for a few kilometers of territory—would continue for nearly four more years.⁹

On August 19, Woodrow Wilson, who was mourning the death of his wife just two weeks earlier, released a short statement that expressed the sentiments of most of his fellow citizens. Recognizing that “the people of the United States are drawn from many nations, and chiefly from the nations now at war,” the president urged them to stay “neutral in fact, as well as name.” Otherwise, the “one great nation [still] at peace” would be unable to mediate the conflict—when and if it chose to do so. Two days later, Wilson wrote to Fanny Villard that he was “very glad” to support her parade, since it upheld the principle of impartiality. In New York City, most immigrants from the belligerent countries obeyed Mayor John Mitchel’s stern request to halt demonstrations of sympathy with their former homelands.¹⁰

Of course, even a plea by the president to “put a curb upon our sentiments” could not stop Americans of different ethnic backgrounds from rooting for one side or the other. The Irish-American nationalists of Clan na Gael hoped a British defeat would hasten the long-awaited freedom of their ancestral isle. Most Jews were convinced that no war fought by the military of Tsar Nicholas II—the world’s most powerful anti-Semite—could ever be a just one. Few Scandinavian-Americans saw any reason to favor either the Allies or the Central Powers.

But the German invasion of Belgium on August 3, followed by the sacking and burning of the city of Louvain later that month, led many Americans to view the Kaiser’s government as the war’s sole culprit. Most metropolitan newspapers cheered the French and British efforts to revenge those “crimes,” while also running occasional pieces that claimed Germany had acted in self-defense. The same day the World praised the women’s march, it ran a large editorial cartoon depicting Marianne, the symbol of France, unsheathing her sword to stop German troops from approaching Paris. In London, Ambassador Page openly expressed his wish that “English civilization” would triumph over the “Prussian military autocracy.” He raised no protest when, at the start of hostilities, the British cut the undersea cables linking the United States with Europe, ensuring that any direct dispatches from their enemies could be censored or destroyed before American readers could read them.¹¹

Contrary to his public rhetoric, Woodrow Wilson’s private sympathies were never truly in doubt. Anglophilia ran though the president’s blood and his intellect. His mother hailed from the town of Carlisle in northern England, his first political heroes were the British statesmen Edmund Burke and William Gladstone, his most important scholarly work lauded parliamentary government as practiced in the United Kingdom, and the Lake District was his favorite place on earth. On August 30, he confided to his closest advisor, Colonel Edward House, that “German philosophy was essentially selfish and lacking in spirituality.” Wilson dreaded a German victory that “would change the course of our civilization and make the United States a military nation.”¹²

But the president had no intention of asking Congress to send U.S. troops to prevent that from happening. He knew few Americans, whatever their views on the countries and the stakes involved, wanted to break with their nation’s tradition of staying out of conflicts between other major powers. “This war is a calamity for Europe,” wrote William Randolph Hearst in late August. The publisher predicted, quite accurately: “At the end of the war this country will be far ahead and Europe far behind. Peace will make this country pre-eminent, and that lesson will never be lost on the world.” In any case, with roughly a hundred thousand troops and just eleven airplanes, the U.S. Army was hardly prepared to fight a major war. Nor were there enough ships in the merchant marine to transport them across the ocean. Far better to call for a speedy end to the bloody mess and, perhaps, help bring that about. Still, as Hearst implied, one could certainly do a good business with one or both sides while the killing lasted.¹³

Through the remainder of 1914 and the early months of 1915, the question of whether to profit from the Great War and how divided Americans along lines that foreshadowed later, more bitter debates. So did the beginnings of a dispute about whether the nation should build a much larger army and encourage or require young men to undergo military training—as much to school them in unselfish discipline as to protect their homeland from future attack. Members of the emerging anti-war coalition played a prominent role in all these debates.

When huge armies began to mobilize across the ocean, the American economy was in recession; about 12 percent of wage earners had no work at all, and many others scraped by with part-time jobs. The onset of conflict turned the downturn into a crisis. Panicked European investors cabled their Wall Street brokers to sell their securities, the very name of which had suddenly turned ironic. On the last day of July, the governors of the New York Stock Exchange, prodded by the financier J.P. Morgan Jr. and Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo, shut the market down. It would not open again until four months later.

Meanwhile, there was a good deal of money to be made—at least potentially. But first, the Wilson administration had to resolve a critical question: Did the impartiality the president called for mean that banks could not lend money to belligerents and that companies could not make and sell goods to them, particularly the weapons and matériel of war? By 1914, the American economy had become increasingly dependent on foreign trade. “Upon its uninterrupted rhythm,” reflected the historian Arthur Link, “depended the price that the southern planter would receive for his cotton and the western farmer for his wheat, the capacity at which steel mills would operate, indeed, whether the entire economy would prosper or decline.”¹⁴

By late summer, it was clear the French and British would be the only realistic partners for American business, if and when commerce resumed. The Royal Navy controlled the sea lanes of the North Atlantic and was imposing an embargo in all but name on the North Sea, the only marine route for exports to Germany. What’s more, nearly all the big American investment firms had close and long-standing ties to their counterparts in London and Paris.

At first, it appeared that Wilson and his top advisors would stay true to the president’s words. They urged the British to abide by rules drafted two years earlier at an international conference in London that would have required its warships to allow Americans to conduct trade in nonmilitary commodities with anyone they wished. Then, on August 15, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan barred J.P. Morgan & Co.—the wealthiest firm on Wall Street—from giving a $100 million loan to France. “Money,” intoned Bryan, “is the worst of contrabands—it commands everyt...