9
MAKE PEACE
National security is one of the few areas Democrats and Republicans agree upon. Intelligence agencies like the CIA, NSA, and FBI are revered, and the US military is the most respected public institution across political lines. The Pentagon’s yearly budget is over one trillion dollars. There are eight hundred US military bases across the world. When Democrats and Republicans talk about foreign policy, they mean maintaining US superpower status globally. If this is the case in times of peace, in times of conflict, deference to the national security apparatus intensifies. Consider that when it became widely reported that Russia meddled during the 2016 presidential election to support Donald Trump’s candidacy, there was a swift condemnation from both sides. Calls for serious retaliation eventually translated into economic sanctions upon Russian oligarchs. A decade before, in 2003, Republican president George W. Bush made the dubious claim, entirely manufactured by his intelligence agencies, that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction. Vaunted publications like the New York Times ran stories affirming it. Before long, America was at war. Again.
But war isn’t the answer. Fight for peace. Do it immediately when hawks set the stage for violent foreign excursions. With urgency. Don’t wait until the war begins.
This was the message of the first mass antiwar movement in the US. As World War I exploded in Europe, shortly after Archduke Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, by a nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, the US, led by President Woodrow Wilson, proclaimed a position of neutrality in “thought and deed.” Wilson’s decision to stay out of the conflict was broadly supported by the American public, whose many nationalities—German, Hungarian, French, Russian, English—represented the nations in battle across the Atlantic. But the temptation to exert US superpower status, as well as the massive economic opportunities of a war economy, proved too great for Wilson and his allies. By 1915, war hawks were pushing for what became known as the “preparedness” movement, which involved the buildup of land and naval forces—a move endorsed by former president Theodore Roosevelt. This was the man who made his political chops as an advocate of US empire during the Spanish-American War of 1898. J. P. Morgan and Company didn’t need to be persuaded to join the war effort; it was already financing the Allies in Europe.1
So, the wheels had been long set in motion when Wilson issued a toothless ultimatum in 1917 that the US would violate its neutrality if German U-boats attacked American sailors. Given the German kaiser’s reliance on submarine warfare, Wilson couldn’t have been surprised when the line was crossed in March of that year after three US merchant vessels were sunk. A month later, on April 2, Wilson got the approval he wanted from Congress. The nation was at war.
There’s a moral to this story. War must be opposed long before it appears as an imminent threat. By the time the first bombs drop, and the troops hit the ground on foreign territory, flags are raised and critical thinking is abandoned. You are presented with the false choice of glorious victory or shameful defeat. Remember: any successful peace movement must match the aggressiveness of war making. Build an army of the willing unwilling to compromise peace.
One of the first mass antiwar demonstrations was held in New York, where, at the end of a cloudy day in August 1914, 1,500 women who had been involved in the decades-long struggle for women’s suffrage marched down Fifth Avenue dressed entirely in either black or white.2 By January 1915, a conference of suffragists had organized the Woman’s Peace Party in Washington, DC. A year later, the party had expanded to forty thousand members and two hundred branches nationwide. Its newly elected president, Jane Addams, who met with Woodrow Wilson frequently, was no stranger to progressive politics in her ferocious support of public education and economic equality.
Addams had become well-known through her book Newer Ideals of Peace (1907), in which she advocated a social philosophy of nurture over antagonism, and for her founding of Hull House, which she opened in 1889 for working-class Chicagoans on the city’s industrial, immigrant West Side. “Was not war in the interest of democracy for the salvation of civilization a contradiction of terms,” Addams asked, “whoever said it or however often it was repeated?”3 Rallies, demonstrations, newspaper ads, and lobbying efforts would consume the peace movement for the next year. Their hard work was made visible one month into the war, in May 1917. The People’s Council of America for Democracy and Peace held its inaugural event at Madison Square Garden, which twenty thousand New Yorkers attended.
Some of those who showed up were official delegates of the American Union Against Militarism. Its leader at the time was the Harvard-educated civil libertarian and St. Louis social worker Roger Baldwin. Baldwin called himself an “unhappy optimist,” because he did everything in his power to end the tyrannical reign of the hawks. “I cannot consistently . . . violate an act which seems to me to be a denial of everything which ideally and in practice I hold sacred,” Baldwin said, providing the intellectual foundation for conscientious objectors, who were swelling in ranks by the end of the decade.4 Three million men didn’t register for the draft. And at least 350,000 registered but didn’t show up for their basic training or medical examinations, and, even more, wouldn’t accept alternative work like farming. They deserted. But they were lucky. They lived. By the time the armistice was declared and the fighting stopped, in November 1918, a hundred thousand Americans had perished, and millions more were seriously wounded.5
A war mentality means you’ll prosecute anyone who violates your ideals. But a peace mindset means to relinquish thinking in terms of “us vs. them.” Peace means honoring the dignity of all, regardless of how they make you feel or what they’ve done. No one deserves to be bombed and maimed.
Roger Baldwin knew he had to match the fervor of President Wilson—worried about the unabating tide of dissent in the country—who was a shadow of the reluctant pacifist he ran as during his reelection campaign in 1916. By 1917, Wilson was an aggressive nationalist, emboldened by the June passage of the Espionage Act, which gave his government authority to censor the content of newspapers, to deport hundreds of so-called traitors who handed out antiwar pamphlets, and to threaten draft dodgers with twenty years in prison and a ten-thousand-dollar fine. Baldwin and the National Civil Liberties Bureau (which would become known as the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920) couldn’t wage their crusade in the courts, which were hostile toward the right of dissent. This became exceedingly clear in 1919, when the US Supreme Court unanimously decided, in Schenck v. United States, to uphold the government’s right to jail Charles Schenck, a socialist who had distributed fifteen thousand antiwar pamphlets, for six months. In such a climate, Baldwin had to go before the court of public opinion by sponsoring prominent liberal intellectuals on speaking tours, organizing letter-writing campaigns, and lobbying elected officials.
Peace advocates are always in a race against the clock. Even if this current administration doesn’t send troops abroad, it’s only a matter of time before another does. Contemporary weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon, on whose executive board Biden’s defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, sat and in which he held $1.4 million in stock options, have combined for yearly revenues of almost $100 billion. There’s an army of lobbyists in DC whose job is to convince congressmembers that a robust national security position wins elections. We’re always on the brink of disaster. War is easy. Peace is hard. To win a war, you need weapons to annihilate everything in sight, to bring your enemy to their knees. To win peace, you need to create conditions that end conflict: Destroy poverty. Guarantee universal education. Support direct democracy. This can’t be calculated by the number of buildings bombed or enemy soldiers killed. But it’s our best hope.