COMMITTED pacifists—those for whom “war is wrong—wrong yesterday, wrong today, wrong forever,” as Ezra Heywood put it in 1863—will find in War No More a means of reaching out and making contact with their traditions, of finding strength and illumination in that contact and shock of recognition. But most prospective readers of the book will not be so committed; what does the anthology offer them?
First, a transformative sense that the writing animated by the antiwar impulse is more distinguished and varied than most portraits of pacifists would suggest it could be. Pacifists and war opponents are often seen as cerebral, pious, humorless, self-righteous, and useless. (Hence the most frequent taunt directed to protesters at peace rallies: “Get a job!”) Some of the writers represented here are indeed pious, some are nearly self-righteous, few are funny. But a just characterization of pacifists and their writing requires a richer vocabulary: visionary, sensual, prophetic, outraged, introspective, self-doubting, fantastic, irreverent, witty, obscene, uncertain, heartbroken. All of those traits are on display here.
But the literary rationale has to be supplemented by two others. One is about America. The United States is the only country in the world to have dropped nuclear bombs in wartime. Our current military budget accounts for 37 percent of world military spending, and is roughly equal to the nine next largest military budgets combined. Our heroes, from George Washington to “American Sniper” Chris Kyle, are often soldiers. Which may make it surprising that American antiwar writing is so vital, and has been since the world’s first peace societies were established here more than two centuries ago. Or perhaps it makes that fact utterly predictable; the intensity of American warmaking is the context from which the intensity of American antiwar writing emerges. “The United States has more often been teacher than student in the history of the nonviolent idea,” wrote Staughton and Alice Lynd, and something similar might be claimed for our contribution to the literature of war resistance. At every turn in American history, from the Revolution to the War on Terror, the writers in this book have begged, prayed, demanded, and in some instances suffered heroically to bring an end to particular wars or war in general. They have seldom succeeded; but gathered together, their words constitute a tradition as exceptional as our military might.
The other rationale is about the moment we are living in. In earlier times, when it was generally conceded that war, however lamentable, was occasionally necessary and just, and as inevitable as the progression of the seasons, a volume of antiwar writing would have been taken to express the idealistic strivings of utopians, admirable but quaint and shallow. For much of that earlier history, supporters of peace movements were indeed utopians, holding on to a vision of universal peace without much of a strategy for winning what William James called “the war against war”; it was enough to fight the good fight, to remain pure in an inevitably fallen world.
With American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq still very present in our consciousness, a War on Terror still ongoing, and an antiwar movement that sometimes seems anemic in comparison with those of generations past, it may be difficult to believe that things have changed—but in recent years they have. The annual editions of the Human Security Report suggest a gradual decline in the number and intensity of wars. The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker traces this development to the growing power of the better angels of our nature. The political scientist Joshua S. Goldstein attributes it to the growing sophistication of those whose business and expertise it is to avert or resolve conflict. The distinguished military historian John Keegan, no supporter of pacifists, writes in A History of Warfare that “despite confusion and uncertainty, it seems just possible to glimpse the emerging outline of a world without war.” War, he argues, “may well be ceasing to commend itself to human beings as a desirable or productive, let alone rational, means of reconciling their discontents. This is not mere idealism.” In that context, this anthology is not only a collection of distinguished texts, not only a document of a vital strain of American thought and feeling, but also a chronicle of the possible emergence of a new way of thinking about the necessities of human life.
So much for the why of the anthology, and now for the how. War No More gathers more than three centuries of American antiwar and peace writing, from precolonial Native American traditions and the petitions of the early Quakers all the way to the present moment. “American” is simple; it means “written by people one can plausibly call Americans.” The other two terms are surprisingly capacious. Antiwar writing includes work that takes a position against war in general or a particular war. But it also includes work that depicts antiwar action: peace marches, attacks on draft boards, trials of conscientious objectors, the prison experiences that follow them. Such work need not support the action it depicts, only do justice to it.
Establishing the boundaries for the former category was sometimes tricky. Many works commended to me as antiwar writing seemed to me excellent but not oppositional. They were honest accounts of war, realistic and not romantic, but not at odds with supporting the war they depicted, and some were written by people who had in fact supported the war or indeed fought in it. Still, some works of that sort are here—for example, Ambrose Bierce’s “Chickamauga,” which was written by an unrepentant Civil War soldier and on a strict reading takes no position about war at all, but in which war’s horrors are so unsparingly depicted that they seem to become exhibits in a case against war itself.
Peace writing is a less familiar category than antiwar writing, and less easy to define. But some works by their nature call the category into being; they feel closely related to the antiwar texts, but are neither oppositional nor documentary. They are trying to imagine peace not as a cease-fire but as, in Denise Levertov’s words, “an energy field more intense than war.” The first work in the anthology offers an image of that energy field: the Iroquois Tree of the Great Peace. The last does too, Jane Hirshfield’s “I Cast My Hook, I Decide to Make Peace,” a homelier image but equally moving: “I put peace in a warm place, towel-covered, to proof, / then into an oven. I wait.”
Some who wrote me while I was assembling the anthology pressed me to make it a record of debates about war and wars. I am grateful for that pressure, but have not yielded to it. None of the work included here is written on behalf of going to war, however alive and engaging such writing has been. That is not to say that the work included here is uniform in viewpoint. The arguments against war are both religious and secular, general and particular, full of love and full of anger, certain and full of doubt. The accounts of antiwar action are sometimes by zealous participants, sometimes by skeptical, sharp-eyed journalists. Conscientious objectors are depicted by themselves, by sympathetic allies, by unsympathetic administrators.
One boundary that was not hard to establish was that of genre; there is none. The anthology includes, in whole or in excerpts, cartoons, essays, interviews, leaflets, letters both private and public, memoirs, novels, parodies, plays, poems, scriptures, sermons, short stories, song lyrics, speeches, and treatises. Anything alive on the page was eligible.
These diversities of genre and viewpoint distinguish the anthology from all other anthologies comparable to it. There are excellent anthologies of antiwar poetry, of antiwar oratory, of antiwar testimony and memoir. There is Staughton and Alice Lynd’s wonderful Nonviolence in America, full of prose documents by advocates of nonviolent action. There is no other anthology in which dramatists and cartoonists, poets and historians, parodists and visionaries, zealots and skeptics are in conversation together. Some of the writers, like Howard Zinn and Daniel Berrigan, were in actual conversation with one another during their lives. Some of the writers are thoughtfully commenting on the writers who came before them, for example, Barbara Ehrenreich on William James. Sometimes, though, the writers were utterly unaware of one another, however their thoughts and images resembled one another. The anthology both documents a conversation and creates one.
The richness of the conversation going on here is a joy for the anthologist but also a challenge. The antiwar impulse, and the related impulse to imagine peace, have yielded an abundance of distinguished, living work; I had enough material to make several anthologies. The texts included here are those I thought created the best conversation on resistance to war and imagining peace. It is a conversation not yet fully described by historians, nor fully available to activists, but living in these pages.