Chapter Six:

Protest

Courage, martial courage, bravery in battle, was recognized and honored during the Great War. Medals, promotion, celebrity—all these were possible for those who killed or rescued under spectacular circumstances. The famous aces, fighter pilots like Georges Guynemer in France, Albert Ball in England, Eddie Rickenbacker in the United States, Hermann Goering in Germany, all became national heroes, as did soldiers like Captain Noel Chavasse, England’s double Victoria Cross winner, and Sergeant Alvin York, the Tennessee hill farmer turned soldier who took thirty-two German machine gun nests singlehandedly. (Though later, looking back on his wartime experience, he would admit, “I can’t see we did any good.”)

Other forms of courage were taken for granted and honored only in platitudes. Women who feared at any moment the knock on the door with the dreaded war office telegram; mothers and fathers dealing with the same kind of anxiety; civilians, across a huge swath of Europe, whose homes and livelihoods were destroyed. They were expected to “soldier on” without the support of their husbands or sons and, in the worst cases, to mourn them quickly, then get on with the job of winning the war.

Some of the greatest exemplars of courage during the war, those showing moral courage, were actively despised, and in some circumstances rigorously prosecuted: the very few writers who dared protest the war in print. They were rewarded with obloquy, loss of income, exile, or jail—the war-fighting establishment did not content itself with tsk-tsk shakes of the head. Yet—such are the ironies of literature and history—these are the very writers whose work can seem the most alive today, while the knee-jerk jingoism of their peers reads mostly as a curiosity. Antiwar writing from any war is always sadly relevant to contemporary conditions, and many of the specific arguments against World War I, so controversial in their day, have long since been accepted by historians as the truth.

As has been seen, almost all the famous fiction writers, playwrights, and poets wholeheartedly supported the war while it was being fought. The protestors (with the notable exception of Romain Rolland), were not imaginative writers; they were essayists, philosophers, professors, and social workers, more directly focused on political and social issues than were novelists, and with much less to lose by going against the popular mood.

Protest writing was a feature of the war right from the start, but it picked up in intensity as the war dragged on. In 1917, war weariness had settled over Europe—and not just over writers. One of the great myths of the war is that the average soldier just “took it,” serving stolidly on through the carnage without complaint or protest. The fact is, by 1917 many soldiers had had enough, and voted with their feet. After twenty-nine thousand poilus were butchered in the failed French offensive along the Chemin des Dames, soldiers in fifty-four divisions, half the French army, refused to take part in any more offensives. Italian soldiers deserted en masse before and after the disaster at Caporetto. After the October Revolution in Russia, the army immediately began to melt away, with four million of them offering themselves up to captivity rather than fighting on, and many others simply laying down their arms and heading home. Not every World War I soldier thought he was enlisted in a great cause.

Since America dithered for three years before entering the war, there was more time and more opportunities for antiwar writing to be safely published there than in other Allied countries. One of dozens of hastily compiled books trying to cash in on the war, The Great War In Europe; Most Terrible Conflict in History, published in New York in 1915, could include an introduction by Bishop Samuel Fallows, “famous Civil War chaplain,” that included this passionate antiwar peroration.

“I arraign war in the name of the ghastly armies of the mangled dead; of the countless devastated and desolate homes; of the millions of broken-hearted, wailing widows fighting a grim and losing battle for bread; of helpless orphans knowing no father’s providence and care; of aged parents without the strong hand of loving sons on which to lean. I arraign it in the name of our common Humanity; in the name of the christianity of the Prince of Peace.”

Two years later this kind of writing could get you punished. The Espionage Act was passed in 1917 and the repressive Sedition Act the following year. Antiwar writers were persecuted with rigor, ostracized in some cases, censored and prosecuted in others. Jane Addams, the beloved founder of Hull House in Chicago, went from a saint to a pariah overnight, thanks to her leadership of the American Union Against Militarism, or, as the New York Times labeled it, “this little group of malcontents.”

Another AUAM writer, Scott Nearing, was prosecuted under the newly passed Espionage Act (which, as whistleblower Edward Snowden discovered, is still very much in force 100 years later), charged with “obstruction to the recruiting and enlistment service of the United States.”

I have on my desk one of the original short pamphlets Nearing was prosecuted for: The Menace of Militarism; An Analysis, A Criticism, a Protest and a Demand, published by the Rand School of Social Science in New York City in 1917. It looks scruffy, amateurish, like a penny-dreadful western meant to be read on a train ride, then tossed into the trash, but having survived a century now, it still packs a powerful punch, not only because of its message (“War is built of fear and cemented with hate”), but because of the unmistakable urgency and passion with which it was printed and produced. On the back is the famous Boardman Robinson cartoon from The Masses called “The Deserter”: Christ lined up against a wall as a firing squad composed of soldiers from all the combatant nations take aim at his heart.

Even such a beloved figure as Helen Keller received abuse for her pacifist views. At an antiwar rally in 1916 she urged workers to “Strike against the war, for without you no battles can be fought! Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder!”

Were the protest writers much read? Did they have any influence? Most of their impact came after the war ended and the mood dramatically changed. Ignored and censored while the war was in progress, their writing became relevant in the 1920s, when the soldier writers began publishing their memoirs testifying to how truly awful the trenches had been, and a mood of disillusionment replaced war fever.

Now, a hundred years later, what comes across most strongly in the writing is the sheer moral and physical courage it took to publish it in the first place. Romain Rolland paid tribute to the dissenters while the war was still at its height.

“The combatants, pitted against each other, agree in hating those who refuse to hate. Europe is like a besieged town. Fever is raging. Whoever will not rave like the rest is suspected. Whoever insists, in the midst of war, on defending peace among men knows that he risks his own peace, his reputation, his friends, for his belief. But of what value is a belief for which no risks are run?”

World War I was the turning point in Bertrand Russell’s life. Forty-two when the war started, his reputation was that of a technical philosopher focused on rarefied abstractions, with his groundbreaking work on mathematical theory, Principia Mathematica, having been published in 1913. The horrors of the war changed the thrust of his writing; ever afterwards social issues would be his primary concern.

“When the War came I felt as if I heard the voice of God,” this famous atheist would later write.

“I knew that it was my business to protest, however futile protest might be. My whole nature was involved. As a lover of truth, the national propaganda of all the belligerent nations sickened me. As a lover of civilization, the return to barbarism appalled me. As a man of thwarted parental feeling, the massacre of the young wrung my heart. I hardly supposed that much good would come of opposing the War, but I felt that for the honour of human nature those who were not swept off their feet should show they stood firm.”

Russell became one of the most prominent pacifists, and—though he was a member of the British aristocracy, the brother of an earl—the establishment struck back hard. He was stripped of his lectureship at Cambridge, denied a passport so he couldn’t teach in America, mobbed when he tried to make antiwar speeches, and then, when he wrote a pamphlet for the No Conscription Fellowship, he was thrown into Brixton Prison for five months.

Russell would campaign for peace for the rest of his long life. At age eighty-nine, he was sent back to Brixton Prison, this time for his participation in a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament demonstration in London.

The selection is from his “An Appeal to the Intellectuals of Europe,” written in 1916 and included in his book, Justice in War-Time, published the same year.

No writer of the Great War was braver, suffered more and is now more forgotten than the forty-two-year-old German physiologist and professor, Dr. G. F. Nicolai. At the outbreak of the war, distraught over Germany’s invasion of Belgium, he wrote a “Manifesto to the Europeans” demanding that the army withdraw, and circulated it among his fellow intellectuals for signatures; only three signed, one of them being Albert Einstein.

The government threw him into Graudenz Prison for this; when he was released, he immediately went to work on a five-hundred-page examination of war in general and the Great War in particular: The Biology of War, with its thesis that war ought to be regarded as we regard smallpox or the plague, something that can and ought to be eradicated by taking the proper preventive measures. He piled particular scorn on the favorite German argument that without war nations become degenerate and effeminate.

Back he went into prison; his property was confiscated, his family left penniless. (“Those who have seen him recently,” writes his translator in the introduction, “declare that his imprisonment and suffering have greatly aged him, and he now looks quite a broken man.”) He eventually made a daring escape to neutral Denmark in a commandeered German biplane. After the war, when he tried to resume his teaching duties at Berlin University, he was shouted down by angry mobs of veterans who considered him a traitor. After a few more years of this persecution, he was forced into exile in South America.

Jane Addams, reformist, feminist, and pacifist, was honored for her work in the Chicago slums and the book she wrote about it, Twenty Years at Hull House. Fifty-four when the war broke out, influenced (as many World War I dissidents were) by the writings of Tolstoy, she came to believe that women had a special mission to preserve peace. As president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, she served as a delegate to the International Congress of Women at the Hague in 1915, where 1,200 delegates called upon combatant nations to begin “a process of continuous mediation until peace could be restored.”

While in Europe on her peace mission, she had the opportunity to meet with soldiers, nurses, pacifists, and young people dealing with the issues she cared about so passionately. She co-authored a book on her experiences, Women at the Hague. My copy, stamped Withdrawn, comes from “The Somerset County Library,” and shows it last being checked out in November 1965.

Addams’s work for peace damaged her reputation once the United States joined the war, but in 1931 she became the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

W. E. B. Du Bois, forty-six, was at the height of his reputation as a militant spokesman for black Americans when war broke out in Europe. He published an essay in the Atlantic Monthly that was highly critical of the combatant countries’ hidden imperialist agendas, but when the United States became involved in 1917, and thousands of African Americans immediately enlisted, Du Bois, like many heretofore antiwar liberals, quickly changed his opinion, writing an essay called “Close Ranks.”

“For long years to come men will point to the year 1917 as the great Day of Decision. We of the colored race have no ordinary interest in the outcome. That which the German power represents today spells death to the aspirations of negroes and all the darker races. Let us, while the war lasts, forget our special grievances, and close ranks brother to brother with our white fellow citizens.”

Some in the black community criticized him for his flip-flop, citing his “crass moral cowardice,” but the Military Intelligence Branch of the U. S. army, recognizing his influence, offered him a captaincy in return for his support. He did not end up serving, though the reason—he either failed the physical and/or there was a backlash among white officers—has never been made entirely clear.

After the war, his views on anti-imperialism reverted to those expressed in his original 1915 Atlantic essay.

Randolph Bourne, born in 1886 with a debilitating physical deformity, was considered one of the most brilliant young intellectuals in the United States, a spokesman for the spiritually sensitive, socially progressive generation just coming of age as the fighting in Europe began. He wrote for the liberal New Republic on literature, culture, and education, but when he tried to publish his antiwar essays there, he found his work was no longer welcome. He became a contributor to the more radical The Masses and Seven Arts until, with war fever reaching its height, these journals were suppressed and he had no outlets for his writing whatsoever. He died in the Spanish Flu epidemic a month after the war ended.

Bourne’s writing and personality made a huge impression on all who came into contact with him, including the critic James Oppenheim.

“No nerve of the young world was missing in Randolph Bourne; he was as sensitive to art as to philosophy, as politically-minded as he was psychologic, as brave in fighting for the conscientious objector as he was in opposing current American culture. He was a flaming rebel against our crippled life, as if he had taken the cue from the long struggle with his own body. And just as that weak child’s body finally slew him before he had fully triumphed, so the Great War succeeded in silencing him.”

John Dos Passos apostrophized him in his novel 1919.

“If any man has a ghost

Bourne has a ghost,

a tiny twisted unscared ghost in a black cloak

hopping along the grimy old brick and brownstone

streets still left in downtown New York,

crying out in a shrill soundless giggle:

War is the health of the state.”

Emily G. Balch, at fifty, was a professor of economics and sociology at Wellesley College, very much involved in the kind of social issues that inspired her friend and colleague Jane Addams. She joined her at the International Congress of Women in Holland in 1915, and co-authored the account of their experiences in a Europe at war, Women at the Hague. As a founder of the Women’s International League for Peace, she came under immediate suspicion with the climate of fear and repression taking hold in the United States, and was dismissed from her professorship by Wellesley in 1918.

Twenty-eight years later, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Scott Nearing was thirty-four when America entered the war, and already had caused his share of controversy as a radical economist. He was dismissed from the University of Pennsylvania in 1915 for his dissident writings, and thanks to his antiwar views he was quickly fired from his next teaching job at a state university in Ohio. He moved to New York and became one of the founders of the pacifist People’s Council of America for Democracy and Peace. During the war, his views moved ever leftward, and he became one of the guiding lights of the American Socialist Party.

Nearing’s career had an unlikely epilogue. He moved to a farm in rural Vermont in 1947, then co-authored with his wife Helen the bestselling Living the Good Life: How to Live Simply and Sanely in a Troubled World, which became the bible of the modern homesteading/commune movement for the 1960s’ counterculture.

He lived longer than any of the writers included in this volume, dying at age 100 in 1983.

Reinhold Niebuhr was twenty-five when America entered the war, serving as a pastor of a German-American congregation in Detroit; a young man, he already had a reputation as a theologian with passionate, courageous insights into a wide range of ethical, political, and cultural issues—a reputation that caused the Atlantic Monthly to commission a 1916 article on his antiwar views, which came at things from a different angle than most antiwar writers.

He retreated from this pacifism in later years, when he became known as the leading theologian of American Protestantism, and a founder of Americans for Democratic Action.

E. D. Morel made his prewar reputation as a radical journalist by helping to expose the horrors of Belgium’s brutal exploitation of the Congo. Fifty-nine when the war broke out, he helped found one of the largest English pacifist organizations, the Union of Democratic Control, which numbered 650,000 members by 1917. He was physically assaulted when trying to deliver antiwar speeches, then accused of breaking the Defense of the Realm Act by sending a UDC pamphlet to Romain Rolland in Switzerland; he was sentenced to six months in prison.

Bertrand Russell was aghast at how prison changed him.

“His hair is completely white (there was hardly a tinge of it before); he collapsed completely, physically and mentally, largely as a result of insufficient food.”

After the war, he became a respected leader of the Labor Party. George Orwell, writing in 1946, remembered him as a “heroic but rather forgotten man.”

This War is Trivial

—Bertrand Russell

Leibniz, writing to a French correspondent at a time when France and Hanover were at war, speaks of “this war, in which philosophy takes no interest.” We have travelled far since those days. In modern times, philosophers, professors and intellectuals generally undertake willingly to provide their respective governments with those ingenious distortions and those subtle untruths by which it is made to appear that all good is on one side and all wickedness on the other. Side by side, in the pages of Scientia, are to be read articles by learned men, all betraying shamelessly their national bias, all as incapable of justice as any cheap newspaper, all as full of special pleading and garbled history. And all accept, as a matter of course, the inevitability of each other’s bias; disagreeing with each other’s conclusions, yet they agree perfectly with each other’s spirit. All agree that the whole of a writer’s duty is to make out a case for his own country.

To this attitude there have been notable exceptions among literary men—for example, Romain Rolland and Bernard Shaw—and even among politicians, although political extinction is now everywhere the penalty for a sense of justice. Among men of learning, there are no doubt many who have preserved justice in their thoughts and their private utterances. But these men, whether from fear or from unwillingness to seem unpatriotic, have almost kept silence.

I cannot but think that the men of learning, by allowing partiality to color their thoughts and words, have missed the opportunity of performing a service to mankind for which their training should have specially fitted them. The truth, whatever it may be, is the same in England, France, and Germany, in Russia and in Austria. It will not adapt itself to national needs; it is in its essence neutral. It stands outside the clash of passions and hatreds, revealing, to those who seek it, the tragic irony of strife with its attendant world of illusions. Men of learning, who should be accustomed to the pursuit of truth in their daily work, might have attempted, at this time, to make themselves the mouthpiece of truth, to see what was false on their own side, what was valid on the side of their enemies. They might have used their reputation and their freedom from political entanglements to mitigate the abhorrence with which the nations have come to regard each other, to help towards mutual understanding, to make the peace, when it comes, not a mere cessation due to weariness, but a fraternal reconciliation, springing from a realisation that the strife has been a folly of blindness. They have chosen to do nothing of all this. Allegiance to country has swept away allegiance to truth. Thought has become the slave of instinct, not its master. The guardians of the temple of Truth have betrayed it to idolators, and have been the first to promote the idolatrous worship …

This war is trivial, for all its vastness. No great principle is at stake, no great human purpose is involved on either side. The supposed ideal ends for which it is being fought are merely part of the myth. This war is not being fought for any rational end; it is being fought because, at first, the nations wished to fight, and now they are angry and determined to win victory. Everything else is idle talk, artificial rationalising of instinctive actions and passions. When two dogs fight in the street, no one supposes that anything but instinct prompts them, or that they are inspired by high and noble ends. If their fighting were accompanied by intellectual activity, the one would say he was fighting to promote the right kind of smell (Kultur), and the other to uphold the inherent canine right of running on the pavement (democracy). Yet this would not prevent the bystanders from seeing that their action was foolish, and that they ought to be parted as soon as possible. And what is true of dogs in the street is equally true of nations in the present war …

Men of learning should be the guardians of one of the sacred fires that illumine the darkness into which the human spirit is born: upon them depends the ideal of just thought, of disinterested pursuit of truth, which, if it had existed more widely, would have sufficed alone to prevent the present horror. To serve this ideal, to keep alive a purpose remote from strife, is more worthy of the intellectual leader of Europe than to help Governments in stimulating hatred or slaughtering more of the young men upon whom the future of the world depends. It is time to forget our supposed separate duty toward Germany, Austria, Russia, France, or England, and remember that higher duty to mankind in which we can still be at one.

From Justice in War-Time, by Bertrand Russell; Open Court Publishing; Chicago, 1916.

The Last Great Carouse

—G. F. Nicolai

War is the solvent, for without war no one would be interested in patriotism or chauvinism. The man who loved his country would have an additional form of happiness, but if a man did not love it, no one would disturb him. The merchant and manufacturer of their own accord try to increase their trade and sales, and thus add to the national welfare. The scientists and artist do their best by reason of some power within them, and thus add to national civilization. They do not require a special stimulus.

When money is to be appropriated for a school, theater, harbor, or canal, certain questions are considered, such as whether the costs will be proportionate to the increased comfort, wealth, civic improvement, or any other advantage that may ensue. In accordance with this the decision is made; no patriotism is required. In short, patriotism does not play the slightest practical role in any of the activities of peace.

But whenever the question is one of an army increase, of new cannons, or new battle-ships, we have to appeal to patriotism, because such armaments are per se unproductive, and demand deprivations on our part. Therefore even during peace patriotism has to be stirred up by the threat of possible war. As a rule the glowing spark is just barely kept alive. Were it to flare up too brightly, it might disturb the activities of the diplomats, and governments are almost as proud of them as they are of the deeds of warlike valor.

When war has once begun, such considerations are superfluous, for war generally puts many deprivations upon a population both in respect to mental and material necessities of life. Consequently, patriotism must be augmented, for only the highest patriotic tension can bring about long-continued and voluntary self-denial in a people. Then, too, the uncertainty and fear with which the possible horrors of war are viewed brings about a closer association of all those who are weak.

Both these feelings are played upon and artificially stimulated. A closer study of the press shows that the wire-pullers have an empiric understanding of the instincts of the crowd. Probably few people, except perhaps the late P. T. Barnum, would envy them this understanding. The whole performance essentially amounts to this. Either there is exaggeration of things favorable to one’s own country or of those favorable to the opponent. In one case the desire is to stimulate the mass feeling by the feeling of activity; in the other to increase the need for cohesion …

War is wrong, harmful and needless. Then why do we wage war, we twentieth-century mortals? And why do we even love war?

War stirs us to the very depths of our being, and is perhaps the last great carouse of which even a degenerate nation can dream. Such simple things as truth and beauty, freedom and progress, evoke merely a tired smile, like that of an old man recalling his youthful follies. Something stronger and more tangible in the way of a stimulant is now needed to arouse the enthusiasm. Such a stimulant for a nation is war. It is a reminder of its youthful days, with their wonderful lightheartedness, their pardonable selfishness, and their boundless capacity for self-sacrifice.

Even the Americans, who are, after all, quite a recent conglomeration of miscellaneous peoples, are becoming patriots and imperialists …

Let us assume that the righteous Germans had none but chivalrous motives for taking the field. Now he hears that the enemy sometimes kill and sometimes do violence to defenseless women, old men and children, and sometimes send them on in front in order to protect themselves against German bullets. Next he hears that vessels engaged in the dangerous work of mine-sweeping are manned by defenseless German prisoners; or, as stated in a grand general staff report of May, 1915, that the French, when digging trenches, made German prisoners stand in a row, thus forming a living wall to protect them against German attacks. Next he hears that the Turcos are cutting off Germans’ heads, and carrying them about in their knapsacks as souvenirs; that the Russians are cutting off German children’s hands; that Belgian girls are gouging out soldiers’ eyes; that the English want to starve German women and children to death; that the Serbians are assassins, and the Montenegrins sheep-stealers, the Italians a pack of scoundrels, and the Japanese half-monkeys. In short, he is so overwhelmed by all these mean and baseless statements which he hears that, however kindly may be his nature, he must inevitably be convinced that all mankind except the inhabitants of the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the Sultanate of Turkey, and the territories of the Turko-Tatar Bulgarian people is rotten to the core.

Whoever thinks thus cannot continue to have any respect for human dignity, and the foundations of his own morality are consequently sapped.

From The Biology of War, by Dr. G. F. Nicolai, translated by Constance and Julian Grande; The Century Co.; New York, 1918.

Courage There is No Room For

—Jane Addams

It gradually became clear to us that whether it is easily recognized or not, there has grown up a generation in Europe, as there has doubtless grown up a generation in America, who have revolted against war. It is a god they know not of, whom they are not willing to serve; because all of their sensibilities and their training upon which their highest ideals depend, revolt against it.

We met a young man in Switzerland who had been in the trenches for three months and had been wounded there. He did not know that he had developed tuberculosis but he thought he was being cured, and he was speaking his mind before he went back to the trenches. He was, I suppose, what one would call a fine young man, but not an exceptional one. He had been in business with his father and had travelled in South Africa, in France, England, and Holland. He had come to know men as Mensch, that gute Menschen were to be found in every land. And now here he was, at twenty-eight, facing death because he was quite sure when he went back to the trenches that death awaited him. He said that never during that three months and a half had he once shot his gun in a way that could possibly hit another man and nothing in the world could make him kill another man. He could be ordered into the trenches and “to go through the motions,” but the final act was in his own hands and with his own conscience. And he said: “My brother is an officer.” He gave the name and rank of his brother, for he was quite too near the issues of life and death for any shifting and concealing. “He never shoots in a way that will kill. And I know dozens and dozens of young men who do not.”

We talked with nurses in hospitals, with convalescent soldiers, with mothers of those who had been at home on furlough and had gone back into the trenches, and we learned that there are surprising numbers of young men who will not do any fatal shooting because they think that no one has the right to command them to take human life. From one hospital we heard of five soldiers who had been cured and were ready to be sent back to the trenches, when they committed suicide, not because they were afraid to die but they would not be put into a position where they would have to kill others.

I recall a spirited young man who said: “We are told that we are fighting for civilization but I tell you that war destroys civilization. The highest product of the university, the scholar, the philosopher, the poet, when he is in the trenches, when he spends his days and nights in squalor and brutality and horror, is as low and brutal as the rudest peasant. They say, those newspaper writers, that it is wonderful to see the courage of the men in the trenches, singing, joking, playing cards, while the shells fall around them. Courage there is no room for, just as there is no room for cowardice. One cannot rush to meet the enemy, one cannot even see him. The shells fall here or they fall there. If you are brave, you cannot defy them; if you are a coward, you cannot flee from them; it is all chance.”

It is such a state of mind which is responsible for the high percentage of insanity among the soldiers. In the trains for the wounded there is often a closed van in which are kept the men who have lost their minds.

From Women at the Hague, by Jane Addams, Emily G. Balch, Alice Hamilton; Macmillan; New York, 1916.

This Unspeakably Inhuman Outrage

—W. E. B. Du Bois

Most men assume that Africa lies far afield from the center to our burning social problems, and especially from our present problem of World War. Yet in a very real sense Africa is a prime cause of this terrible overturning of civilization, and these words seek to show how in the Dark Continent are hidden the roots, not simply of war to-day, but of the menace of wars to-morrow …

The present world war is the result of jealousies engendered by the recent rise of armed national associations of labor and capital, whose aim is the exploitation of the wealth of the world mainly outside the European circle of nations. These associations, grown jealous and suspicious at the division of spoils of trade-empire, are fighting to enlarge their respective shares; they look for expansion, not in Europe, but in Asia, and particularly in Africa. “We want no inch of French territory,” said Germany to England, but Germany was unable to give similar assurances as to France in Africa.

The resultant jealousies and bitter hatreds tend continually to fester along color lines. We must keep Negroes in their places, or Negroes will take our jobs. All over the world there leaps to articulate speech and ready action that singular assumption that if white men do not throttle colored men, then China, India, and Africa will do to Europe what Europe has done to them …

Hitherto the peace movement has confined itself chiefly to figures about the cost of war and platitudes on humanity. What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa? How can love of humanity appeal as a motive to nations whose love of luxury is built on the inhuman exploitation of human beings, and who, especially in recent years, have been taught to regard these human beings as inhuman? I appealed to the last meeting of peace societies in St. Louis, saying “Should you not discuss racial prejudice as a prime cause of war?” The secretary was sorry but was unwilling to introduce controversial matters!

If we want real peace and lasting culture, we must extend the democratic ideals to the yellow, brown, and black peoples. To say this is to evoke on the faces of modern men a look of blank hopelessness. Impossible! we are told, and for so many reasons—scientific, social, and what not—that argument is useless. But let us not conclude too quickly. Suppose we had to choose between this unspeakably inhuman outrage on decency and intelligence and religion which we call the World War and the attempt to treat black men as human, sentient, responsible beings? We have sold them as cattle. We are working them as beasts of burden. We shall not drive war from this world until we treat them as free and equal citizens in a world-democracy of all races and nations.

Colored people endure the contemptuous treatment meted out by whites to those not “strong” enough to be free. These nations and races, composing as they do a vast majority of humanity, are going to endure this treatment just as long as they must and not a moment longer. Then they are going to fight and the War of the Color Line will outdo in savage inhumanity any war this world has yet seen. For colored folk have much to remember and they will not forget.

From The Atlantic Monthly; Boston, May 1915.

A War Made Deliberately by Intellectuals

—Randolph Bourne

To those of us who still retain an irreconcilable animus against war, it has been a bitter experience to see the unanimity with which the American intellectuals have thrown their support to the use of war-technique in the crisis in which America found itself. Socialists, college professors, publicists, new-republicans, practitioners of literature, have vied with each other in confirming with their intellectual faith the collapse of neutrality and the riveting of the war-mind on a hundred million more of the world’s people. And the intellectuals are not content with confirming our belligerent gesture. They are now complacently asserting that it was they who effectively willed it, against the hesitation and dim perceptions of the American democratic masses. A war made deliberately by intellectuals! A calm moral verdict, arrived at after a penetrating study of inexorable facts! Sluggish masses, too remote from the world-conflict to be stirred, too lacking in intellect to perceive their danger! An alert intellectual class, saving the people in spite of themselves, biding their time with Fabian strategy until the nation could be moved into war without serious resistance! An intellectual class, gently guiding a nation through sheer force of ideas into what the other nations entered only through predatory craft or popular hysteria or militarist madness! A war free from any taint of self-seeking, a war that will secure the triumph of democracy and internationalize the world! This is the picture which the more self-conscious intellectuals have formed of themselves, and which they are slowly impressing upon a population which is being led no man knows whither by an indubitably intellectualized President. And they are right, in that the war certainly did not spring from either the ideals or the prejudices, from the national ambitions or hysterias, of the American people, however acquiescent the masses prove to be, and however clearly the intellectuals prove their putative intuition.

Those intellectuals who have felt themselves totally out of sympathy with this drag toward war will seek some explanation for this joyful leadership. They will want to understand this willingness of the American intellect to open the sluices and flood us with the sewage of war spirit …

The war sentiment, begun so gradually but so perseveringly by the preparedness advocates who came from the ranks of big business, caught hold of one after the other of the intellectual groups. With the aid of Theodore Roosevelt, the murmurs became a monotonous chant, and finally a chorus so mighty that to be out of it was at first to be disreputable and finally almost obscene. And slowly a strident chant was worked up against Germany which compared very creditably with the German fulminations against the greedy power of England. The nerve of war-feeling centered, of course, in the richer and older classes of the Atlantic seaboard, and was keenest where there were French or English business and particularly social connections. The sentiment then spread over the country as a class-phenomenon, touching everywhere those upper-class elements in each section who identified themselves with this Eastern ruling group. It must never be forgotten than in every community it was the least liberal and least democratic elements among whom the preparedness and later the war sentiment was found. The farmers were apathetic, the small business men and workingmen are still apathetic towards the war. The intellectuals, in other words, have identified themselves with the least democratic forces in American life. They have assumed the leadership for the war of those very classes whom the American democracy has been immemorially fighting. Only in a world where irony was dead could an intellectual class enter war at the head of such illiberal cohorts in the avowed cause of world-liberalism and world-democracy. No one is left to point out the undemocratic nature of this war-liberalism. In a time of faith, skepticism is the most intolerable of all insults ….

We go to war to save the world from subjugation! But the German intellectuals went to war to save their culture from barbarization! And the French went to war to save their beautiful France! And the English to save international honor! And Russia, most altruistic and self-sacrificing of all, to save a small State from destruction! Whence is our miraculous intuition of our moral spotlessness? Whence our confidence that history will not unravel huge economic and imperialist forces upon which our rationalizations float like bubbles? Are not our intellectuals fatuous when they tell us that our war of all wars is stainless and thrillingly achieving for good? …

Minor novelists and minor poets are still coming back from driving ambulances in France to write books that nag us into an appreciation of the “real meaning.” No one can object to the generous emotions of service in a great cause or to the horror and pity at colossal devastation and agony. But too many of these prophets are men who have lived rather briskly among the cruelties and thinness of American civilization and have shown no obvious horror and pity at the exploitations and the arid quality of the life lived here around us. Their moral sense has been deeply stirred by what they saw in France and Belgium, but it was a moral sense relatively unpracticed by deep concern and reflection over the inadequacies of American democracy. Few of them had used their vision to create literature impelling us toward a more radiant American future. And that is why, in spite of their vivid stirrings, they seem so unconvincing. Their idealism is too new and bright to affect us, for it comes from men who never cared very particularly about great creative American ideals. So these writers come to us less like ardent youth, pouring its energy into the great causes, than like youthful mouthpieces of their strident and belligerent elders …

It is foolish to hope. Since the 30th of July, 1914, nothing has happened in the area of war-policy and war-technique except for the complete and unmitigated worst. We are tired of continued disillusionment, and of the betrayal of generous anticipations. One keeps healthy in wartime not by a series of religious and political consolations that something good is coming out of it all, but by a vigorous assertion of values in which war has no part.

From Untimely Papers, by Randolph Bourne; B. W. Huebsch; New York, 1919.

Women Who Dared

—Emily G. Balch

When I sailed on the Noordam in April 1915 with the forty-two other American delegates to the International Congress of Women at The Hague, it looked doubtful to me, as it did to many others, how valuable the meeting could be made. I felt, however, that even a shadow of chance to serve the cause of peace could not to-day be refused. Never have I been so thankful for any decision. As I look at it now, the undertaking repaid all that it cost us a hundred-fold.

In this world upheaval the links that bind the peoples have been strained and snapped on every side. Of all the international gatherings that help to draw the nations together, since the fatal days of July, 1914, practically none have been convened. Science, medicine, reform, labor, religion—not one of these causes has yet been able to gather its followers from across the dividing frontiers.

Our whole experience has been an interesting one. Sunny weather and a boat steadied by a heavy load of grain made it possible for the American delegates to study and deliberate together during the voyage. We were stopped one evening under the menace of a little machine gun trained full upon us by a boat alongside while two German stowaways were taken off and searched and carried away. If the proceeding had been staged for dramatic purpose, it could not have been more effective. One prisoner, with a rope about him to prevent his escaping or falling overboard, shouted Hoch der Kaiser, Deutschland uber Alles, before he stepped upon the swaying ladder over the ship’s side; both prisoners in the boat below us, with hands held up above their heads, were searched in front of that ever-pointing little cannon, then the sailors carried blankets and cups of hot coffee to them in the hold. All this, lighted by the ship’s lanterns, was just below us as we hung over the ship’s side.

At last we were allowed to proceed, but not for long. Next morning not far from Dover we were stopped again and there we were held motionless for four mortal days, almost like prisoners of war. We chafed and fretted and telegraphed and brought to bear all the influence that we could command, but there we stuck, not allowed to land, not allowed to have any one come aboard. When telegrams were possible, they were severely censored, and no indication of our whereabouts was allowed.

As the days slipped by and the date of the Congress drew nearer and people spoke of possible weeks of delay, it grew harder and harder to bear. At last, we were released as mysteriously as we had been stopped, and by Tuesday afternoon were landing in Rotterdam …

The Congress was too large for any of the rooms at the Peace Palace and met in a great hall at the Dierentuin. In general the mornings were given over to business and the evenings to public addresses. The programme and rules of order agreed on from the first shut out all discussions of relative national responsibility for the present war or the conduct of it or of methods of conducting future wars. We met on the common ground beyond—the ground of preparation for permanent peace.

The two fundamental planks, adherence to which was a condition of membership, were: (a) That international disputes should be settled by pacific means; (b) that the Parliamentary franchise should be extended to women …

What stands out most strongly among all my impressions of those thrilling and strained days at The Hague is the sense of the wonder of the beautiful spirit of the brave, self-controlled women who dared ridicule and every sort of difficulty to express a passionate human sympathy, not inconsistent with patriotism, but transcending it.

There was something profoundly stirring and inexpressibly inspiriting in the attitude of these women, many of them so deeply stricken, so closely bound to the cause of their country as they understand it, yet so full of faith in the will for good of their technical enemies and so united in their common purpose to find the principles on which permanent relations of international friendship and cooperation can ultimately be established.

There was not one clash or even danger of a clash over national differences; on every hand was the same moving consciousness of the development of a new spirit which is growing in the midst of the war as the roots of wheat grow under the drifts and tempests of winter. In the distress of mind that the war breeds in every thinking and feeling person, there is a poignant relief in finding a channel through which to work for peace. The soldiers in the hospitals say to their nurses: “We don’t know why we are fighting. Can’t you women help us? We can’t do anything.” That is the very question we are trying to answer.

From Women at the Hague, by Emily G. Balch, Jane Addams, Alice Hamilton; Macmillan; New York, 1916.

The Bitterness of Gall

—Scott Nearing

They lied to us!

Consciously, deliberately, with premeditation and malice aforethought, they lied to us! The shepherds of the flock, the bishops of men’s souls, the learned ones, the trusted ones—with fear in their hearts and a craven falsehood on their lips, they betrayed us.

Not all of them!

There were some who believed sincerely that they were in the right; there were some who knew no better; there were some who should have known better and were duped, and there were some, oh!, so very, very few, who kept the faith—all through the bitter years—and who were reviled, attacked and jailed—but we had trusted them all and most of them betrayed us.

First of all—most conspicuous and most notorious there were the newspapers—the channels of information that reached the greatest number of American people—that shamelessly and almost without exception, threw their news-columns as well as their editorial pages on the side, first of preparedness and then of war. A meeting called to advocate war would be heralded beforehand in blazing type across the page, and would be reported in elaborate detail. A meeting of the same number of people, addressed by speakers of equal ability, called to consider peace, would be treated with indifference or ignored. Every device that could be relied upon to stimulate fear and to arouse hate was resorted to—the papers seeming to vie with each other in their efforts to lash American public opinion to a spate of war fury.

My life has brought me into contact with many newspaper men. I sat in the office of one managing editor recently, discussing this very matter. At first, by way of defense, he insisted that there was only one side to the question. Then, when I asked him whether he, as a newspaper man of long experience, was willing to state that there was only one side to the greatest public issue that had confronted the world for a generation, he protested, shamefacedly, that the owner of the paper, a business man of prominence, was for war, “and that settles the matter as far as this paper is concerned,” he said.

The great, outstanding, bitter fact is that the newspapers, instead of informing us, lied to us—consistently.

The newspapers were not alone. Others lied to us whose conduct is far less excusable than that of the press. There were the scientists, teachers, research-men—who have given their lives to study; men charged with the sacred duty of seeking out the truth and telling it to the people. And they lied to us. The same thing that has happened in Europe has happened also in the United States and the college halls and class rooms, almost without exception, have been ringing with a note of partisanship, antagonism, and hate that is not met even in the recruiting station or the training camp.

Children come out of the schools with an unintelligent acceptance of war as a matter of course. Many of them come out feeling that war is a grand, fine, splendid thing. The kind of emphasis now laid in the American schools upon war and military training is bad for the children and bad for the nation, nor is it of any particular value in creating the basis for successful army or military life. It is jingoistic and militaristic in the cheapest sense in which these terms may be used.

Then there are the churches. Here and there a minister has raised his voice for peace and brotherhood, but his has been merely one voice, crying in the wilderness of militaristic propaganda.

When I think that these men of the cloth, sworn servants of God and followers of Jesus of Nazareth, the men trusted as the spiritual advisers of the people, have been among the most ardent propagandists of hatred and bitterness, I think that I may be pardoned if I simply remind the reader that their Leader, after commanding purity, meekness, justice and peace, said “Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you and shall say all manner of evil against you, falsely, for my sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for so prosecuted they the prophets that were before you,” and to note that, in this immense world crisis, most of the clergy have escaped reviling and persecution.

The mighty ones—the masters in the land—the favored, trusted leaders of American public opinion turned militaristic, and after denouncing German jingoism, developed a jingoism of their own, more vicious, because more unjustifiable than that of the Germans. And the great mass of the common people of the land, who relied upon those elect ones and trusted them, have turned away empty, or else with the bitterness of gall and wormwood on their lips.

Shepherdless—for the moment leaderless—the common folk of America are turning this way and that, in an effort to extricate themselves from the network of falsehood that has enmeshed their minds and poisoned their souls. Perhaps, in seeking they may decide with the common people of Russia that the only sure way to have a thing done right is to do it for themselves.

From The Menace of Militarism, by Scott Nearing; The Rand School of Social Science; New York, 1917.

Crime Against the Individual

—Reinhold Niebuhr

The incurable optimists who feel called upon to find a saving virtue in every evil and in every loss a compensation have been comforting the world since the outbreak of the great war with the assurance that the nations of Europe would arise purified and ennobled from the ashes of the war’s destruction. It is not difficult to share this hope, but it gives us little comfort if we have any sense of proportion and are able to see what the individual is paying for a possible ultimate gain to the nations. We cannot help but think of the thousands of graves on the countryside of Europe that are mute testimonies to the tragedy of individual life as revealed in this war, when we are asked to accept these optimistic assurances. The heroes and victims will not arise from their graves, though Europe may rise from its destruction …

No cause was too petty to be advanced by blood; no price in human values too high to be paid for its advancement. History is not lacking in national ventures that can be morally justified, but on the whole it presents a dismal succession of petty jealousies, often more personal than national, of cheap ambition and unrighteous pride, all of which claimed the individual as victim. To this history of individual life this war is a tragic climax, because it convinces us that the forces of history have not favored the individual as much as we thought. Modern warfare is cruel, not only because of its extravagant waste of human life, but because of its barbaric indifference to personal values …

What a pitiful thing it is that the Pomeranian peasant or the miner of Wales is asked to sacrifice his life in a struggle that is to determine whether future generations of Hamburg or Liverpool merchants shall wax rich from overseas commerce and the exploitation of undeveloped countries! That is the tragedy of modern nationalism—it offers modern man, with all his idealism and sensitive moral instincts, no better cause to hallow his sacrifices than the selfish and material one of securing his nation’s prosperity …

By peculiar irony, history applies other standards to the actions of men than those of the tribunals of contemporary opinion. It sees many men as fools who were heroes in their own time. For its loyalty is not an end in itself. It looks to the ends that this virtue may serve. That is the reason posterity often honors men for their non-conformity, while contemporary opinion respects them for their conformity; that is why there are as many rebels as patriots on the honor rolls of history …

The willingness of men to die in struggles that effect no permanent good and leave no contribution to civilization makes the tragedy of individual life all the more pathetic. The crime of the nation against the individual is, not that it demands his sacrifices against his will, but that it claims a life of eternal significance for ends that have no eternal value.

From “The Nation’s Crime Against the Individual,” by Reinhold Niebuhr; The Atlantic Monthly Magazine; November 1916.

This Saturnalia of Massacre

—E. D. Morel

To the Belligerent Governments

Wider and wider the spread of your devastations.

Higher and higher the mountains of the dead—the dead because of you.

Ever more extensive the boundaries of the cemetery you fashion.

All the wars and all the plagues were as nought to the madness of your doings.

Like until the breath of a pestilence this madness sweeps through the plains and valleys of Europe, destroying in multitudes the children of men.

The weeping of women is unceasing; their tears mingle with the blood which flows continuously at your bidding.

What have the people done to you that you should treat them so?

Have they not sweated for you?

Have they not groveled to you and licked the hand that smote them?

Have they not stocked your Treasuries?

Have they not lacked that you might be filled?

Have not great masses of them submissively endured poverty, squalor and want while you prated to them of Liberty and Equality and Patriotism and Empire?

Continuously, cynically, deliberately, you have sacrificed them to your secret maneuvers and your sordid quarrels.

You murder the body and you putrefy the mind.
For you are all guilty—every one.

One and all you prepared for this saturnalia of massacre.

From Truth and the War, by E. D. Morel; National Labour Press; London, 1916.