Antiwar Movements

A campaign to end a war or a state's involvement in a war, especially the 1963-73 effort to end U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

Peace and antiwar movements provide a means to focus pacifist sentiment into organized, domestic expressions of dissent toward American foreign policy. Antiwar sentiment has usually been the attitude of the minority, and antiwar movements have traditionally struggled to be seen as representing a thoughtful and respectable critique of U.S. foreign policy rather than the radical fringe. Although peace movements have often existed in times of peace, it has been in times of military conflict or the increased risk of such conflict that the movements have thrived.

Antiwar sentiment dates back to the colonial period. Pacifism was one of the central tenets of the Quakers (Society of Friends). But in the early nineteenth century peace movements flourished as the result of two converging developments. First was an increasing disposition toward human development in a reform-oriented age when temperance, antislavery, and women's rights campaigns were also flourishing. More immediately, it was in reaction to the Napoleonic Wars at the beginning of the nineteenth century and most particularly to the unpopular War of 1812 against the British that the first organized movements dedicated specifically to pacifism came into being. Federalist opponents to the War of 1812 had labeled themselves "Friends of Peace" during the war's duration, and after it had finished, in 1815, the Massachusetts Peace Society and a New York equivalent were formed. Several other bodies were also formed; among them the American Peace Society (APS), founded in 1828 by William Ladd, proved one of the most enduring and influential even though it primarily campaigned for the abolition of slavery.

Early movements approached the challenge in different ways, some through legalistic arbitration, some through enforcement, some through military reductions, and some used an approach championed by the temperance movement, abstinence. The American movements' interaction with their European counterparts proved important, and a series of international peace congresses convened in Europe in the late 1840s and early 1850s provided the opportunity for reciprocal learning and exemplified the growing tendency toward arbitration as the means to ending military conflict.

The APS supported the North during the Civil War. It continued its activities after the war, walking a line between the public's apathy and the radical's dissatisfaction with its compromising tactics, a viewpoint that found expression in the Universal Peace Union (UPU). Led by Alfred Love, the UPU called for immediate disarmament, an international treaty substituting arbitration for war, and an end to imperialism. Toward the end of the nineteenth century organized religion began to voice its opposition to war. The Women's Christian Temperance Union and advocates of women's rights declared for peace. As the conflict with Spain over Cuba intensified, the APS felt that any attempt to resolve the crisis would be futile, while the UPU worked tirelessly to avert war. Peace found another ally in the Anti-Imperialist League, founded in 1898, which included some prominent American politicians and capitalists.

In the years immediately preceding World War I, over sixty peace societies were in existence. The American Society for the Judicial Settlement of International Disputes, the World Peace Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a series of peace congresses were paralleled by peace leagues and associations in secondary schools and colleges and the expression of peace sentiments in the business world and by the American Federation of Labor. The outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 triggered the formation of the Woman's Peace Party, feminist led; the American Union against Militarism, anti-interventionist and antipreparedness; and the League to Enforce Peace, an international organization. But few of these groups could withstand the surge of patriotism that came with the war years. During the 1930s pacifism received a surge of support that manifested itself in the formation of a myriad of peace-inclined groups. In 1933 thirty-seven peace organizations formed the National Peace Conference, but within two years the movements were dividing into isolationists and collective security advocates.

Because few questioned the righteousness of the war against Nazism, Fascism, and the perpetrators of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and also because many subscribed to the view that the pacifism of the 1930s had led directly to the appeasement of Hitler, during and immediately after World War II the peace movement was small, disorganized, and largely silent. By mid-1954, however, that was changing as the campaign for nuclear disarmament propelled a resurgence of the peace movement. In the context of Cold War tensions, the nuclear arms race seemed a dire threat to human survival. Peace advocates now campaigned for disarmament and a reduction in United States–Soviet tensions, and more immediately for a ban on nuclear testing. Two groups that emerged in 1957, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) and the Committee for Nonviolent Action (CNVA), provided the organizational focus of the peace movement until the emphasis shifted from nuclear weapons to Vietnam. Both organizations were loosely structured and their ranks were filled with people from varied backgrounds who came together under the general moniker of "nuclear pacifists." Their methods were varied, but most often they attempted to focus the public's attention through public discourse rather than action.

The most organized, politically powerful, and politically and socially divisive antiwar movement of the twentieth century was the campaign against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Beginning as early as 1955, the anti-Vietnam War movement grew in parallel to the growth of U.S. involvement, reaching its peak in the mid-1960s to the early 1970s. Early dissent was focused on college campuses, where professors and students criticized U.S. policy publicly, staging teach-ins, and used the tools of the academic trade to articulate the dissent movement. By now two words were used to describe the spectrum of views on pacifism—"doves" described the pacifists and "hawks" described those inclined toward military solutions; both terms became labels of derision.

By the early 1960s the antiwar campaign received a major boost through its commonality of interests with the civil rights movement. As well as benefiting from mutual support, from the civil rights movement the antiwar movement learned the tactics of dissent, ranging from militant radicalism to nonviolent protest. Of common concern to both movements was the principle of self-determination, but more immediate and tangible concerns related to the racial inequities of the military draft and the disproportionate numbers of casualties suffered from among the ranks of African American men. Prominent civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bayard Rustin were early critics of the war but ultimately the antiwar campaign split the civil rights movement into factions.

President Johnson's 1965 escalation of the American involvement in Vietnam provoked many, who had previously harbored private concerns about American policy, to express themselves for the first time. The result was that the movement expanded beyond college campuses. Initially, the peace movement generally aimed at building public consensus, but by 1967 some activists were resorting to increasingly drastic methods and civil disobedience gave way to urban unrest punctuated by violence. Over the weekend of 21–22 October 1967 approximately over 55,000 antiwar protesters converged on Washington, D.C., threatening to escalate their expressions of opposition from dissent to resistance by disrupting the U.S. military machinery itself. For the first time since the 1932 Bonus March, U.S. troops and marshals were deployed in Washington, D.C., to protect against domestic protesters. Similar mass protests were staged in San Francisco and New York. After Richard Nixon's promise during the 1968 presidential election campaign to end American involvement in the conflict, the peace movement temporarily subsided. When, in the spring of 1970, Nixon announced that U.S. troops would fight in Cambodia, the antiwar movement became reinvigorated. The division of the nation was graphically and violently demonstrated on 4 May 1970, when National Guard units opened fire on antiwar protesters at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four unarmed students. After 1975, following the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, the antiwar movement rapidly and drastically subsided.

During the 1980s the primary focus of the peace movement once again became nuclear disarmament. The resurgence began in Europe and quickly spread to the United States in reaction to the Reagan administration's defense policies. Sharing a commonality of interests with the growing environmentalist movement, the disarmament campaign became a powerful political force. In the wake of the Cold War, the peace movement for the most part lacked a coherent and sustained target and became largely subsumed by other movements such as environmentalism and antiglobalization.

Bibliography

DeBenedetti, Charles. An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1990.

Hixson, Walter L., ed. The Vietnam Antiwar Movement. New York: Garland, 2000.

Wittner, Lawrence. The Struggle against the Bomb. 2 vols. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993.

—David G. Coleman