Peace movement

Aspects of peace culture existed in North America before European colonialism and settlement. The Iroquois had modes of mediation, as did the Quakers later on. William Penn's peace plans preceded organized political movements for peace, which were very much a post-Enlightenment, post-industrial phenomenon. Immigrant peace sects such as the Amish, Hutterians, and many others had religious peace doctrines, often refusing military service and leading nonviolent lives. Nevertheless these groups did not constitute social movements in the way that the term is used in the social sciences: mobilized public groups that take action for social change.

Such peace movements emerged as a response to the Napoleonic wars of the early nineteenth century as the members of various economic and social classes engaged in political debate and publication. Usually taking the form of specific organizations (for example, labor or peace societies), these groups in the United States were often initially linked to similar groups in Europe. Although the first local peace society was formed in New York in 1815 by David L. Dodge, expanded in 1828 into the American Peace Society by W. Ladd (both were reformist, liberal pressure groups that opposed standing armies and supported worldwide peace), firmly establishing a starting date or founding leaders is difficult. The United States has never had a single mass movement or an overarching, unified peace organization.

Not until the later decades of the nineteenth century did broad-based social and political mass movements concerned with peace arise. Earlier, individuals like Ladd, Dodge, the itinerant blacksmith Elihu Burritt (who had popular backing and a broader base as well as an English branch for his League [1846]), and later Alfred Love, who formed The Universal Peace Movement in 1866, and William Lloyd Garrison, as well as individual peace prophets like Henry David Thoreau were the main promulgators of the peace message, the latter introducing ideas of civil disobedience. Churches espousing pacifism, such as the Society of Friends (Quakers), Mennonites, and the Church of the Brethren, were already well established and utopian societies with pacifist views grew in the mid-nineteenth century. Although all these elements were often informally in touch with one another, they did not constitute a true social movement (compare the abolitionist movement).

U.S. peace movements, like those of other industrialized democracies, were composed of overlapping groups, organizations, and individuals that formed temporary coalitions and alliances. The peace movement did not have a single unifying principle, although opposition to war appears to be an obvious one; however, such opposition was often based on isolationism, national chauvinism, economic self-interest—motivations that had little to do with peace. The various peace groups, rooted in a variety of traditions, methods, and ideologies, regularly disagreed—especially on the issue of Pacifism or about ideologies such as socialism, communism, feminism, or religious doctrines.

Not until about 1900 did several parallel social movements against war and militarism and for pacific inter-nationalism emerge. These included organizations such as the American Union Against Militarism, the Emergency Peace Federation, and the Women's Peace Party, all formed after 1914 to keep the United States out of the European maelstrom. Together with socialist and syndicalist agitation, this represents the first genuine peak of mass peace and antiwar movement activity (1900–1915). Yet with the exception of Jane Addams (who was a key founder of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in 1920) and Eugene Debs, head of the Socialist Party, there were no prominent founders of the movement, although Randolph Bourne, Norman Thomas, and Emma Goldman were important critics of war. Out of this activity emerged such organizations as the inter-denominational Fellowship of Reconciliation and the largely secular War Resisters League. This activity also spawned the U.S. Communist Party with its ever-shifting peace fronts; the Communist Party's relationship with the peace movement was problematic and often disruptive, though undoubtedly individuals held genuine antimilitarist views. A. J. Muste, who later became a major pacifist leader, was an active Trotskyist in the interwar years.

Ebb and Flow

Like many major social movements, peace movements worldwide are cyclical, often responding to the build up to, conduct of, and aftermath of major wars. In addition, peace movements have tried to forestall war and stop or decelerate arms races. Before 1917 and 1936, the United States had several peace groups working to prevent war or American entry into war. American women helped organize an international women's conference in The Hague in 1915 to try to promote an armistice to end World War I, and by 1936 the League against War and Fascism had a large and stable base, especially on U.S. college campuses. After 1940, however, the U.S. peace movement experienced a long and dramatic decline, with both internationalists and pacifists becoming isolated.

Peace movements have also tried to prevent U.S. entry into wars on other continents and have worked to achieve ceasefires or armistices. Additionally, peace movements have been involved in trying to bring about reconciliation and, especially at the end of the world wars, the establishment of institutions, such as the United Nations, that would provide a venue for settlement of conflict and differences between nations that did not involve going to war. The peace movement in the United States was influenced in character and organization by the late entry of the United States into World Wars I and II and its early ventures in Indochina.

Peaks of peace activity can be seen in U.S. history. The first stretched from the late nineteenth century to the United States' entry into World War I; the second was in the early 1920s, fueled by disillusionment with the outcome of the "war to end wars" and associated with the failure of the League of Nations and other international organizations; the third came in the 1930s in response to the accelerating arms race. The fourth, beginning in the late 1950s was concerned mainly with nuclear weapons and served as the base for the fifth, which arose in the mid-1960s in response to the escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The antiwar peace movement of the 1960s and 1970s included massive demonstrations and mass draft refusal with many young men emigrating to

Canada and other countries to avoid the draft. The sixth peak of peace activity came after 1979 and focused on preventing nuclear war; it also included feminist and ecological concerns from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. At first nuclear energy was a key issue; but by November 1982 the campaign to stop the nuclear arms race had organized strong local groups and could mount large demonstrations and get referenda on local ballots. This coalition formed the "Nuclear Freeze" campaign, led by Randall Forsberg and Randy Kehler; prominent spokespersons were Benjamin Spock and Helen Caldecott. It was at this time that distinctive women's peace movements emerged. Since this final peak, the peace movement continued episodic patterns, and overlapped with the anti-globalization movement of the 1990's and beyond.

At all times the interaction between U.S. and European peace movements was important. From Burritt's League of Universal Brotherhood (1846), which sponsored two European congresses (1848 and 1853) to the Hague Appeal of 2000, peace movement members in the United States have supplied financing and strongly influenced European movements and meetings. American industrialist Andrew Carnegie's gift of the Peace Palace at The Hague as the seat for the International Courts of Justice symbolized the continuing role and influence of the United States. Equally significant was the importation of peace ideologies and strategies into the United States with the migrations of the later years of the nineteenth century.

Post–world War II

At times in the post–World War II years, when peace movements could have given significant support to Eleanor Roosevelt and Ralph Bunche in their work with the newly established United Nations, the movements became isolated and were stigmatized as "Red Communist" or traitorously pacifist. Often, as in 1918, peace movement leaders were imprisoned. After 1940, many peace movements found that their organizational supports had evaporated. However, a viable remnant in the form of small organizations and key activists, speakers, and organizers remained. Termed the "prophetic peace minorities," they resurfaced in key roles at the start of each new phase of peace activity, sometimes as initiators.

In the mid-twentieth century, small pacifist groups raised the issue of nuclear weapons and conducted non-violent direct action at military bases; these groups also engaged in peace marches in Cuba and Moscow and sailed into nuclear testing areas. These groups tended to be strongly reinforced by the Japanese movement in the early 1950s and, after 1959, by their European counterparts. The emergence of the opposition to the Vietnam War after 1965 strongly influenced the rise of similar radical (often student based) movements in Europe and the rest of the world. In 1979, however, as opposition to the development of a neutron bomb and to placement of intermediate nuclear weapons in European nations grew in Europe, the peace movement in the United States again lagged that of Europe; the character of the U.S. movement was much more moderate, endorsing gradualism and shunning unilateralist policies.

Peace Movement Defined

What then defines the peace movements, given their individualistic and largely discontinuous character? Peace movements appear to be independent of states or governments, they are autonomous groupings of civil society, and though nonaligned with any nation's foreign policy, they are not necessarily neutral in conflicts. In addition, their methods are actively nonviolent. What then are their goals?

Peace movements have tended to coalesce around goals related to preventing or stopping specific wars, abolishing certain weapons or weapons systems, or opposing military conscription. Peace movements have always had a pacifist dimension, opposing all war. They have also had a radical, socialist, or liberal dimension that critiqued the links of capitalism to imperialism and militarism. Often there was a commitment to refusing to participate in specific wars. The political left—anarchist, syndicalist, social democrat, Marxist—has often taken an antiwar and antimilitarist stances, often in alliance with more traditional peace groups.

Until World War I, refusing military service was motivated primarily by religious belief, but the reasons for conscientious objection grew more secular in the years after 1917. Conscientious objection on nonreligious grounds evolved during and after World War II; by 1970, pacifism was a major force within American society in general. Peace movements, however, had found a new religious constituency: Roman Catholic peace activity following the 1970 papal encyclical, Pacem in Terris, ranged from opposing death squads and intervention in Latin America to actively opposing nuclear weapons. The Roman Catholic group, Pax Christi, evolved from a tiny pressure group in 1960 to a significant part of the overall peace movement.

From World War I onward radical pacifists used the social gospel to advance political change. Also inspired by Gandhi's use of nonviolence, active pacifists such as A. J. Muste and Bayard Rustin engaged in direct action against military bases, racial injustice, and civil defense, advocated for Civil Rights and the nonviolent transformation of a militarized and often unjust society, and supported positive peace (for example, racial justice).

At times radical pacifists adopted anticapitalist and anti-imperialist positions. In the 1960s, socialist critiques reemerged in the New Left in organizations like the Student Peace Union and the Students for a Democratic Society. At times large peace coalitions were infiltrated, manipulated, or even led by members of left-wing political groups. At other times, in the two decades before 1917, for example, socialist agitation against militarism was largely separate from other peace activity. (Such isolation left socialists very vulnerable to repression; the International Workers of the World and the Socialist Party under Eugene Debs were savagely suppressed.) In the 1920s and 1930s communists and Trotskyists often practiced "entrism" (covert participation) in peace organizations, moving peace alliances into an antifascist or later even isolationist or pro-Soviet position. After 1946, pro-Soviet "peace fronts" helped stigmatize the rest of peace movements. Thus, the massive 1950 Stockholm Peace appeal, which involved millions of noncommunists, was made less effective by its support of the Soviet Union.

By the early 1960s, however, growing political nonalignment, or a "third way" position, in peace coalitions allowed transnational linkages with other independent movements to grow. After 1959 these linkages were encouraged by A. J. Muste, Dave Dellinger, and Liberation Magazine. By the 1980s, these coalitions included groups opposed to communist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Boundaries

Boundaries of the peace movement are hard to establish. It has played a key role in disseminating the theory and methods of nonviolent action and conflict transformation; many peace movements were broadly programmatic and its members participated in community organizing and civil rights campaigns. The American Civil Liberties Union emerged from the defense of the freedom of conscience and speech during and prior to World War I. Much of the inspiration for the civil rights movement came from peace leaders and activists from World War II and the decade following.

What kind of relationship to have with oppressive governments and violent liberation movements has always vexed peace movements. Pacifists have been divided on the issue of just wars. Although at moments of mass peace mobilization those in disagreement have joined together in large demonstrations or days of action, the ideological differences remain. Some peace lobbying groups prefer educational or pressure group work and conferences as methods to achieve peace.

Success and Failure

What criteria can we use to assess the successes and failures of the American peace movements? While few stated goals have been achieved, their support has significantly aided international peace organizations. Cultural dimensions of peace have entered mainstream culture, not so much politically as in music, literature, art, theater, and film. The growth of peace research, peace studies, and peace education in schools, colleges, and universities since the 1970s has started to legitimate the interdisciplinary fields of peace and conflict studies as an area of inquiry and pedagogy. More peace programs exist in the United States than anywhere else in the world; most of them reflect concerns of the early 1970s (Vietnam) and early 1980s (nuclear war). Without a peace movement such programs almost certainly would not have been developed. In the 1950s, for example, a "conspiracy of silence" and censorship surrounded the nature of nuclear war—peace groups took on the role of public education. The peace movement has also brought to light and into question U.S. military or paramilitary intervention in various parts of the world.

As for specific impact on government policy, domestic successes include the expansion of the legal right for individuals to declare conscientious objection to participating in war and the humane treatment of conscientious objectors. They also include the signing of a partial, atmospheric nuclear test ban treaty of 1963,the decision to end the ground and then air wars in Vietnam, the suspension of the peace time draft, and the increasing reluctance to incur casualties in combat by the United States.

Over the years the peace movement has accumulated ideas, organizations, and traditions while rarely having more than 10 percent of the public supporting its positions. The peace movement, however, has succeeded in weaving its ideas, symbolism, and styles of action into American culture. Following the acts of global terrorism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a transnational peace strategy may begin to make sense to a far wider constituency.

Such traditions as religious pacifism and conscientious objection, Gandhian nonviolence, liberal and socialist internationalism, and anticonscriptionism have been enhanced by the special role of women's peace activity, conflict resolution, mediation, and dispute settlement as well as a growing belief in international law, justice, and arbitration through transnational bodies and nongovernmental organizations. All these have become an accepted, if sometimes contested, part of normal political life in America even if they are often minority positions. The peace movements of the past one hundred and fifty years have made this transformation and evolution possible.

Bibliography

Brock, Peter, and Nigel Young. Pacifism in the Twentieth Century. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1999.

Chatfield, Charles. The American Peace Movement: Ideals and Activism. New York: Twayne, 1992.

DeBenedetti, Charles. The Peace Reform American History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.

Peterson, H. C., and Gilbert Fite. Opponents of War, 1917–1918. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957.

Wittner, Lawrence S. Rebels against War: The American Peace Movement, 1933–1983. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984.

The idea of peace is ancient, reaching back to the beginnings of organized society and perhaps even earlier; but until the Renaissance it had not passed beyond the stage of individual thought. Society was rural, save for a few towns and cities. Nationalities, while recognized, were not well formed. International relations did not exist. The relations of the Greek city-states were casual and unorganized, moving from hostilities to lack of hostilities without much of a dividing line. The very basis of international organization—existence of different peoples, organized in states, usually speaking different languages, was not present in the Greek world. Nor was it present in the world of Rome, where a single city, through extension of citizenship, recognized no equals in the area of the Mediterranean. To the Romans the people with whom they came in touch were either to submit to the domination of the empire or forever remain barbarians. There was no such thing as interstate relations. The same lack of international relations marked medieval life, where princes and principalities might fight or not fight, for whatever reason, conducting warfare as if it were a natural state of affairs and halting it when convenient, without much or any formality. In such disorganized relations between the peoples of Europe there was, to be sure, little reason to try for a better order of affairs when all that people knew was chaos or domination. In any event, the generality of the citizens or subjects was not consulted in advance of fighting or its conclusion.

The appearance of peace movements awaited both the formal division of Europe into nation-states and a notable intellectual development often overlooked by analysts of modern European history—the division of international relations into times of peace and times of war. This latter change came during the Thirty Years' War in the seventeenth century, and did not occur so much in the statecraft of the time as in the thinking of jurists and students of law, who began to see not merely that the primitive international customs and traditions of the era must be ordered but also that the task of ordering involved division into laws for fighting and laws for peaceful existence. In this regard the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius proved most influential. A citizen of one of the major maritime states of the era, and therefore interested in the freest possible trade on the high seas, he found the military forces of his countrymen outnumbered by the professional armies of the monarchs whose territories surrounded the States-General. The convenience of trading with many European states had fascinated the Dutch, and they wanted to continue this commerce. At the same time they needed guarantees of freedom of trade. Life during the Thirty Years' War was almost insufferable for so rich a group as the Dutch burghers. Grotius was imprisoned, and friends contrived his escape in a large chest. With reason he wished to try to order the international relations of his time, and the result was De jure belli ac pacis (1625). In it he drew a sharp line between what was war and what was peace. It was, incidentally, a line that was not recognized until the nineteenth century, when there were no major European wars except the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871). Grotius's distinction between war and peace would be blurred by the statesmen of the twentieth century, who through cold wars and other such undeclared conflicts pushed international relations back toward the pre-Grotian chaos. In any event, the drawing of a war-peace line—however theoretical, and thereafter slowly accepted and eventually violated—set the stage for popular peace movements. In a real sense Grotius and his supporters among the legal theorists were the originators of peace movements.

The essentially theoretical nature of peace movements was observable from the outset, and it may well have been one of the reasons why the innumerable drawings of ideal international societies, the perfect renderings of international relations, have never been translated even approximately into reality.

The first designs of men of peace in modern times, which themselves were not characterizable as the programs of peace movements but received a good deal of attention during their periods of interest, were markedly theoretical. One of the leaders of France in the early seventeenth century, the duc de Sully, was the author of the "great design" of King Henry IV, which, though it stipulated an international force, asked for one so small that it amounted to disarmament. Much notice was taken of this hope for peace, and it was speculated upon for years thereafter. The supporters of later peace movements were also accustomed to cite the hopes of Benjamin Franklin, who was convinced that standing armies diminished not only the population of a country but also the breed and size of the human species, for the strongest men went off to war and were killed. He pointed out obvious waste in the maintenance of armies. His analysis made sense to many Americans who themselves, or whose ancestors, had come to the New World to escape the constant wars of the Old. The Farewell Address of President George Washington in 1796 was plain about the need for peace and the wastefulness of war: "Overgrown military establishments are, under any form of government, inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty." Here was another rationale that would recur in the pronouncements of the nineteenth-century peace movements in both the United States and Europe.

The intellectual foundations of peace movements were laid in the years prior to 1815. Beginning in that year, with the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon at an end, and the emperor of France on his way to St. Helena in a British frigate, it was possible to bring together the formalities of the international lawyers and the philosophical hopes of Sully, Franklin, and Washington, and to enlarge upon and systematize ideas about how American or European—or even world—peace might be achieved.

The years from 1815 to 1848 saw major developments in organization of peace groups in the United States. For a while it appeared as if they might carry everything before them. Peace seemed secure between the United States and Great Britain. In the Rush-Bagot Convention (1817) the two English-speaking nations undertook a virtual disarmament of their borders upon the Great Lakes, across New York State, and along the northern borders of the New England states. Why could not such an arrangement between erstwhile enemies spread to the entire world? This was the era of the founding of the American Peace Society in 1828 and of state peace societies. It was an ebullient time, often characterized by later historians as an age of reform: the antislavery movement, prison reform, insane asylum reform, experiments in communitarian living, and the rise of reformist religions such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Members of the new peace organizations advanced their ideas with unwonted vigor and with a very considerable intellectual precision. The principal organizer of the American Peace Society, William Ladd, arranged for distribution of tracts and advocated a congress of nations, together with the riddance of war through treaties of arbitration. Elihu Burritt established the League of Universal Brotherhood in 1846, which soon was claiming an American membership of twenty thousand and a similar number of British members; Burritt's organization was largely responsible for a series of "universal peace congresses" held in European cities over the next years.

The peace groups of the first half of the nineteenth century took interest in international law, as Grotius had two centuries before, and the American Peace Society in the person of Ladd, as well as the reformer Alfred Love, founder of the Universal Peace Union (1866), looked to a stronger law of nations that, they were certain, would make war more difficult, perhaps even impossible.

As for precisely how influential the peace groups were, during the years from Waterloo to the revolutions of 1848 and the Crimean War (for Europe) and to the Mexican War and the passing of the slavery issue into national politics, and ultimately the coming of the Civil War (for the United States), it is impossible to say. The problem of analysis here is that during an age of reform there was goodwill in so many directions, often expressed by the same individuals, that its forcefulness or lack thereof cannot be easily determined. Moreover, the absence of even fairly small international conflicts was probably not a result of the peace movement, but of contemporary circumstances in the international relations of Europe—the unpopularity of war after the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon, and the momentary sense of community among the great powers known as the Concert of Europe. To many people of the time, peace nonetheless seemed a logical outcome of the peace movement; and the workers for peace tended to pursue their plans and purposes—abolition of standing armies, development of international law on land and sea, organization of peace congresses—with a confidence that was unjustified by the international relations of the time.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, peace workers began to have a new sense of urgency because of an armaments race that at first was not very noticeable but later became highly evident. By the 1860s and 1870s the stresses and strains incident to the rise of a Prussia-dominated German state in Europe began to send armament expenditures on an upward trend that continued into the twentieth century. The sharpening of nationalisms everywhere, and the increasing authority of national bureaucracies, impelled nations to increase their armaments. Weapons also began to increase in complexity and costliness. Muskets gave way to rifles. Smooth-bore cannon were replaced by rifled guns, and projectiles went farther and penetrated deeper. The navies of the world converted from sail to steam. They armored their ships. Transport—first the railroad and then, after the end of the century, motor transport over paved roads—made land armies mobile in ways unknown to generals during the age of Napoleon, Gebhard von Blucher, and the duke of Wellington.

The Industrial Revolution allowed nations with heavy industries to produce arms for themselves and sell arms to their agricultural neighbors in exchange for foodstuffs. Introduction of such weapons as the French 75, a new field gun, forced all the leading European states to purchase the new ordnance. By the 1890s men of goodwill everywhere were alarmed at the dreadfully costly battles and campaigns of any new war, given the new equipment. They were alarmed at the talk about military might by the leaders of Germany after Bismarck. The surge of imperialism in the 1890s momentarily took European and American energies into the Far East. Earlier the Europeans had devoted themselves to the imperial task of dividing Africa. Shortly after the turn of the century, there was no more territory to divide, and rivalries began to concentrate in Europe, as they had just before outbreak of the Napoleonic wars. It was a vastly troubled situation; and peace groups began to look for solutions, to try to do what statesmen seemed incapable of doing—to contrive some kind of international arrangement of ideas and interests so that war could be prevented.

Limitation of armaments was the task of the peace movements prior to 1914, and the result was disappointing. Calvin D. Davis has justly remarked that a strange dichotomy of thought existed in the United States and Europe. International rivalries never had burned so brightly, and never had there been so much talk about national interest; yet never had there been more popular interest in peace. Peace groups received broad public support, even from statesmen, who perhaps saw them as so important, so obviously influential, that it would be best to join them, at least in appearance. Universal Peace Congresses began to assemble, the first such meeting being held in 1889. The men and women who attended these meetings favored disarmament and the advance of arbitration through treaties. The Dissenting churches of Great Britain heartily supported disarmament during the 1890s, before the British army and navy were modernized on the eve of World War I. British members of these groups looked anxiously to their American cousins, hoping that from unity of language could come unity of national purposes. The English-Speaking Union was a reflection of this hope. During the years from the turn of the century until 1914, a rapprochement became apparent between the two countries and was much remarked upon. The two countries together could join their European friends in a peace movement that would overwhelm the forces for war. It was thought by people who were interested in peace that the two English-speaking nations might well be considered impartial in urging a disarmament conference because of their separation from Europe by water—not very much in the case of Britain but a vast expanse in the case of America.

The pre–World War I years seemed to promise a great peace reform. Baroness Bertha von Suttner in 1889 published a book titled Die Waffen Nieder (Lay Down Your Arms). It was perhaps the greatest peace novel of all times and was translated into almost every known tongue. The British journalist W. T. Stead reprinted it in English in 1896, and sold the book at the nominal price of one penny. The Russians appeared to be interested in world peace, or at least it was clear that the great novelist Leo Tolstoy was fascinated by the idea. At the suggestion of Baroness von Suttner, the inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel, became devoted to the peace movement. Nobel, who believed that he could cooperate with the baroness through making dynamite, wrote to her on one occasion, "Perhaps my factories will put an end to war even sooner than your Congresses; on the day when two army corps may mutually annihilate each other in a second, probably all civilized nations will recoil with horror and disband their troops." Little did Nobel know that this day to which he looked mystically, albeit seriously, would arrive in the latter twentieth century, but civilized nations not only would fail to recoil with horror and disband their troops, but also would prove willing to allow the weapons of destruction to proliferate.

Nobel characterized the hopes of his generation by endowing a peace prize that was to go annually "to that man or woman who shall have worked most effectively for the fraternization of mankind, the diminution of armies, and the promotion of Peace Congresses." This was the spirit that produced the most notable product of the peace movement of the turn of the century, the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907.

Unfortunately, the first conference did little for peace. The czar of Russia called it in the vain hope that it would limit adoption of French 75 rifles by the armies of Europe, so that the Russian government could put available funds into modernizing its navy. This purpose was well understood by representatives of the nations meeting at The Hague, and nothing came of it. Evidence of how little the administration of President William McKinley expected from the First Hague Peace Conference could be seen in the composition of the American delegation, which included Captain William Crozier of the U.S. Army and Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, who had recently retired from the U.S. Navy. Crozier was coinventor of an ingenious disappearing gun carriage, and Mahan was the philosopher of a large American navy; neither was about to let the czar's government get away with anything. The first conference did, however, define the rules of civilized warfare. It arranged for an international tribunal that nations thereafter promised to use, albeit excepting so many of their national interests that such use was virtually a symbol of the court's uselessness.

The Second Hague Peace Conference was delayed until after the Russo-Japanese War, by which time the European armaments race was so far developed that the conference's prospects were almost zero. President Theodore Roosevelt knew that 1907 was not a good year for peace, yet felt that he had to do something, for many of his Republican friends in New England were members of peace societies and anxious for achievement. He sent the American fleet around the world that year, and later wrote that the voyage was the best thing he had done for peace. He considered doing more, and urged the British government to limit the size of battleships to fifteen thousand tons displacement. Apparently he was seeking to halt the naval arms race begun by the British with the launching of the battleship Dreadnought the preceding year. But then Roosevelt's idea disappeared, as naval architects pointed out to him that fifteen thousand tons was too small a platform for the best combination of the essentials of fighting ships—guns, armor, and propulsive machinery. Neither the British nor the German government wished to do anything serious about disarmament at the Second Hague Peace Conference, and so the idea languished and the conferees contented themselves with tidying up the projects for judicial settlement and international law advanced at the initial conference. The Third Hague Peace Conference was scheduled just about the time World War I broke out; and the Hague idea, as it was called, then blended into the larger notion of a League of Nations.

The American peace groups in these years concentrated not merely on congresses and conferences but also on a national program of bilateral treaties of arbitration and conciliation. Secretaries of State Richard Olney, John Hay, Elihu Root, Philander C. Knox, and William Jennings Bryan sought to negotiate such treaties, and Hay, Root, and Bryan concluded several dozen. The only way that this program of the American peace groups could have ensured world peace was for the United States to have signed up every nation—and the other nations would have had to arrange their own treaty networks. Because of the outbreak of World War I there was not enough time for so many instruments to be signed and ratified. Although the American network remains on the statute books, nothing came of the hope for peace through treaties of arbitration and conciliation.

The Interwar Years

World War I marked the end of the program of the peace movement of preceding years. The war was a chilling experience. Although statesmen had anticipated the war, they and people everywhere were shocked when it did not end quickly, like the Franco-Prussian War, and lasted more than four years. The United States intervened. It became necessary, so it seemed, for the New World to redress the balance of the Old. It was necessary, Americans believed, to get the Europeans off dead center, to move them toward peace.

The principal accomplishment of peaceminded Americans during the war and in the months of negotiations afterward in Paris was to draw up the constitution, or Covenant, of the League of Nations. Participation in the war convinced many Americans that they had not merely repaid their debt to the marquis de Lafayette but that their country, as President Woodrow Wilson said, comprised all nations and therefore understood all nations, and American organization of the peace would ensure a decent future for mankind.

But then came another shock for the millions of Americans who looked forward to world peace—rejection of the Treaty of Versailles and thereby of the Covenant, which constituted the first twenty-six articles of the treaty, by the Senate in 1919–1920. President Wilson had told everyone who would listen that Article X, which promised international action to prevent war, was the "heart" of the Covenant. To the millions of League of Nations supporters in the United States, it seemed that the Senate had broken the heart of the world.

The American peace groups of the interwar era divided over the wisdom of establishing a League of Nations, and perhaps the best way to understand the division is to characterize it as pro-league and anti-league—or conservative and radical—because of differing outlooks on the organization of peace. Most conservative peace groups—including the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the World Peace Foundation, the League of Nations Association, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation—had originated in the eastern portion of the country. They possessed financial strength—at its foundation in 1910 the Carnegie Endowment received $10 million in bonds of the United States Steel Corporation. Those bonds had been insured by the profits of World War I, a situation presenting the odd picture of a peace organization operating on the profits of war. The World Peace Foundation had also begun its work in the same year, with $1 million. The Woodrow Wilson Foundation, created in 1923, received initial contributions of nearly $1 million.

The work of the conservative wing of American peace organizations varied, for their members realized that all sorts of activity could come under the general heading of peace. The Carnegie Endowment annually spent $500,000 sponsoring such projects as a monthly bulletin, International Conciliation, and "international mind alcoves" in small libraries throughout the United States. Its publishing program included the monumental Economic and Social History of the World War in one hundred volumes. It financed smaller peace organizations in the United States and abroad, maintained the Paris Center for European Peace, rebuilt the library of the University of Louvain in Belgium, endowed university chairs in international relations, and advanced codification of international law. The World Peace Foundation worked in favor of the World Court and distributed League of Nations publications in the United States. The Woodrow Wilson Foundation worked to perpetuate Wilsonian ideals.

Radical peace organizations of the interwar era were far less staid and restrained. Almost all had come into existence as a result of World War I. Names of these groups changed as finances and memberships waxed and waned, but altogether there were perhaps forty operating at the national level, with many more local organizations. These were groups of believers in world peace, filled with hope for their programs. Often their purposes were revealed in their names: the American Committee for the Outlawry of War, the American Committee for the Cause and Cure of War, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the National Council for the Prevention of War, the Committee on Militarism in Education, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Parliament of Peace and Universal Brotherhood, the Peace Heroes Memorial Society, the War Resisters' League, the Women's Peace Society, the World Peace Association.

Operating procedures of the radical peace organizations, the evangelists among the peace workers, varied markedly. Some were virtually one-man operations, such as the American Committee for the Outlawry of War, financed by the Chicago lawyer Salmon O. Levinson, who spent $15,000 a year to spread the idea that war should not be permitted under international law—it should be outlawed. The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom had as many as six thousand members and thousands of dollars each year for expenses, much of the money provided by friends of the Chicago social worker Jane Addams. The National Council for the Prevention of War was the creation of the Congregational minister Frederick J. Libby to work against arms manufacturers during the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–1922, and after the success of that meeting Libby continued his group in support of other causes. It acted as a Washington lobby for peace groups, but always reflected the pacifism of its founder. It spent $100,000 a year; in 1928 its office roster included twelve secretaries and eighteen office assistants. Among other radical groups the Women's Peace Society had two thousand members; the Fellowship of Reconciliation, forty-five hundred; and the War Resisters' League, four hundred. Their financial situations were relatively modest.

How, one might ask, could even substantial groups (in terms of finances) like the conservative organizations, or small groups such as the radical peace organizations, hope to influence the millions of American citizens in the years after World War I? How can one speak of the peace movement in America when the organizations for peace, affluent or otherwise, were composed of such disparate groups and often of committees dominated by a few persons or even one individual?

An important reason for their influence was their ability to act through a maze of supporting peace groups and interlocking committees. Membership of the radical peace organizations was astonishingly small, and within it the core of full-time peace workers was less than one hundred individuals in Washington and New York. But individuals could join more than one group or otherwise obtain cooperation between peace organizations. And the ardent peace worker Carrie Chapman Catt federated organizations not primarily interested in peace; she brought together as many as a dozen of these national organizations—such as the American Association of University Women and the Young Women's Christian Association—into the American Committee for the Cause and Cure of War.

Peace organizations were influential because of their frequent claim to represent the female voters of the United States. After World War I the franchise had been extended to all American women. Their voting preferences were highly uncertain, and Catt was able to threaten the nation's political leaders with a unified female vote in support of whatever she was advocating.

Still another reason for the extraordinary influence of American peace groups during the 1920s and 1930s perhaps needs to be explained. Elected officials of the time were sensitive to pressure from voters advocating a program. Of course there has always been pressure upon officials. But to leaders of the postwar period a new force, an aroused public opinion, seemed to be at work. Participation in the war had brought interest in propaganda, and in turn produced much learned and unlearned speculation about public opinion. Walter Lippmann published a book on the subject during the early 1920s. The science of persuasion, as applied to mass consumption, came into vogue, with advertising taking on the proportions of a national industry. Political leaders felt that they were being watched, their actions scrutinized, as never before. Any individuals or small groups who could claim to represent larger groups or great organizations received instantaneous attention. It was a nervous, rather unsophisticated era in which claims to importance, carefully advanced, could propel their bearers toward success in whatever they were advocating.

American peace organizations indulged in a pressure politics that for years proved far more successful than it should have been—because of the hypersensitive political climate. They did everything possible to give the impression that their programs represented the thoughts of the American people. In their letter-writing campaigns to members of Congress, workers for peace learned early on that it was advisable to make each letter appear different, even if it was for the same purpose and said the same thing; the technique was to have separately written appeals, individually signed—never should there be forms that, apparently, had been signed without much thought or purpose. They also engaged in the tactic of presenting petitions, and in the time-honored activity of interviewing members of Congress. In the latter work Catt was an expert; she warned one of her workers that she never believed a senator's attitude was sincere unless he had been interviewed by several people and said the same thing to each one.

As for the ideas of American peace workers during the period from the Armistice in 1918 to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in December 1941, ideas about world peace, or peace for the United States, proliferated but most Americans interested in peace found a reason for advocacy of one of several major plans or purposes. The League of Nations was the greatest source of hope for peace, and many Americans looked to the future, if not immediate, membership of their country in that organization. The force of the league idea owed a great deal to its novelty. The United Nations has never captured the imagination of Americans in the way that the League of Nations did. The idea of a league had not been a part of earlier American peace programs, which had looked either to the codification of international law, including treaties of arbitration and conciliation, or to a working out of more diplomatic arrangements through periodic congresses like the Hague Peace Conferences.

Only during World War I did the idea of a more political League of Nations find favor in the United States. Interest had risen to a considerable height by the summer of 1919—so far, indeed, that Senator Henry Cabot Lodge found himself forced to temporize during hearings of the Foreign Relations Committee until popular sentiment lessened. During passage of the Treaty of Versailles through the tortuosities of Senate maneuver, Lodge always avoided criticism of the league idea; if he criticized, it was because the League of Nations was Wilson's league, not because of the idea itself. As the years passed, it became evident that American membership in the league was, practically speaking, impossible, because the league seemed too concerned about the smaller points of European politics. But many Americans—Wilsonians, they frequently called themselves—continued to feel that the Senate amendments of the League Covenant had broken the heart of the world and that the turning of the world toward war during the 1930s was a direct result of failure of the United States to join the League of Nations.

A second program for American peace workers during the 1920s and 1930s was membership in the World Court. Advocates of the League of Nations often were advocates of the court, which, though technically separate from the league, was actually one of its organs. The World Court reflected the traditional American concern for codification of international law. Its protocol stated, in classic form, that among the sources of this law (in addition to treaties, decisions of international conferences, and writings of publicists) were decisions of jurists. It seemed sensible to assist in codification in this way, just as municipal law was organized through daily work of the courts. Yet connection of the league with the World Court, the proviso that the court could give advisory opinions to the league's council, encouraged the league's enemies in the Senate to affix so many onerous conditions to membership in the World Court as to make it impossible. Peace organizations did their best to secure membership, but failed to anticipate the importance of the league connection.

Disarmament was a popular program, and at least in the realm of naval disarmament (a better term would be "limitation" of armaments) there was some progress. As is now fairly evident, limitation of American, British, Japanese, Italian, and French naval arms was a useful activity during the 1920s. In the next decade it made less sense. It was not a major support of peace, for the peace of Europe was conditioned upon the size of armies, not navies. Germany and the Soviet Union were unaffected by the naval conferences sponsored by the allies of World War I. Germany and the Soviet Union attended the World Disarmament Conference held at Geneva in the early 1930s, and the Soviet spokesman, Maxim Litvinov, was eloquent in support of proposals for peace. But these two powers placed little trust in disarmament. Peace workers in the United States never really understood the peripheral importance of disarmament. It seems safe to say that they attached far too much meaning to it, spending too much time and energy working for it. Like the World Court, disarmament acted as a magnet, drawing their attention away from German and Japanese aggression that in the 1930s brought the collapse of world peace.

Another fascination of Americans interested in peace after World War I was the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), in which almost all nations of the world promised to renounce and outlaw war. The pact was the crowning achievement of American peace groups in the interwar period. Despite Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg's initial and private feeling that peace workers were "a set of God-damned fools" and "God-damned pacifists," the groups managed to coerce and then convert Kellogg to support the Pact of Paris. The secretary received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1929. Unfortunately, the Kellogg-Briand Pact was too ethereal a creation, too impossible in terms of practical world politics, to assist world peace. It was an illustration of the traditional American liking for pronouncement, for doctrine and dogma. Peace movements, by their nature doctrinaire, were much attracted to formulas officially announced. Insofar as American groups occupied themselves with Kellogg's pronouncement, they failed, as in other programs, to work realistically for peace.

In the interwar years Americans continued to adhere to their traditional faith in freedom of world trade—in a trade largely unrestricted by tariffs, quotas, and other regulations. The American peace groups frequently championed this path to peace, although the idea of freedom of world trade failed to attract them in the manner of such programs as the League of Nations, the World Court, naval disarmament, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact, for it seemed to be a less direct attack on war. Secretary of State Cordell Hull was fascinated by the problem of lowering tariff barriers. An old Wilsonian, he received much favorable public comment by promoting what to his mind was almost a substitute for American membership in the League of Nations, the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (1934).

In the late 1930s, with war beginning to be talked about in Europe and then becoming a reality, many Americans interested in peace restricted their concerns to their own country's neutrality. The idea of neutrality flourished, an ancient American hope embodied in belief in a New World and an Old. There was a desire to restrict the merchants of death, the dealers in the international arms trade. Another belief of the time was that President Wilson's interpretation of neutral rights to include the right of Americans to travel aboard belligerent ships had taken the country into World War I; and if this interpretation and other latitudinarian views of neutrality were avoided, with the nation seeking only the most narrow of rights upon the sea, then the forthcoming European war would not touch the United States. The series of neutrality enactments beginning in 1935 attracted immense attention from American workers for peace. Congress eventually changed this legislation to permit American trade with the democratic nations of Europe, but the changes were made in gingerly fashion so as to avoid offending the predominantly isolationist peace organizations.

After 1939

To speak of an American peace movement in the years after 1939 is to look to a far more complicated effort to preserve the peace of Europe and the world than had been made in the years before. Americans interested in peace realized the need for much more organization and much more money. The number of peace groups proliferated beyond the imagination of workers during the 1920s and 1930s. A survey of peace groups in 1988 found that there were 500 with budgets of more than $30,000 annually, and 7,200 groups with budgets of less.

The programs to which the new and old peace groups turned were remarkably diverse. Most groups took interest in the United Nations, notably the surviving conservative groups of the interwar era, which easily changed their support from the League of Nations to the United Nations. During World War II the country concentrated on victory, but there was much interest in the Department of State's plans for a United Nations, which were well advanced by 1944, when the Dumbarton Oaks Conference met to draw up a draft of the United Nations Charter. Undersecretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., carefully encouraged the formation of a network of committees and organizations across the country that was to give advice on the structure of the new world organization. He provided for public representation at the San Francisco Conference (1945). The resultant charter and the constitutions of its many supporting organs showed that the people of the United States this time considered the maintenance of peace to be more than a political task, and that it comprised social, economic, and intellectual concerns.

In the immediate years after World War II, peace groups found an almost dizzying group of issues to focus upon, but principally their concern was the developing Cold War with the Soviet Union. This turned attention to the American and Soviet buildup in armaments, both conventional and nuclear.

After such foreign policy developments as the Truman Doctrine and support of Greece and Turkey against the Soviet Union; Soviet explosion of a nuclear test device in 1949; the Korean War; the Suez crisis of 1956, involving intervention in Egypt by Britain, France, and Israel; and continuing troubles in the Middle East, notably American occupation of Lebanon in 1958, there came the intervention in Vietnam, which for a dozen years in the 1960s and early 1970s, until withdrawal in 1975, brought a coalition of American peace groups in strident opposition.

When the issue of the Vietnam War arose, could it be said that the many youthful dissenters represented a revival of the older peace movements, which were generally against war rather than advocating special causes? Some of the anti-war protesters generalized their feelings about Vietnam to include all wars. In the 1960s young people everywhere, not merely in the United States, found war distasteful. It might have appeared that they were reconstituting the world peace movement of the interwar years. Or perhaps they were harking back to the views of Tolstoy and other philosophical pacifists at the end of the nineteenth century. Yet in the United States the antiwar protesters focused on involvement of the country in Vietnam. Their special cause set them apart from older peace movements. Their tactics also were markedly different; they took inspiration from the Indian protest movement of Mohandas K. Gandhi, a generation and more earlier, against British imperialism. Gandhi's movement had been a means of registering dissent and forcing change. In the United States the civil rights protesters in the South were employing civil disobedience, with marked success. The Vietnam protesters similarly employed it to persuade the American public to stop supporting the Vietnam War.

Americans interested in peace after World War II were necessarily attracted to the problems of nuclear disarmament, but here the technicalities proved so complex that no single assemblage, such as another Washington Naval Conference, and certainly no campaign by private individuals, could hope to resolve them. The contentions of the 1920s over gun calibers and tonnage and the thickness of armor plate now appeared to represent an antediluvian age. In the years after 1945 much initiative passed to the federal government, which sponsored nuclear disarmament programs and organized the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Private organizations assisted in its work. The atomic physicists organized themselves through the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and through the Federation of Atomic Scientists.

Such efforts tended to attach to aspects of nuclear disarmament, and in the early years after World War II peace groups in America concentrated on an end to nuclear testing, once the dangers of tests became evident. The limited test ban of 1963 appeared to be the initial result—although it might be argued that for the nuclear powers testing by that time no longer was of advantage. Another factor, seldom mentioned, in passage of the test ban treaty through the U.S. Senate was an arrangement for Republican support in exchange for a promise by President Lyndon B. Johnson not to undertake an investigation of the income tax returns of President Dwight Eisenhower's chief of staff, Sherman Adams—a deal negotiated by former president Eisenhower.

In the early 1980s the groups in the United States concentrated on limitation of intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Europe, and the success of this endeavor raised a question as to what tactics—those of the movement in America and Europe, or the competitive rearmament sponsored by the Ronald Reagan administration vis-àvis the Soviet Union—were successful. The administration sponsored the B-1 bomber, the MX missile system, and the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars"). The last sought a defense against Soviet missiles by an antiballistic missile system. The movement cited the enormous cost of competition over many years, and it was easy to show all the alternatives, peaceful alternatives, available for the same price: construction of schools, of roads and dams, of rail lines between cities, of new or improved airports; better health care; housing for the poor. Groups cited the risk of destruction of cities and national infrastructures, not to mention the millions of people who would die in a nuclear war.

The attack against the nuclear programs of the Reagan era led to the nuclear freeze campaign, an issue that appeared on ballots in many states during the November 1982 elections, and 11.5 million people, 60 percent of those voting on the freeze issue, voted in favor. State legislatures, city councils, and national labor unions declared themselves in favor of a freeze on testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons. All this resulted in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with the Soviet Union in 1987. Not long afterward the Soviet Union collapsed, and with it a considerable part of the world's nuclear competition, although the remaining nuclear powers constituted a considerable threat to peace and a very real complexity in negotiating further arms cuts.

Continuing concerns meanwhile were arising over threats to peace of a conventional sort, including American actions in scattered places around the world. Each threat or action gathered its groups in opposition. Here one speaks of interventions in Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), and Somalia (1992), the last two occurring during the George H. W. Bush administration. The Reagan administration's support of the contras in Nicaragua led to clashes with peace groups opposing sponsorship of right-wing partisans against a left-wing government.

In 1990 another opportunity arose for protesting intervention, again in the Middle East, where the U.S. government and the United Nations sought to press the regime of the dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, whose troops had invaded and occupied the neighboring country of Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia. The immediate concern of the movement during the time of negotiation, prior to the UN military attack, Desert Storm, was to give sanctions time to work rather than rushing to war. Some American groups supporting the need for time believed that it was also an opportunity to spread their message and recruit new members. Most groups simply desired more time than President Bush and his increasingly supportive UN allies were willing to offer.

The older generation of peace movement supporters, one should remark, was not altogether pleased with the diffuse concerns of the younger generation, and beheld weakness rather than strength in the much larger numbers of American groups and their far larger finances. Their criticisms perhaps had a point, and are worth mentioning. The historian Arthur Ekirch, who had been a conscientious objector during World War II, was disgusted with the postwar peace workers. He wrote of the factionalism, self-examination, and debate over alternatives after 1945. He thought that the only purpose of a peace movement was opposition to militarism and war.

And what to say of this criticism? Of the factionalism there could be no question, for each of the bewildering number of American groups, numbering into the thousands, had its purpose. A Canadian group in the 1970s began publication of a periodical—a digest of peace books, articles, and conference papers—on the principle that chemists and other scientists possessed such digests, and so should the peace movement. The span of the books, articles, and papers was almost unlimited, displaying the way in which the post–World War II groups had edged into subjects never hitherto deemed of much, if any, interest to a peace movement. One conference participant advocated tourism, because seeing other cultures would produce tolerance, and therefore understanding, and maybe peace. The confusion of purposes, the welter of what Ekirch described as factionalism, was evident in the categories of the digest's editors, who changed their categories every few years, to the confusion of readers.

In the factionalism of the post-1945 movement it was evident that only two general distinctions, which might be described as organizing principles, marked the new movement. The authors of the survey of peace groups in 1988 wrote that pacifist groups tended to lead the entire movement; in times of slumps of interest in peace, they tended to stay together and offer new ideas. Pacifist groups served as "halfway houses" to ensure the movement's survival during the doldrums. They were especially persistent during troubling experiences, as when in Iran they sought to "do peace" but found the task difficult in the midst of violence. Their task of testimony was also difficult. How could they be heard when the United Nations engaged in peacekeeping, and its proposals and programs dominated public attention?

According to the analysts of the movement, the nonpacifist groups sought to change foreign policy by working within the political system. In the United States this entailed proposing legislation to halt development of particular weapons or generally cut spending for programs, creating support for such efforts through lobbying, and making positions known during elections.

Another point made in the survey, somewhat countering the accusation of factionalism, was that constituents of groups were not themselves divided into a few factions: women, students, and professionals. Constituents were more diverse than expected, among both pacifist and nonpacifist groups. With the exception of religious persons, the often cited constituent groupings were small proportions of any of the peace groups. Students were found in small-budget groups and professionals in nonpacifist groups, but differences otherwise were not large.

Self-examination also was a characteristic of the post–World War II American groups. Interviewers of "persistent peace activists" developed a theory of sustained commitment that included creating an activist identity, integrating peace work into everyday life, building beliefs that sustain activism, bonding with a peace group, and managing burnout. Ekirch's third criticism, that the American peace advocates were fond of debate, was undeniable, as all readers of the Peace Research Abstracts could see.

But in retrospect one might conclude—despite present-day factionalism and self-examination and debate over issues, and the failure of peace movements of the past—that groups everywhere have done much good. In the United States they have had public support based on the nation's history. The resort to colonies in the New World was in part to escape the incessant wars of Europe, including enforced military service. Through experience involving the exploitation of a great new continent, Americans became hopeful people, and the age-old hope of peace naturally appealed to them. The very success of the American experiment in democracy raised the possibility of changing the ways of other peoples. E pluribus unum has succeeded beyond all expectation in the United States, and Americans have expected this motto to have meaning for Europe and the world.

Another factor has entered into support for the peace movement in the United States that was not present in earlier years. The American people have come to realize that the bounties of geography and the rivalries of other nations have given their country protection for many decades longer than they could have expected, and it is time now for them to take part in the organization of world order. Jules Jusserand, France's ambassador to the United States (1902–1920), was fond of saying that America was bordered on north and south by weak nations, and on east and west by nothing but fish. During the American Revolution, and throughout the nineteenth century, the United States benefited from what President Washington described as the ordinary combinations and collisions of the European powers. The noted twentieth-century historian of American foreign relations, Samuel Flagg Bemis, was accustomed to write regarding this era that "Europe's distress was America's advantage." C. Vann Woodward aptly labeled it a time of "free security." Beginning with World War I, this remarkable period was no more. After World War II most Americans realized that fact. When the nuclear age opened, the problems of world peace became so omnipresent, so persistent, that they no longer were possible to ignore.

Bibliography

Alonso, Harriet H. The Women's Peace Union and the Outlawry of War: 1923–1942. Knoxville, Tenn., 1989.

——. Peace as a Women's Issue: A U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women's Rights. Syracuse, N.Y., 1993.

Brock, Peter, and Thomas P. Socknat, eds. Challenges to Mars: Essays on Pacifism from 1918 to 1945. Toronto, 1994. Half of the twenty-eight essays are on the interwar period.

Buckley, Thomas H. The United States and the Washington Conference: 1921–1922. Knoxville, Tenn., 1970.

Chatfield, Charles. For Peace and Justice: Pacifism in America, 1914–1941. Knoxville, Tenn., 1971.

——. The American Peace Movement: Ideals and Activism. New York, 1992.

Cooper, Sandi E. Patriotic Pacifism: Waging War on War in Europe, 1815–1914. New York, 1991. Emphasis on the peace movement between 1889 and 1914.

Curti, Merle. Peace or War: The American Struggle, 1636–1936. New York, 1936.

Davis, Calvin D. The United States and the First Hague Peace Conference. Ithaca, N.Y., 1962.

——. The United States and the Second Hague Peace Conference: American Diplomacy and International Organization, 1899–1914. Durham, N.C., 1976. Relates the history of "the Hague idea" until World War I.

DeBenedetti, Charles. The Peace Reform in American History. Bloomington, Ind., 1980.

Doenecke, Justus. Discerning the Signs: American Anti-Interventionism and the World Crisis of 1939–1941. Lanham, Md., 2000.

Early, Frances H. A World Without War: How Feminists and Pacifists Resisted World War I. Syracuse, N.Y., 1997.

Ferrell, Robert H. Peace in Their Time. New Haven, Conn., 1952.

Foster, Carrie A. The Women and the Warriors: The U.S. Section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, 1913–1946. Syracuse, N.Y., 1995.

Howlett, Charles F. The American Peace Movement: Reformers and Resources. New York, 1991. Annotated, 1,600 entries.

Joseph, Paul. Peace Politics. Philadelphia, 1993. Peace movement of the 1980s.

Kleidman, Robert. Organizing for Peace: Neutrality, the Test Ban, and the Freeze. Syracuse, N.Y., 1993. Covers the years 1936–1937, 1957–1963, 1979–1986.

Marullo, Sam, Alexandra Chute, and Mary Anna Colwell. "Pacifism and Nonpacifist Groups in the U.S. Peace Movement of the 1980s." Peace and Change 16, no. 3 (July 1991): 235–259.

Patterson, David S. Toward a Warless World: The Travail of the American Peace Movement, 1887–1914. Bloomington, Ind., 1976.

Peace and Change. Vols. 1–16 (1975–2001).

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Schott, Linda K. Reconstructing Women's Thoughts: The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom Before World War II. Stanford, Calif., 1997.

Small, Melvin, and William Hoover, eds. Give Peace a Chance: Exploring the Vietnam Anti-war Movement. Syracuse, N.Y., 1992.

Tracy, James. Direct Action: From the Union Eight to the Chicago Seven. Chicago, 1996. Half the book addresses racial conflict.

Wells, Tom. The War Within America: America's Battle over Vietnam. Berkeley, Calif., 1994.

Wittner, Lawrence S. Rebels Against War: The American Peace Movement, 1933–1984. Philadelphia, 1984.

——. One World or None: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement Through 1953. Stanford, Calif., 1993.

——. Revisiting the Bomb: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1954–1970. Stanford, Calif., 1997.

Ziegler, Valarie H. The Advocates of Peace in Antebellum America. Bloomington, Ind., 1992.

— Robert H. Ferrell

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An Australian anti-conscription poster from World War One

A peace movement is a social movement that seeks to achieve ideals such as the ending of a particular war (or all wars), minimize inter-human violence in a particular place or type of situation, often linked to the goal of achieving world peace. Means to achieve these ends usually include advocacy of pacifism, non-violent resistance, diplomacy, boycotts, moral purchasing, supporting anti-war political candidates, demonstrations, and National political lobbying groups to create legislation. The political cooperative is an example of an organization that seeks to merge all peace movement organizations and green organizations which may have some diverse goals, but all of whom have the common goal of peace and humane sustainability.

Some people refer to the global loose affiliation of activists and political interests as having a shared purpose and this constituting a single movement, "the peace movement", encompassing "the anti-war movement". Seen this way, the two are often indistinguishable and constitutes a loose, reactive and event-driven collaboration between groups with motivations as diverse as humanism, nationalism, environmentalism, veganism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, decentralization, hospitality, ideology, theology, and fear.

Contents 1 Diversity of ideals 2 Current events 3 Detailed history by region 3.1 Germany 3.2 Israel 3.2.1 Peace Now 3.2.2 Gush Shalom and the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace 3.3 Canada 3.3.1 The McGill Middle East Program in Civil Society and Peace Building 3.3.2 Canada and Iraq War Resisters 3.4 United Kingdom 3.5 United States of America 3.5.1 Introduction 3.5.2 The 1930s: The rise of the peace movement from World War I 3.5.3 The peace movement in World War II 3.5.4 The Cold War: The 1940s and 1950s 3.5.5 The anti-Vietnam War movement: 1962-1975 3.5.6 The 1980s and 1990s 3.5.7 The Iraq War 3.5.8 Peace movement in popular music 3.5.9 The threat of military action against Iran 3.5.10 The peace movement in U.S. politics 3.5.11 Domestic peace movement in the United States 3.5.12 Day of Silence for Peace 4 Bibliography 5 See also 6 References 7 External links

Diversity of ideals

There is much confusion over what "peace" is (or should be), which results in a plurality of movements seeking diverse ideals of peace. Particularly, "anti-war" movements often have ill-defined goals.

It is often not clear whether a movement or a particular protest is against war in general, as in pacifism, or against one side's participation in a war (but not the other's). Indeed, some observers feel that this lack of clarity has represented a key part of the propaganda strategy of those seeking defeat in, e.g., the Vietnam War.

Global protests against the US invasion of Iraq in early 2003 are an example of a more specific, short term and loosely-affiliated single-issue "movement" —with relatively scattered ideological priorities, ranging from absolutist pacifism to Islamism and Anti-Americanism (see Human shield action to Iraq). Nonetheless, some of those who are involved in several such short term movements and build up trust relationships with others within them, do tend to eventually join more global or long-term movements.

By contrast, some elements of the global peace movement seek to guarantee health security by ending war and assuring what they see as basic human rights including the right of all people to have access to air, water, food, shelter and health care. A large cadre of activists seek social justice in the form of equal protection under the law and equal opportunity under the law for groups that have previously been disenfranchised.

The movement is primarily characterized by a belief that humans should not wage war on each other or engage in violent ethnic conflicts over language, race or natural resources or ethical conflict over religion or ideology. Long-term opponents of war preparations are primarily characterized by a belief that military power is not the equivalent of justice.

The movement tends to oppose the proliferation of dangerous technologies and weapons of mass destruction, in particular nuclear weapons and biological warfare. Moreover, many object to the export of weapons including hand-held machine guns and grenades by leading economic nation's to lesser developed nations. Some, like SIPRI, have voiced special concern that artificial intelligence, molecular engineering, genetics and proteomics have even more vast destructive potential. Thus there is intersection between peace movement elements and Neo-Luddites or primitivism, but also with the more mainstream technology critics such as the Green parties, Greenpeace and the ecology movement they are part of.

It is one of several movements that led to the formation of Green Party political associations in many democratic countries near the end of the 20th century. The peace movement has a very strong influence in some countries' green parties, such as in Germany, perhaps reflecting that country's negative experiences with militarism in the 20th century.

Current events

Some believe that as of the Iraq crisis, peace movements could be seen as part of a global effort to cohere "public opinion as a superpower" to compete with perceived U.S. unilateralism.

Peace movements are also generally thought to have benefited from the rise of Internet communication and coordination, the so-called smart mob technology.

Detailed history by region

These histories will begin with the countries that suffered during World War II, and which effectively began the postwar period in a submitted position, and wrote peace into their constitutions. They will then deal with the English-speaking world and the arguments more familiar to the English speaking reader, which intersect with current events most strongly, and are the current focus of the peace movement worldwide.

Germany

Such Green parties and related political associations were formed in many democratic countries near the end of the 20th century. The peace movement has a very strong influence in some countries' green parties, such as in Germany. These can sometimes exercise decisive influence over policy, e.g., as during 2002 when the German Greens influenced German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, via their control of the German Foreign Ministry under Joschka Fischer (a Green and the single most popular politician in Germany at the time), to limit his involvement in the War on Terrorism and eventually to unite with French President Jacques Chirac whose opposition in the UN Security Council was decisive in limiting support for the U.S. plan to invade Iraq.

Israel

Main article: Israeli peace camp

Peace Now

The Israeli-Palestinian and Arab-Israeli conflict have existed since the mid-nineteenth century creation of Zionism, and especially since the 1948 formation of the state of Israel, and the 1967 occupation of Palestinian and other Arab lands. The mainstream peace movement in Israel is Peace Now (Shalom Akhshav), whose supporters tend to vote for the Labour Party or Meretz.

Peace Now was founded in the aftermath of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem, when many people felt that the chance for peace might be missed. PM Begin acknowledged that the Peace Now rally in Tel-Aviv at the eve of his departure for the Camp David Summit with Presidents Sadat and Carter – drawing a crowd of 100,000, the largest peace rally in Israel until then – had a part in his decision to withdraw from Sinai and dismantle Israeli settlements there. Peace Now supported Begin for a time, and hailed him as a peace-maker, but turned against him when withdrawal from Sinai was accompanied by an accelerated campaign of land confiscation and settlement building in the West Bank.

Peace Now advocates a negotiated peace with the Palestinians. Originally this was worded vaguely, with no definition of who “the Palestinians” are and who represents them. Peace Now was quite tardy in joining the dialogue with the PLO, started by such groups as the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace and the Hadash communist party. Only in 1988 did Peace Now accept that the PLO is the body regarded by the Palestinians themselves as their representative.

During the first Intifada, Peace Now held numerous protests and rallies to protest the army's cruelty and call for a negotiated withdrawal from the Occupied Territories. At the time Peace Now strongly targeted then for Defence Minister Yitzhak Rabin for his infamous order to "break the bones of Palestinian trouble-makers." However, after Rabin became Prime Minister, signed the Oslo Agreement and shook Yasser Arafat’s hand on the White House lawn, Peace Now strongly supported him and mobilized public support for him against the settlers’ increasingly vicious attacks. Peace Now had a central role in the November 4, 1995 rally after which Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir, an extreme-right militant.

Since then the annual Rabin memorial rallies, held every year at the beginning of November, have become the main event of the Israeli Peace Movement, always certain to draw a crowd in the tens or hundreds of thousands. While officially organized by the Rabin Family Foundation, Peace Now presence in these annual rallies is always conspicuous.

Nowadays, Peace Now is especially known for its struggle against the expansion of settlement outposts on the West Bank. Dror Etkes, head of Peace Now’s Settlement Watch, is highly regarded for his meticulous work and on one recent occasion was invited to testify before a US Congressional committee at D.C.

Gush Shalom and the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace

Gush Shalom, the Israeli Peace Bloc, is a radical movement to the left of Peace Now. In its present name and structure, Gush Shalom grew out of the Jewish-Arab Committee Against Deportations, which protested the deportation without trial of 415 Palestinian Islamic activists to Lebanon in December 1992, and erected a protest tent in front of the Prime Minister's office in Jerusalem for two months – until the government consented to let the deportees return. Members then decided to continue as a general peace movement with a program strongly opposing the occupation and advocating the creation of an independent Palestine side-by-side with Israel in its pre-1967 borders (“The Green Line”) and with an undivided Jerusalem serving as the capital of both states.

While existing under the name Gush Shalom only since 1992, this movement is in fact the lineal descendant of various groups, movements and action committees which espoused much the same program since 1967, and which occupied the same space on the political scene. In particular, Gush Shalom is the descendant of the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace (ICIPP) which was founded in 1975. The ICIPP founders included: a group of dissidents from the Israeli establishment, among them were Major-General Mattityahu Peled, who was member of the IDF General Staff during the 1967 Six Day War and after being dishcarged from the army in 1969 turned increasingly in the direction of peace; Dr. Ya'akov Arnon, a well-known economist who headed the Zionist Federation in Holland before coming to Israel in 1948, and was for many years Director-General of the Israeli Ministry of Finance and afterwards chaired the Board of Directors of the Israeli Electricity Company; and Aryeh Eliav who was Secretary-General of the Labour Party until he broke with the then PM Golda Meir over the issue of whether or not a Palestinian People existed and had national rights.

These three and some two hundred more people became radicalised and came to the conclusion that arrogance was a threat to Israel’s future and that dialogue with the Palestinians must be opened.^{[citation needed]} They came together with a group of younger, grassroots peace activists who had been active against the occupation since 1967. The bridge between the two groups was Uri Avnery, a well known mud-raking journalist who had been member of the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) between 1965 and 1973, at the head of his own radical one-man party.

The main achievement of the ICIPP was the opening of dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), with the aim of making Israelis understand the need of talking and reaching a peace deal with the Palestinians, and conversely making Palestinians aware of the need to talk to and eventually reach a deal with Israel.

At present, Gush Shalom activists are mainly involved in daily struggle at Palestinian West Bank villages which have their land confiscated by the Separation barrier, erected to stop suicide bombers. Gush activists are to be found, together with those of other Israeli movements like Ta'ayush and Anarchists Against the Wall, joining the Palestinian villagers of Bil'in in the weekly non-violent protest marches held to protest confiscation of more than half of the village lands.

Although Gush Shalom earned itself respect among peace-seeking Israelis as well as in the United States and Europe, it is regarded by mainstream Israelis as a purely pro-Palestinian movement.^{[citation needed]}

Canada

The Canadian Peace Congress (1949-1990) was a leading organizer in the peace movement for many years, particularly when it was under the leadership of James Gareth Endicott who was its president until 1971.

Currently, Canada has a diverse peace movement, with coalitions and networks in many cities, towns and regions. The largest cross-country umbrella coalition is the Canadian Peace Alliance (website), whose 140 member groups include large city-based coalitions, small grassroots groups, national and local unions, faith, environmental, and student groups, with a combined membership of over 4 million Canadians. The Canadian Peace Alliance has been a leading voice, along with its member groups opposing the "War on Terror." In particular, the CPA opposes Canada's participation in the war in Afghanistan and Canadian complicity in what it views as misguided and destructive US foreign policy.

Canada has also been home to a growing movement of Palestinian solidarity, marked by an increasing number of grassroots Jewish groups opposed to Israel's policies, in many cases likening them to Apartheid, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing.

The McGill Middle East Program in Civil Society and Peace Building

Borne of the Montreal Consortium of Human Rights Advocacy Training (MCHRAT), the McGill Middle East Program (MMEP) is modelled on one of Montreal's most celebrated efforts of civil society and peace building, Project Genesis. Project Genesis comes from a growing school that sees Social Work and Peace-Building as inseparable projects (click here for publications by expert Jim Torczyner and others).

The MMEP takes this Canadian model to the Middle East, not only promoting but actively engaging communities - Jordanian, Palestinian, and Israel - in the process of civil society and peace building. Taking advantage of Canada's reputation as a peacemaker, Fellows from the Middle East come to Montreal to participate in a year-long Masters of Social Work program that includes fieldwork at Canadian organizations like Project Genesis as well as an intensive peace-building class between the fellows themselves.

Canada and Iraq War Resisters

Main article: Canada and Iraq War Resisters

During the Iraq War, which began with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there were United States military personnel who refused to participate, or continue to participate, in that specific war. Their refusal meant that they faced the possibility of punishment in the United States according to the US Uniform Code of Military Justice. For that reason some of them chose to come to Canada as a place of refuge.

The choice of these US Iraq war resisters to come to Canada has led to considerable debate in Canada's social, media, legal and political arenas. On June 3, 2008 and March 30, 2009, two motions were passed in the Parliament of Canada in support of the war resisters' efforts to stay in Canada. An Angus Reid Strategies poll taken on June 6 and 7, 2008, showed that 64% of Canadians agreed with that motion.^[1][2][3] But the motions' recommendation was non-binding and was never implemented by the minority Conservative government.

The War Resisters Support Campaign has made major efforts to support these war resisters.

United Kingdom

The National Peace Council was founded in 1908 after the 17th Universal Peace Congress in London (July August 1908). It brought together representatives of a considerable number of national voluntary organisations with a common interest in peace, disarmament and international and race relations. The primary function of the NPC was to provide opportunities for consultation and joint activities between its affiliated members, to help create an informed public opinion on the issues of the day and to convey to the government of the day the views of the substantial section of British life represented by its affiliated membership. The NPC folded in 2000 to be replaced in 2001 by Network for Peace[1], which was set up to continue the networking role of NPC.

From 1934 the Peace Pledge Union gained many adherents to its pledge, "I renounce war and will never support or sanction another". Its support diminished considerably with the outbreak of war in 1939, but it remained the focus of pacifism in the post-war years.

Post-World War II peace movement efforts in the United Kingdom were initially focused on the dissolution of the British Empire and the rejection of imperialism by the United States and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The anti-nuclear movement sought to "opt out" of the Cold War (see below under U.S.) and rejected such ideas as "Britain's Little Independent Nuclear Deterrent" in part on the grounds that it (BLIND) was in contradiction even with MAD (see below).

Anti-nuclear campaigning in the early 1950s was at first focused on the small Direct Action Committee (DAC), who organised the first of the Aldermaston Marches in 1958. The DAC were later to merge into the much larger Committee of 100.^[4] The formation of CND tapped widespread popular fear and opposition to nuclear weapons following the development of the first hydrogen bomb, and in the late 1950s and early 1960s anti-nuclear marches attracted large followings, especially to the annual Aldermaston march at Easter.

Popular opposition to nuclear weapons produced a Labour Party resolution for unilateral nuclear disarmament at the 1960 Party Conference, but it was overturned the following year and did not appear on later agendas. This experience disillusioned many anti-nuclear protesters with the Labour Party, in whom they had previously put their hopes. Subsequently there was a strong anti-parliamentary current in the British peace movement, and it has been argued that during the 1960s anarchism became as influential as socialism.

Two years after the formation of CND Bertrand Russell, its president, resigned to form the Committee of 100, which was to undertake civil disobedience in the form of sit-down demonstrations in central London and at nuclear bases around the UK. Russell said that these were needed because the press had grown indifferent to CND and because large scale direct action could force the government to change its policy.^[5] A hundred prominent people, many in the arts, put their names to the organisation. Very large numbers of demonstrators were essential to this strategy, but the violence of the police, the arrest and imprisonment of demonstrators, and pre-emptive arrests for conspiracy made support dwindle rapidly. Although several eminent people took part in sit-down demonstrations (including Russell, whose imprisonment at the age of 89 was widely reported) many of the 100 signatories were inactive.^[6]

As the Committee of 100 had a non-hierarchical structure and no formal membership, many local groups sprang up calling themselves Committee of 100. This helped the promulgation of civil disobedience but it produced policy confusion and, as the decade progressed, Committee of 100 groups engaged in actions on many social issues not directly related to war and peace.

The VSC (Vietnam Solidarity Campaign) led by Tariq Ali mounted several very large and violent demonstrations against the Vietnam war in 67/68 but the first anti Vietnam demonstration was at the American Embassy in London and took place in 1965. ^[7]

The peace movement was later associated with the Peace camp movement as Labour moved "more to the centre" under Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Private anti-war protest in Bath, Somerset, summer 2007.

By early 2003, the peace and anti-war movement, mostly grouped together under the banner of the Stop the War Coalition, was powerful enough to cause several of Blair's cabinet to resign, and hundreds of Labour Party MPs to vote against their government. Blair's motion to support militarily the U.S. plan to invade Iraq continued only due to support from the UK Conservative Party. Protests against the invasion of Iraq were particularly vocal in Britain. Polls suggested that without UN Security Council approval, the UK public was very much opposed to involvement, and over two million people protested in Hyde Park (the previous largest demonstration in the UK having had around 600,000).

United States of America

Introduction

Although there was substantial organized resistance to foreign wars in the U.S. since the nation's origins (see the Anti-Imperialist League and Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience), this was often simply an outgrowth of noninterventionism or religious pacifism, and not in general a coherent mass movement with unified goals until after World War II. These movements were dismissed by most in U.S. foreign policy circles as impractical as the country entered the Cold War era (c. 1948-1990). Some peace groups, such as the United World Federalists, hoped to secure world peace through integrated world government.

The 1930s: The rise of the peace movement from World War I

With the end of World War I, there was widespread weariness with war. This led to an isolationist policy in America, marked by the passage of the Neutrality Act and congressional investigations into munition makers, who were charged with instigating wars for profit. Popular films of the era, such as All Quiet on the Western Front, promoted the view that war was futile and should never happen again. This isolationism contributed to the "appeasement" of Hitler, due to the lack of will to go to war.

The peace movement in World War II

Opposition to World War II was limited in the United States, but included the War Resisters League, the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Catholic Worker Movement.

The Cold War: The 1940s and 1950s

With Cold War tensions rising, the Progressive Party became a home for the peace movement. Like the American Peace Mobilization before the war, they were accused of harboring communist sympathies. In the election campaign of 1948, the Progressive Party supported appeasement of the Soviet Union and a ban on nuclear weapons. They opposed the Berlin airlift and the Marshall Plan. They received over one million popular votes but no electoral votes.

There was a relatively small amount of domestic protest relevant to the Cold War in the 1950s, which saw a large buildup of both nuclear and conventional weapons in both the United States and its adversary, the Soviet Union. The lack of protest was in part due to McCarthyism and general disdain for those who did not view communist expansion as a threat. It was during this time that the Eisenhower administration developed the policy of Mutual Assured Destruction, in which both the U.S. and the USSR held enough nuclear weapons to obliterate each other should they become embroiled in nuclear war. According to this notion, the two superpowers' possession of nuclear weapons was viewed as a deterrent that would prevent any such war from taking place. MAD also became a central doctrine to the U.S.'s foreign policy of containing Communism.

One may reasonably date the open explicit and public resistance to this process to the departing comments of U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1960) who warned that the United States was in peril of being politically dominated by a military-industrial complex. Shortly into the Kennedy era, the world experienced white-knuckled nuclear brinksmanship during the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962). To the delight of anti-militarism activists and the relief of ordinary citizens worldwide, a test ban treaty and nuclear arms control talks ensued soon after.

The anti-Vietnam War movement: 1962-1975

The peace movement in the 1960s in the United States succeeded in ending U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The decision of Lyndon Johnson not to run for re election as president is the direct result of Anti War Protests. Some advocates within this movement advocated a unilateral withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam. One reason given for the withdrawal is that it would contribute to a lessening of tensions in the region and thus less human bloodshed. Another, contrasting reason was that the Vietnamese should work out their problems independent of foreign influence. Independent venues were summed up by the collective effort in opposing the Vietnam War.

The first USA anti-Vietnam protest was led in 1962 by Sam Marcy, founder of Workers World Party, a demonstration whose importance was noted by Ho Chi Minh in an interview published in the National Guardian newspaper.

Opposition to the Vietnam War tended to unite groups opposed to U.S. anti-communism, imperialism and colonialism and, for those involved with the New Left, capitalism itself, such as the Catholic Worker Movement. Others, such as Stephen Spiro opposed the war based on the theory of Just War. Although he was convicted of avoiding conscription, he received a suspended sentence, and was later pardoned by President Gerald Ford.

Some critics of U.S. withdrawal predicted that it would not contribute to peace but rather vastly increased bloodshed. These critics advocated U.S. forces remain until all threats from the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army had been eliminated.

Advocates of U.S. withdrawal were generally known as "doves", and they called their opponents "hawks", following nomenclature dating back to the War of 1812. The imagery was intended to present the withdrawal advocates as peace-seeking and the withdrawal opponents as bad and predatory. The idea of a chickenhawk refers back to this time, to describe those who had avoided dangerous military service before they entered politics, but then advocated aggressive stances once in office.

High-profile opposition to the Vietnam war turned to street protests in an effort to turn U.S. political opinion against the war. The protests gained momentum from the Civil Rights Movement that had organized to oppose segregation laws, which had laid a foundation of theory and infrastructure on which the anti-war movement grew. Protests were fueled by a growing network of independently published newspapers (known as "underground papers") and the timely advent of large venue rock'n'roll festivals such as Woodstock and Grateful Dead shows, attracting younger people in search of generational togetherness. The movement progressed from college campuses to middle-class suburbs, government institutions, and labor unions.

The fatal shooting of four anti-war protesters at Kent State University cemented the resolve of many protesters. The Kent State killings saw campuses erupt all across the country; in May 1970 most universities were strike-bound, for example at Wayne State University[2]. The late 1960s in the U.S. became a time of youth rebellion, mass gatherings and riots, many of which began in response to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but which ignited in an atmosphere of open opposition to a wartime government.

In 1965 the movement began to gain national prominence. Provocative actions by police and by protesters turned anti-war demonstrations in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic National Convention into a riot. Explosive news reports of American military abuses, such as the 1968 My Lai Massacre, brought new attention and support to the anti-war movement bringing it to its height. The movement continued to prosper over the span of the conflict.

Veterans of the Vietnam War returned home to join the movement, including John Kerry, who spearheaded Vietnam Veterans Against the War and testified before Congress in televised hearings. Thirty years later, as a United States Senator, Kerry campaigned to become President of the United States, betraying a newfound reluctance to acknowledge his anti-war roots while playing up his stellar war record. Other U.S. veterans returned from the war saying that nobody wants to be in a war where people are suffering and dying, but that they found peace in their own minds by knowing they served their country. Some cited the words of George Washington's 1790 State of the Union Address: "To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace."

Anti-war protests ended with the final withdrawal of troops after the Paris Peace Accords were signed in 1973. Momentum from the protest organizations became a main force for the growth of an environmental movement in the United States. South Vietnam was left to defend itself alone when the fighting resumed. Many South Vietnamese fled to the United States in one of the largest war refugee migrations in history. There was no peace movement to protest the renewed bloodshed, and little media coverage. Saigon surrendered to the North in 1975; Laos and Cambodia were overrun by Communist troops that same spring.

The 1980s and 1990s

During the 1980s U.S. peace activists largely concentrated on slowing the superpower arms race in the belief that this would reduce the possibility of nuclear war between the U.S. and the USSR. As the Reagan Administration accelerated military spending and adopted a tough, challenging stance to the Russians, peace groups such as the Nuclear Freeze and Beyond War sought to educate the public on the what they believed was the inherent riskiness and ruinous cost of this policy. Outreach to individual citizens in the Soviet Union and mass meetings, using then-new satellite link technology, were part of peacemaking activities in the 1980s.

In response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, President George H.W. Bush began preparations for a mideast war. Peace activists were starting to find their groove just before the Gulf War was launched in February 1991, with well-attended rallies, especially on the west coast. However, the ground war was over in less than a week. A lopsided Allied victory and a media-incited wave of patriotic sentiment washed over the protest movement before it could develop traction.

The 1990s began with the Gulf War and the collapse of the Soviet Union (November 1991), removing one of the main focuses of peace activism. The U.S. government of Bill Clinton adopted a more conciliatory tone and presided over a decade of perceived peace and prosperity — one in which corporate rule quietly advanced. Peacemakers' priorities during the Nineties included seeking a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian impasse, belated efforts at humanitarian assistance to war-torn regions such as Bosnia and Rwanda, and mitigating the harm caused by U.N. sanctions on Iraq. These sanctions — in effect from 1990 to 2003 — led to the deaths of some 500,000 children from fully preventable causes, including common infections and malnutrition{fact}; American peace activists brought medicine into Iraq in defiance of U.S. law, in some cases enduring heavy fines and imprisonment in retaliation. Some of the principal groups involved were Voices in the Wilderness and the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

The Iraq War

Before, during, and after the War in Iraq began, a concerted protest effort has existed in the United States. On February 15, 2003 a series of protests across the globe took place with events in approximately 800 cities. In March 2003, just before the U.S. and British Military led invasion of Iraq, a protest mobilization called "The World Says No to War" led to as many as 500,000 protestors in cities across the U.S. Alleged incidents of initimidation, spying, and police harassment toward protesters have discouraged some members of the movement^{[citation needed]}, and have led to lawsuits against the U.S. Government's policies related to privacy and freedom of speech^{[citation needed]}. However, many protest organizations have persisted as the United States has maintained a military and corporate presence in Iraq.

U.S. activist groups including United for Peace and Justice, CODEPINK (Women Say No To War), Military Families For Peace, Military Families Speak Out (MFSO), Not In Our Name, A.N.S.W.E.R., Veterans for Peace, and The World Can't Wait continue to protest against the Iraq War. Methods of protest include rallies and marches, impeachment petitions, the staging of a war-crimes tribunal in New York (to investigate crimes and alleged abuses of power of the Bush administration), bringing Iraqi women to tour the U.S. and tell their side of the story, street theater and independent filmmaking, high-profile appearances by anti-war activists such as Scott Ritter, Janis Karpinski, and Dahr Jamail, resisting military recruiting on college campuses, withholding tax monies, mass letter-writing to legislators and newspapers, blogging, music, and guerrilla theater. Independent media producers continue to broadcast, podcast and Web-host programs about the movement against the Iraq War.

Peace movement in popular music

While Americans stood divided on the issue of war in Iraq, media was the medium and the message for communicating presidential speeches, patriotic propaganda, terrorism alerts, death statistics and war images. Gradually,division and uncertainty turned to public discontent, protest and change. This process is evident through the changes and novelties in American pop culture. Most significantly, peace is being communicated by the music industry through musical lyrics, special concerts and celebrity influence.

Though not quite a rebirth of The Beatles era, artists of the 21st century are voicing society’s need and desire for peace, through their lyrics. Countless songs protesting war and communicating peace have been played and promoted via mainstream media. U2’s “Love and Peace or Else” and “City of Blinding Lights,” both released in 2004 are prime examples of communicating peace. The following year was a big one for peace and music. John Mayer released “Waiting on the World to Change” and the Dixie Chicks released “I Hope.” Most recently, Will.I.Am. released “It’s A New Day.” The lyrics express a celebration of the new presidency and the messages of hope and peace associated with it: “I woke up this morning - Feeling brand new - 'Cause the dreams that I've been dreaming - Have finally came true.” With numerous artists keeping the trend alive, the emphasis on peace has arguably become a permanent addition to popular music.

The best way that music communicates peace at a mass level is by televised concerts endorsed by celebrity singers and bands. A model example of this is the “global multimedia event staged in the summer of 2005—the concerts/conscious- ness-raising/political-economic configuration called Live 8.”^[8] (Compton, 30). Viewers watched in awe, as reporters switched from Andrea Bocelli singing in Paris, to Madonna in London, and back again to Our Lady Peace in Barrie.^[9] The trend has reached Canada, as exemplified by the televised “Me 2 We” special held in Toronto; a huge concert aimed at Canada’s youth to make a positive difference in the world. Finally, though intertwined with politics, President Barack Obama’s inauguration concert was definitely a spectacle created to celebrate and promote peace, hope and change.

Celebrities of the music industry are a major influence, even when they are not singing. Speaking against war and for peace has become something most celebrities will do before or after a performance, during the acceptance of an award or during an interview. In 2003, Natalie Maines lead singer of the Dixie Chicks, set the stage for freedom of speech against the war.^[10] She uttered the infamous phrase “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.”^[11] It soon became much more acceptable to speak out against war when more artists started doing it. The trend climaxed during Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. An overwhelming number of celebrities, including Chris Rock and the Black Eyed Peas, turned the campaign into a movement for change and peace.

The threat of military action against Iran

Further information: Opposition to war against Iran

Starting in 2005,opposition to military action against Iran started in the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, including the creation of the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran. By August 2007, fears of an imminent United States and/or Israeli attack on Iran had increased to the level that several Nobel Prize winners, Shirin Ebadi (Nobel Peace Prize 2003), Mairead Corrigan-Maguire and Betty Williams (joint Nobel Peace Prize 1976), Harold Pinter (Nobel Prize for Literature 2005) and Jody Williams (Nobel Peace Prize 1997), along with several anti-war groups, including The Israeli Committee for a Middle East Free from Atomic, Biological and Chemical Weapons, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, CASMII, Code Pink and many others, warned about what they believed was the imminent risk of a "war of an unprecedented scale, this time against Iran", especially expressing concern that an attack on Iran using nuclear weapons had "not been ruled out". They called for "the dispute about Iran's nuclear program, to be resolved through peaceful means" and a call for Israel, "as the only Middle Eastern state suspected of possession of nuclear weapons", to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.^[12]

The peace movement in U.S. politics

The progress of peace movements may be measured by the slow steady growth of congressional legislation to create the United States Department of Peace and Nonviolence, and the number of legislators becoming cosponsors.

• In 1792, Dr. Benjamin Rush, a Founding Father and signer of the Declaration of Independence, along with George Washington's peer, Benjamin Banneker noted American scientist, surveyor, and editor, envisioned a Department of Peace to balance the Department of War.[3]

• In 1925, Carrie Chapman Catt suffragette leader, first proposed a Department of Peace headed by a Cabinet level Secretary of Peace at the First Conference on the Cause and Cure of War, which she organized. It was held in Washington DC, from January 18-25, 1925, and had 450 delegates from nine organizations representing five million women members.

• In 1935, 1937, and 1939, Senator Matthew Neely of West Virginia introduced bills calling for a Department of Peace. In 1943, Senator Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin spoke on the Senate floor calling for the United States of America to be the first government on the world to have a Secretary of Peace.

Over 100 bills have been introduced into Congress since the end of World War II to create a Department of Peace in the federal government:

• 1945 Representative Louis Ludlow of Indiana introduced a bill that would establish a Department of Peace.

•1946 Representative Randolf Jennings introduced legislation to establish a Department of Peace with the goal of strengthening America's capacity to resolve and manage international conflicts by both military and nonmilitary means. In the 1970s and 1980s he joined Senators Mark Hatfield and Spark Matsunaga and Congressman Dan Glickman in efforts to create a national institution dedicated to peace. After he had announced his retirement from Congress in 1984, Randolph played a key role in the passage and enactment of the United States Institute of Peace Act. To guarantee its passage and funding, the legislation was attached to the Department of Defense Authorization Act of 1985. Approval of the legislation was in part a tribute to Randolph's long career in public service. The Jennings Randolph Program, which awards fellowships to enable outstanding scholars, policymakers, journalists, and other professionals from around the world to conduct research at the U.S. Institute of Peace, has been named in his honor.

• 1947 Representative Everett Dirkson of Illinois introduced a bill for “A Peace Division in the State Department”.

• President Dwight Eisenhower named Harold Stassen to be his Cabinet Level Advisor for Peace & Disarmament in March, 1953.[4]

• 1955-1968 Eighty-five bills calling for a Department of Peace were introduced in the House or the Senate.

• 1969 Senator Vance Hartke of Indiana and Representative Seymour Halpern of New York introduced legislation to create a Department of Peace in the House of Representatives and the Senate.

• 1984 President Ronald Reagan signed into law the creation of the United States Institute of Peace USIP.

• 2001 and 2003 Representative Dennis Kucinich of Ohio introduced legislation to create a Department of Peace.

• September 2005 Representative Dennis Kucinich of Ohio and Senator Mark Dayton of Minnesota introduced legislation to create a Department of Peace and Nonviolence in the House of Representatives and the Senate, respectively.

The 21st century legislation to create the United States Department of Peace & Nonviolence introduced in July 2001, gained 45 Cosponsors during that session of congress. With the 108th Congress the movement grew to 53 congressional cosponsors, and 75 Congressional sponsors in the 109th congress. A list of the Congressional cosponsors can be viewed at the Library of Congress. LOC

The peace movement hopes to gain federal endorsement and join the ranks of other government programs such as: Pollution awareness – from the 1960s “Give a Hoot don’t pollute”, to today’s global warming movement. The Anti-Tobacco movement began with a the mild surgeon general's warning, “Smoking MAY be hazardous to your health” to today with many States and municipalities outlawing smoking, within common use buildings. If successful, proponents believe the United States Department of Peace and Nonviolence may be as significant a social change as the Emancipation proclamation - Freeing the slaves and the Women's suffrage movement - Granting women the right to vote.

Domestic peace movement in the United States

The peace movement in the United States is perhaps less popular in the media but supported by vast numerous of professionals in many areas, gang violence Prevention, domestic abuse Counseling, Violence against children Awareness, and Character education www.charactercounts.org in Primary Schools.

Gang Violence Prevention is primarily a regional effort lead by local Law Enforcement and special programs within schools.

Domestic Abuse Counseling is supported by many non-profit organizations

Violence against Children Awareness

Character Education is a growing program in American primary school education. Recognized as a pillar of strength in the foundation of our society along with a strong family support, Character education resources are used broadly to shape young minds.

Day of Silence for Peace

Also known as the Peace Movement, the Day of Silence for Peace follows the tradition of rallies that use silence to be noticed. Participants wear a piece of white cloth across their mouths with Peace written on it to symbolize their unity and readiness to change their world. It means they are tired of the status quo, and are willing to challenge it. It hopes to achieve unity and a sense of empowerment for its participants - including the knowledge that they can have an impact without traveling to the far reaches of the earth. The first Day of Silence for Peace took place on October 23, 2007.^[13]

Bibliography

• Scott H. Bennett, Radical Pacifism: The War Resisters League and Gandhian Nonviolence in America, 1915-45 (Syracuse Univ. Press, 2003).
• Charles Chatfield, editor, Peace Movements in America (New York: Schocken Books, 1973). ISBN 0-8052-0386-0
• Charles Chatfield with Robert Kleidman, The American Peace Movement: Ideals and Activism (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992). ISBN 0-8057-3852-5
• Elsie Locke, Peace People: A History of Peace Activities in New Zealand (Christchurch, NZ: Hazard Press, 1992). ISBN 0-908790-20-1
• Sam Marullo and John Lofland, editors, Peace Action in the Eighties: Social Science Perspectives (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990). ISBN 0-8135-1561-0
• Caroline Moorehead, Troublesome People: The Warriors of Pacifism (Bethesda, MD: Adler & Adler, 1987).
• Roger C. Peace III, A Just and Lasting Peace: The U.S. Peace Movement from the Cold War to Desert Storm (Chicago: The Noble Press, 1991). ISBN 0-9622683-8-0
• Lawrence S. Wittner, Rebels Against War: The American Peace Movement, 1933-1983 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984). ISBN 0-87722-342-4
• Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam, 1963-1975 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984). ISBN 0-03-005603-9
• André Durand: Gustave Moynier and the peace societies. In: International Review of the Red Cross, no 314, p. 532-550 (31-10-1996): http://www.icrc.org/Web/Eng/siteeng0.nsf/html/57JNAW

See also

American Friends Service Committee Anti-nuclear movement Anti-war Atoms for Peace Award Catholic Worker Movement Institute for Interreligious Dialogue Canada and Iraq War Resisters Christian Peacemaker Teams Conscientious objector Conscientious objection throughout the world Department of Peace European Peace Marches Fellowship of Reconciliation Global citizens movement Hollanditis Militarism Mohandas Gandhi New Left Nobel Peace Prize Nuclear-free zone Opposition to war against Iran Opposition to the Iraq War Opposition to the US involvement in the Vietnam War Peace

Peace symbol Peace Action Peace Alliance Peace flag Peace organization (preceded the peace movement in the 19th. See also Category:Peace organizations) Pentecostal Charismatic Peace Fellowship US Peace Memorial Foundation Voices for Creative Nonviolence War Resisters' International War Resisters League War Resisters Support Campaign (Canada) White Rose Women's Peace Party Women's Peace Union World peace World Peace Council Young Peacemakers Club 1973 World Congress of Peace Forces

References

1. ^ Canseco, Mario (June 27, 2008). "Angus Reid Poll: Most Canadians Would Grant Permanent Residence to U.S. Military Deserters". Angus Reid. http://www.angusreidstrategies.com/polls-analysis/opinion-polls/angus-reid-poll-most-canadians-would-grant-permanent-residence-us-milit. Retrieved 12 July 2009. 
2. ^ Bailey, Sue (July 5, 2009). "Federal website changes undermine Iraq resisters: critics". The Canadian Press. http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5iGSn-j73WQhIktgHT2tLCndsL_5A. Retrieved 17 July 2009. 
3. ^ Cooper, Alex (April 21, 2009). "Federal court to hear American war resister's appeal". Toronto Star. http://www.thestar.com/article/622278. Retrieved April 23, 2009. 
4. ^ From Protest to Resistance, Peace News/Mushroom Books, 1981
5. ^ Bertrand Russell, "Civil Disobedience", New Statesman, 17 February 1961
6. ^ Frank E. Myers, "Civil Disobedience and Organizational Change: The British Committee of 100", Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 86, No. 1. (Mar., 1971), pp. 92-112
7. ^ Comment Magazine. (Communist) http://www.library.law.ua.edu/spcoll/findaids/murpaid/murpaid4.htm
8. ^ Compton, James R., and Edward Comor. "The Integrated News Spectacle, Live 8, and the Annihilation of Time." Canadian Journal of Communication 32.1 (2007): 29 53.
9. ^ “The Concerts.” Live 8. February 16 2009 <http://www.live8live.com/theconcerts/index.shtml>.
10. ^ Trakin, Roy. "Simon Renshaw." Advertising Age 78.21 (2007): S,8; S-8.
11. ^ Willman, Chris. Rednecks and Bluenecks: The Politics in Country Music. New York:New Press, 2005,page 24
12. ^ "For a Middle East free of all Weapons of Mass Destruction". Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran. 2007-08-06. http://www.campaigniran.org/casmii/index.php?q=node/2694. Retrieved 2007-11-03. 
13. ^ http://www2.gvsu.edu/~kirinv/ThePeaceMovement.html

External links

• UC Berkeley Library Social Activism Sound Recording Project: Anti-Vietnam War Protests
• United States Institute of Peace
• The Peace Alliance Campaign for a US Department of Peace and Nonviolence - HR-808 Bill re-introduced in 2009, Nationwide grassroots organization
• International People's Initiative for Departments of Peace
• Linus Pauling and the International Peace Movement: A Documentary History
• International Coalition for the Decade of a Culture of Peace and Nonviolence [5]
• American Friends’ Service Committee – committed Quaker pacifist group; draft counseling etc.
• US Peace Memorial - Will build and maintain the US Peace Memorial in Washington DC and publish the US Peace Registry
• US Peace Registry - Recognizes and documents the peace activities of US citizens and organizations
• Chicago FreeSpeechZone - Documents the post-9/11 Chicago-area peace movement
• Veterans For Peace - U.S. veterans' peace group
• Women's International League for Peace and Freedom
• Peace Organisation of Australia
• Cultrual Peace Group
• International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
• Additional outlets for extensive anti-war education via online videos are available at Google (anti-war videos) [6], Democracy Now! [7] and CitySites.com [8].
• Character Education Resources - Program utilized by the best schools in the United States.
• Search LOVE for a better world without war
• Silence for Peace Day article
• Getting Local and Keeping Positive in the Anti-War Movement –Zoltan Grossman, Znet, Nov. 2, 2006
• Speaking Different Languages: How the Peace Movement Works With the Military Community – Zoltan Grossman, ZNet, Nov. 2, 2007
• Challenges for the Antiwar Movement – Zoltan Grossman, Counterpunch, Jan. 5, 2006
• Peace is Active - Peace community with forum, blogs, videos, photos, and music.
• WorldWalk-Peacetour - A walking tour around the world in name of peace, friendship and brotherhood.
• Travel for Peace, AS. Karl M Haugan

v • d • e Anti-war topics Opposition to Military action in Iran · Iraq War · War in Afghanistan · War on Terrorism · Landmines · Vietnam War · Nuclear armament · World War II · World War I · Second Boer War · American Civil War · War of 1812 Agents of opposition Anti-war organizations · Conscientious objectors · Draft dodgers · Peace movement · Peace churches · Peace camp Related ideologies Anti-imperialism · Antimilitarism · Appeasement · Hippie · Nonviolence · Nonkilling · Pacificism · Pacifism · Satyagraha · Vanguardism · Soviet influence on the peace movement Peace punks Media Books · Films · Songs · Symbols

• Lynch, Jake and Annabel McGoldrick. Peace Journalism. Gloucestershire: Hawthorn Press, 2005.

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