Another AUAM writer, Scott Nearing, was prosecuted under the newly passed Espionage Act (which, as whistleblower Edward Snowden discovered, is still very much in force 100 years later), charged with “obstruction to the recruiting and enlistment service of the United States.”
I have on my desk one of the original short pamphlets Nearing was prosecuted for: The Menace of Militarism; An Analysis, A Criticism, a Protest and a Demand, published by the Rand School of Social Science in New York City in 1917. It looks scruffy, amateurish, like a penny-dreadful western meant to be read on a train ride, then tossed into the trash, but having survived a century now, it still packs a powerful punch, not only because of its message (“War is built of fear and cemented with hate”), but because of the unmistakable urgency and passion with which it was printed and produced. On the back is the famous Boardman Robinson cartoon from The Masses called “The Deserter”: Christ lined up against a wall as a firing squad composed of soldiers from all the combatant nations take aim at his heart.
Even such a beloved figure as Helen Keller received abuse for her pacifist views. At an antiwar rally in 1916 she urged workers to “Strike against the war, for without you no battles can be fought! Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder!”
Were the protest writers much read? Did they have any influence? Most of their impact came after the war ended and the mood dramatically changed. Ignored and censored while the war was in progress, their writing became relevant in the 1920s, when the soldier writers began publishing their memoirs testifying to how truly awful the trenches had been, and a mood of disillusionment replaced war fever.
Now, a hundred years later, what comes across most strongly in the writing is the sheer moral and physical courage it took to publish it in the first place. Romain Rolland paid tribute to the dissenters while the war was still at its height.
“The combatants, pitted against each other, agree in hating those who refuse to hate. Europe is like a besieged town. Fever is raging. Whoever will not rave like the rest is suspected. Whoever insists, in the midst of war, on defending peace among men knows that he risks his own peace, his reputation, his friends, for his belief. But of what value is a belief for which no risks are run?”
World War I was the turning point in Bertrand Russell’s life. Forty-two when the war started, his reputation was that of a technical philosopher focused on rarefied abstractions, with his groundbreaking work on mathematical theory, Principia Mathematica, having been published in 1913. The horrors of the war changed the thrust of his writing; ever afterwards social issues would be his primary concern.
“When the War came I felt as if I heard the voice of God,” this famous atheist would later write.
“I knew that it was my business to protest, however futile protest might be. My whole nature was involved. As a lover of truth, the national propaganda of all the belligerent nations sickened me. As a lover of civilization, the return to barbarism appalled me. As a man of thwarted parental feeling, the massacre of the young wrung my heart. I hardly supposed that much good would come of opposing the War, but I felt that for the honour of human nature those who were not swept off their feet should show they stood firm.”
Russell became one of the most prominent pacifists, and—though he was a member of the British aristocracy, the brother of an earl—the establishment struck back hard. He was stripped of his lectureship at Cambridge, denied a passport so he couldn’t teach in America, mobbed when he tried to make antiwar speeches, and then, when he wrote a pamphlet for the No Conscription Fellowship, he was thrown into Brixton Prison for five months.
Russell would campaign for peace for the rest of his long life. At age eighty-nine, he was sent back to Brixton Prison, this time for his participation in a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament demonstration in London.
The selection is from his “An Appeal to the Intellectuals of Europe,” written in 1916 and included in his book, Justice in War-Time, published the same year.
No writer of the Great War was braver, suffered more and is now more forgotten than the forty-two-year-old German physiologist and professor, Dr. G. F. Nicolai. At the outbreak of the war, distraught over Germany’s invasion of Belgium, he wrote a “Manifesto to the Europeans” demanding that the army withdraw, and circulated it among his fellow intellectuals for signatures; only three signed, one of them being Albert Einstein.
The government threw him into Graudenz Prison for this; when he was released, he immediately went to work on a five-hundred-page examination of war in general and the Great War in particular: The Biology of War, with its thesis that war ought to be regarded as we regard smallpox or the plague, something that can and ought to be eradicated by taking the proper preventive measures. He piled particular scorn on the favorite German argument that without war nations become degenerate and effeminate.
Back he went into prison; his property was confiscated, his family left penniless. (“Those who have seen him recently,” writes his translator in the introduction, “declare that his imprisonment and suffering have greatly aged him, and he now looks quite a broken man.”) He eventually made a daring escape to neutral Denmark in a commandeered German biplane. After the war, when he tried to resume his teaching duties at Berlin University, he was shouted down by angry mobs of veterans who considered him a traitor. After a few more years of this persecution, he was forced into exile in South America.
Jane Addams, reformist, feminist, and pacifist, was honored for her work in the Chicago slums and the book she wrote about it, Twenty Years at Hull House. Fifty-four when the war broke out, influenced (as many World War I dissidents were) by the writings of Tolstoy, she came to believe that women had a special mission to preserve peace. As president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, she served as a delegate to the International Congress of Women at the Hague in 1915, where 1,200 delegates called upon combatant nations to begin “a process of continuous mediation until peace could be restored.”
While in Europe on her peace mission, she had the opportunity to meet with soldiers, nurses, pacifists, and young people dealing with the issues she cared about so passionately. She co-authored a book on her experiences, Women at the Hague. My copy, stamped Withdrawn, comes from “The Somerset County Library,” and shows it last being checked out in November 1965.
Addams’s work for peace damaged her reputation once the United States joined the war, but in 1931 she became the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
W. E. B. Du Bois, forty-six, was at the height of his reputation as a militant spokesman for black Americans when war broke out in Europe. He published an essay in the Atlantic Monthly that was highly critical of the combatant countries’ hidden imperialist agendas, but when the United States became involved in 1917, and thousands of African Americans immediately enlisted, Du Bois, like many heretofore antiwar liberals, quickly changed his opinion, writing an essay called “Close Ranks.”
“For long years to come men will point to the year 1917 as the great Day of Decision. We of the colored race have no ordinary interest in the outcome. That which the German power represents today spells death to the aspirations of negroes and all the darker races. Let us, while the war lasts, forget our special grievances, and close ranks brother to brother with our white fellow citizens.”
Some in the black community criticized him for his flip-flop, citing his “crass moral cowardice,” but the Military Intelligence Branch of the U. S. army, recognizing his influence, offered him a captaincy in return for his support. He did not end up serving, though the reason—he either failed the physical and/or there was a backlash among white officers—has never been made entirely clear.
After the war, his views on anti-imperialism reverted to those expressed in his original 1915 Atlantic essay.
Randolph Bourne, born in 1886 with a debilitating physical deformity, was considered one of the most brilliant young intellectuals in the United States, a spokesman for
the spiritually sensitive, socially progressive generation just coming of age as the fighting in Europe began. He wrote for the liberal New Republic on literature, culture, and education, but when he tried to publish his antiwar essays there, he found his work was no longer welcome. He became a contributor to the more radical The Masses and Seven Arts until, with war fever reaching its height, these journals were suppressed and he had no outlets for his writing whatsoever. He died in the Spanish Flu epidemic a month after the war ended.
Bourne’s writing and personality made a huge impression on all who came into contact with him, including the critic James Oppenheim.
“No nerve of the young world was missing in Randolph Bourne; he was as sensitive to art as to philosophy, as politically-minded as he was psychologic, as brave in fighting for the conscientious objector as he was in opposing current American culture. He was a flaming rebel against our crippled life, as if he had taken the cue from the long struggle with his own body. And just as that weak child’s body finally slew him before he had fully triumphed, so the Great War succeeded in silencing him.”
John Dos Passos apostrophized him in his novel 1919.
“If any man has a ghost
Bourne has a ghost,
a tiny twisted unscared ghost in a black cloak
hopping along the grimy old brick and brownstone
streets still left in downtown New York,
crying out in a shrill soundless giggle:
War is the health of the state.”
Emily G. Balch, at fifty, was a professor of economics and sociology at Wellesley College, very much involved in the kind of social issues that inspired her friend and colleague Jane Addams. She joined her at the International Congress of Women in Holland in 1915, and co-authored the account of their experiences in a Europe at war, Women at the Hague. As a founder of the Women’s International League for Peace, she came under immediate suspicion with the climate of fear and repression taking hold in the United States, and was dismissed from her professorship by Wellesley in 1918.
Twenty-eight years later, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Scott Nearing was thirty-four when America entered the war, and already had caused his share of controversy as a radical economist. He was dismissed from the University of Pennsylvania in 1915 for his dissident writings, and thanks to his antiwar views he was quickly fired from his next teaching job at a state university in Ohio. He moved to New York and became one of the founders of the pacifist People’s Council of America for Democracy and Peace. During the war, his views moved ever leftward, and he became one of the guiding lights of the American Socialist Party.
Nearing’s career had an unlikely epilogue. He moved to a farm in rural Vermont in 1947, then co-authored with his wife Helen the bestselling Living the Good Life: How to Live Simply and Sanely in a Troubled World, which became the bible of the modern homesteading/commune movement for the 1960s’ counterculture.
He lived longer than any of the writers included in this volume, dying at age 100 in 1983.
Reinhold Niebuhr was twenty-five when America entered the war, serving as a pastor of a German-American congregation in Detroit; a young man, he already had a reputation as a theologian with passionate, courageous insights into a wide range of ethical, political, and cultural issues—a reputation that caused the Atlantic Monthly to commission a 1916 article on his antiwar views, which came at things from a different angle than most antiwar writers.
He retreated from this pacifism in later years, when he became known as the leading theologian of American Protestantism, and a founder of Americans for Democratic Action.
E. D. Morel made his prewar reputation as a radical journalist by helping to expose the horrors of Belgium’s brutal exploitation of the Congo. Fifty-nine when the war broke out, he helped found one of the largest English pacifist organizations, the Union of Democratic Control, which numbered 650,000 members by 1917. He was physically assaulted when trying to deliver antiwar speeches, then accused of breaking the Defense of the Realm Act by sending a UDC pamphlet to Romain Rolland in Switzerland; he was sentenced to six months in prison.
Bertrand Russell was aghast at how prison changed him.
“His hair is completely white (there was hardly a tinge of it before); he collapsed completely, physically and mentally, largely as a result of insufficient food.”
After the war, he became a respected leader of the Labor Party. George Orwell, writing in 1946, remembered him as a “heroic but rather forgotten man.”
This War is Trivial
—Bertrand Russell
Leibniz, writing to a French correspondent at a time when France and Hanover were at war, speaks of “this war, in which philosophy takes no interest.” We have travelled far since those days. In modern times, philosophers, professors and intellectuals generally undertake willingly to provide their respective governments with those ingenious distortions and those subtle untruths by which it is made to appear that all good is on one side and all wickedness on the other. Side by side, in the pages of Scientia, are to be read articles by learned men, all betraying shamelessly their national bias, all as incapable of justice as any cheap newspaper, all as full of special pleading and garbled history. And all accept, as a matter of course, the inevitability of each other’s bias; disagreeing with each other’s conclusions, yet they agree perfectly with each other’s spirit. All agree that the whole of a writer’s duty is to make out a case for his own country.
To this attitude there have been notable exceptions among literary men—for example, Romain Rolland and Bernard Shaw—and even among politicians, although political extinction is now everywhere the penalty for a sense of justice. Among men of learning, there are no doubt many who have preserved justice in their thoughts and their private utterances. But these men, whether from fear or from unwillingness to seem unpatriotic, have almost kept silence.
I cannot but think that the men of learning, by allowing partiality to color their thoughts and words, have missed the opportunity of performing a service to mankind for which their training should have specially fitted them. The truth, whatever it may be, is the same in England, France, and Germany, in Russia and in Austria. It will not adapt itself to national needs; it is in its essence neutral. It stands outside the clash of passions and hatreds, revealing, to those who seek it, the tragic irony of strife with its attendant world of illusions. Men of learning, who should be accustomed to the pursuit of truth in their daily work, might have attempted, at this time, to make themselves the mouthpiece of truth, to see what was false on their own side, what was valid on the side of their enemies. They might have used their reputation and their freedom from political entanglements to mitigate the abhorrence with which the nations have come to regard each other, to help towards mutual understanding, to make the peace, when it comes, not a mere cessation due to weariness, but a fraternal reconciliation, springing from a realisation that the strife has been a folly of blindness. They have chosen to do nothing of all this. Allegiance to country has swept away allegiance to truth. Thought has become the slave of instinct, not its master. The guardians of the temple of Truth have betrayed it to idolators, and have been the first to promote the idolatrous worship …
This war is trivial, for all its vastness. No great principle is at stake, no great human purpose is involved on either side. The supposed ideal ends for which it is being fought are merely part of the myth. This war is not being fought for any rational end; it is being fought because, at first, the nations wished to fight, and now they are angry and determined to win victory. Everything else is idle talk, artificial rationalising of instinctive actions and passions. When two dogs fight in the street, no one supposes that anything but instinct prompts them, or that they are inspired by high and noble ends. If their fighting were accompanied by intellectual activity, the one would say he was fighting to promote the right kind of smell (Kultur), and the other to uphold the inherent canine right of running on the pavement (democracy). Yet this
would not prevent the bystanders from seeing that their action was foolish, and that they ought to be parted as soon as possible. And what is true of dogs in the street is equally true of nations in the present war …
Men of learning should be the guardians of one of the sacred fires that illumine the darkness into which the human spirit is born: upon them depends the ideal of just thought, of disinterested pursuit of truth, which, if it had existed more widely, would have sufficed alone to prevent the present horror. To serve this ideal, to keep alive a purpose remote from strife, is more worthy of the intellectual leader of Europe than to help Governments in stimulating hatred or slaughtering more of the young men upon whom the future of the world depends. It is time to forget our supposed separate duty toward Germany, Austria, Russia, France, or England, and remember that higher duty to mankind in which we can still be at one.
From Justice in War-Time, by Bertrand Russell; Open Court Publishing; Chicago, 1916.
The Last Great Carouse
—G. F. Nicolai
War is the solvent, for without war no one would be interested in patriotism or chauvinism. The man who loved his country would have an additional form of happiness, but if a man did not love it, no one would disturb him. The merchant and manufacturer of their own accord try to increase their trade and sales, and thus add to the national welfare. The scientists and artist do their best by reason of some power within them, and thus add to national civilization. They do not require a special stimulus.
When money is to be appropriated for a school, theater, harbor, or canal, certain questions are considered, such as whether the costs will be proportionate to the increased comfort, wealth, civic improvement, or any other advantage that may ensue. In accordance with this the decision is made; no patriotism is required. In short, patriotism does not play the slightest practical role in any of the activities of peace.
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