Jane Addams, along with the socialist journalist Crystal Eastman, led an international bloc of feminists and pacifists. In War Against War, Kazin, a Georgetown history professor and editor of Dissent, focuses on the leaders of groups in the “motley” antiwar coalition. Kauffman’s Direct Action traces how antiwar activists from Vietnam to Iraq helped lead the American left in an increasingly inclusive fight for democracy at home and abroad. Picking up the story in the late twentieth century, L.A. Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro’s The Internationalists proposes that the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 reduced the incidence of war throughout the second half of the twentieth century. War Against War argues that the peace movement energized the American left and helped shape its identity for decades to come. joined WWI “may have been the most consequential period in the history of America’s relationship with the outside world.” He may well be right: The decision to enter the war created the national security state we still live in today.Īt the same time, war has provoked powerful new ideas about justice and peace that have echoed through generations, as three new books show. Michael Kazin argues in his recent book War Against War that the months just before the U.S. And a vast military-industrial complex continues to shape our foreign policy and domestic spending priorities. The draft has been used to wage unpopular wars in Korea and Vietnam. The FBI and CIA have routinely surveilled American citizens without due process. That militarization has continued through the past century. The peace movement’s fears of a militarized surveillance state had come true. Many antiwar activists, who had recently enjoyed broad public support, were thrown in jail. Wilson signed the Espionage and Sedition acts, which enabled the government to monitor its own citizens and made it a crime to “utter, print, write or publish” anything “disloyal” about the government. The peace movement, which had been a key component of his electoral alliance, felt profoundly betrayed. (The Zimmerman Telegram, with its offer of German assistance for a Mexican invasion of the United States, didn’t help.) On April 2, 1917, Wilson asked Congress to declare war. Woodrow Wilson had won reelection in 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of war,” but when Germany declared submarine warfare against neutral shipping-and any American civilians on those ships-in early 1917, Wilson rapidly changed his mind.
The outbreak of World War I in 1914, followed by America’s entry into the war in 1917, seemingly shattered that dream. WAR AGAINST WAR: THE AMERICAN FIGHT FOR PEACE 1914-1918 by Michael Kazin Simon & Schuster, 400 pp., $19
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