Rosenwald - War no more: three centuries of American antiwar and peace writing

T HE essential American soul, D.H. Lawrence observed in writing about James Fenimore Coopers Leatherstocking tales, is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. That harsh assessment, one must acknowledge, has been borne out across the centuries by a still-unchecked current of war, but through the essential American soul runs a countercurrent of peace, and this volume documents it. Democratic liberalism itself aims at a civics of compromise, while the United States Constitution establishes a structure of amendment that amounts to a politics of self-criticism. Compromise and self-criticism: nonviolence is essential to both.

Wars, though, have defined the nations narrative, especially once the apocalyptic fratricide of the Civil War set the current running in bloodtoward the Jim Crow reenslavement of African Americans, further genocidal assaults against native peoples, imperial adventures abroad, a two-phased World War that permanently militarized the American economy and spawned a bifurcated imagination that so requires an evil enemy that the Cold War morphed seamlessly into the War on Terror. The hard, isolate, and stoic heroes sanctify this dynamic, and are sacrificed to it. Who objects?

Well, Americans sung and unsung do. Henry David Thoreau, repudiating slavery and the U.S. war against Mexico, defined a mode of conscientious objection (Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine) that would shape an alternative politics across the globe, across a century, ultimately inspiring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his great cloud of witnesses. But far less celebrated citizens have preached sermons, written letters to presidents, composed statements to juries, penned meditations in prison, and posted manifestos. They are poets (I shall die, Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote, but that is all I shall do for death), pop singers, politicians, common soldiers, activists (Do you have the guts, Stokely Carmichael asked, to say Hell no!?), parents, philosophers, Quakers, physicians, nuns, rabbis, and priests (Our apologies, good friends, Father Daniel Berrigan declared in court, for the burning of paper instead of children). Perhaps the author of the most powerful antiwar statement ever made was the U.S. Army major who, in 1968, told Peter Arnett, It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.

Conventional wisdom says that the voices of peace are inevitably drowned out by the trumpets of war, but this volume suggests otherwise. The nuclear age itself, by threatening human self-extinction, launched a moral mobilization that still stirs the national conscience, and its testimonies are here. Antiwar protests could not halt the horrors of Vietnam, but they stopped cold the open-ended Pentagon escalation toward absolute destruction. No expert in realpolitik imagined that the millennial conflict between Moscow and Washington could end without mass carnage, but grassroots alarm about nuclear war (sparked, for example, by atomic physicists who denounced a weapon of genocide) enabled just such an unexpected outcome. Virtues greatest modern triumph was the nonviolent dismantling of the Berlin Wall. Its lesson must be cherished, and taught.

Because the human future, for the first time in history, is itself imperiled by the ancient impulse to respond to violence with violence, the cry War no more! can be heard coming back at us from time ahead, from the as yet unborn men and womenthe ultimate voices of peacewho simply will not come into existence if the essential American soul does not change. The voices of this book, a replying chorus of hope, insist that such change is possible.