We have a meeting with Brigid Smith on Wednesday, March 29
at 4:30 PM at the Office of Congressperson John Sarbanes, 600 Baltimore Avenue,
Suite 303, Towson, Md. 21204. The main purpose of the meeting is to get a
better understanding of a progressive perspective during the time of a Trump
Administration with Republican control of the House and the Senate. There
would also be an opportunity to raise questions about particular legislation,
but as you know the Democrats have little chance of passing any bills. Please
RSVP to me at mobuszewski@verizon.net or 410-323-1607
if you can attend the meeting. Thanks.
Kagiso,
Max
Published on Portside (https://portside.org)
How
Opposition to World War One Galvanized the Left
Juliet Kleber
Tuesday, March 28, 2017
New Republic
On April 6,
1917, the United States entered World War I. For three years before, activists
and legislators had urged lawmakers not to join this unprecedented “war to end
all wars,” and their efforts had enjoyed significant public support. But as
German aggression mounted—and as Germany courted an alliance against the United
States with Mexico—the US was dragged into the conflict. The anti-war
movement’s aims shifted from preventing military preparedness to opposing the
draft and the war itself, even while its leading figures were subjected to
censorship and surveillance.
Michael
Kazin’s book War Against War: The American Fight
for Peace, 1914-1918 [1] tells the story of
these Americans, who tried to prevent the militarization of the United States.
As Kazin argues, this was not an isolationist movement afraid of engagement
with the broader world; peace activists worked with allies abroad from both
sides of the conflict, and fostered visions of an international organization
for peace. Nor was the anti-war movement a passion project for one type of
idealist—it was a coalition of Americans against the perceived “jingoism” of
capitalists and militarists, united against a corrupt economic elite who they
felt would use war as a for-profit industry
With this
book, Kazin offers a portrait of a rare kind of bipartisan political
resistance, as well as a glimpse into a key moment for the American left, when
interest in socialism surged but before it was burdened by associations with
the Soviet Union. We talked about this history and its reverberations today,
when the left has thrown its energies into resisting Trump. The following
conversation has been edited for clarity.
The New
Republic: You’ve said that you’d never written a book about a war or an
anti-war movement before. What made you write about this now?
Michael
Kazin: The United States has been at war for most of its history. But the
anti-war movements that have existed have been pretty short lived and have not
gotten much attention from scholars or from journalists, really, except right
during the wars themselves. Anti-war movements have not been successful for the
most part (except, arguably the movement, against the Vietnam War). Yet, I
think if you understand American history as a history of war, you also have to
look at the people who opposed those wars.
TNR: Your
book is specifically about the opposition to World War I.
Kazin: It
was a very diverse coalition: Democrats, Republicans, conservatives and
radicals, different races. The purpose of the book is not just to tell
forgotten stories, which is important itself, but also to question the
conventional wisdom that these people who opposed the war were isolationists
who didn’t want the United States to be involved in trying to make a better
world. Everybody I write about had a really strong understanding and vision of
the kind of world they wanted to build. It just didn’t involve having a large
military and going into what was then the bloodiest war in history.
TNR: Who
were the main figures in this movement?
Kazin: I
focus on four figures who I think were important because each of them led a key
faction in the coalition. One was Crystal Eastman, a fairly young woman who was
a very active suffragist, a member of the Socialist Party for a time, and a
leader of a strong feminist movement of that period. She was a key organizer of
antiwar groups, the Women’s Peace Party of New York and the American Union
Against Militarism, and later on she became the co-editor of the Liberator magazine.
The other figure on the activist side was Morris Hillquit who was a liberal
lawyer, an immigrant born in Latvia. He was the Socialist Party’s key emissary
to Socialist parties in Europe, which were much larger and stronger than the
American Socialist Party was.
There were
also two figures in Congress. Robert La Follette, a senator from Wisconsin, who
was very pro-labor and very involved in international peace movements; he was
the leader of the progressive Republicans. The fourth figure was Claude
Kitchin, a Democratic congressman from North Carolina and the Majority Leader
of the House during the war. He was also a white supremacist and one of the
people involved in basically disenfranchising African Americans in North
Carolina. He was very much a populist with a small “p,” opposing the power of
Wall Street munitions makers in the economy, which he thought would only grow
if the US went to war.
It’s
important to understand, these figures came from different places
demographically and ideologically, but they all agreed that having a much
larger military and then going to war would make America a very different place
and they all opposed that.
TNR: Your
book depicts this moment when the radical left in general seemed to have a
chance, which then got kind of crushed by censorship, by the war and buried in
history.
Kazin:
There’s a debate among historians. There was an older view that World War I was
central to the decline of the Socialist Party. American socialists, unlike most
socialists in Europe, actually, opposed their country going to war, and were
repressed in different ways because of that. Eugene Debs, a leader of the
Socialist Party, was put into jail for giving speeches against the war.
But James
Weinstein, who founded In These Times, argued that the
socialists benefitted from becoming the main agencies and voices opposing World
War I. Morris Hillquit was able to get 22 percent of the vote in his run for
mayor of New York City in 1917, which is a far, far higher percentage than any
socialist ever got before. Plus, socialists did pretty well in the off-year
local elections of 1917.
I think,
really, what caused problems for the Socialist Party is when in 1919 they
split, and a lot of socialists become communists. And the Communist Party by
the 1930s became a more important part of the left, which is good in that the
communists organize labor unions and civil rights groups and so forth. But at
the same time, clearly, the association with the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin
was a non-starter for most Americans.
TNR: Do you
think the effects of this period reverberate on the contemporary left?
Kazin:
Today, the Cold War is long over. Socialism has lost many of the negative
connotations it had, being associated with the Soviet Union. I think one of the
reasons why Democratic Socialists of America has grown and why Bernie
Sanders could run as social democrat is because, in some ways, we’re returning
to the kind of socialism that Eugene Debs believed in and talked about.
To a
degree, I mean. He believed in revolution; Bernie Sanders does not believe in
revolution. But I think it would be a good thing if we revived the memory of
the pre-World War I and World War I Socialist Party. That was the heyday of
socialism in America. It was a socialism that helped to promote support for
things we now take for granted like Medicare and Social Security, and—if you’re
a progressive—labor unions and progressive income tax. Women’s suffrage too,
for that matter.
TNR: You
mention in the book that building a peace movement isn’t like working on any
other issue, where the movement can grow gradually. It needs to come together
on a moment’s notice. Obviously there are a lot of differences, but it does
kind of feel like that right now on the left with the need for an anti-Trump
movement—very suddenly we have to spring together to block imminent policy
decisions that could have very swift, very dramatic consequences.
Kazin: On
the one hand, people oppose Trump for all kinds of reasons: his
authoritarianism, his terrible positions on the environment, labor, on women’s
rights, on black rights, etc. So that’s not like the war against war.
Obviously, they had one big cause to unite them.
What’s the
same both now and then is that social movements that are opposing people in
power need to have an inside/outside strategy. They have to do the kind of
things these people are doing: demonstrating in the streets, going to
congressional meetings, if they’re lawyers supporting amicus briefs, building
on institutions, subscribing to magazines on the left. On the other hand, they
also have to find allies within the structures of power, and that means
Democrats and perhaps some Republicans.
It’s not
either/or, ever—that’s how you make change, by putting pressure on people of
power but also winning some of them over. You can’t see all of them as the
enemy, as terrible political elites because, if you do, then you’re not
understanding how power works and how you’re going to be able to stop Trump.
We’ve got to beat him electorally, we’ve got to beat him in Congress, we’ve got
to beat him in the courts, and those are established institutions run by elites
by definition.
And that
was true in World War I, too. There was a concerted effort to try to stop bills
to expand the military. There were efforts once the war started to make sure
that the rich would pay for it. Claude Kitchin was a very important part of
that because all spending bills have to start in the House and he was chair of
the Ways and Means Committee as well as the Majority Leader. So this Dixiecrat
was responsible, in part, for having a more progressive tax system, because he
thought the war was wrong. He said, well, if we’re going to have a war then the
rich will have to pay more for it.
TNR: If
today’s left were to take one lesson from this period in history, what should
it be?
Kazin: I
hesitate to offer “lessons” from something that occurred a century ago. This is
particularly true because anti-war movements are different from other kinds of
social movements, and there is not much of a peace movement around now.
Still, the
contemporary American left (by which I mean, liberals and radicals) should
emulate the strategy the anti-war coalition followed from 1914 to 1918:
Organize local groups, put on imaginative kinds of protests, exclude no one who
supports your basic demand(s), and work with elected officials who are
sympathetic to you but don’t depend on them to remain steadfast when times get
rough. In the end, you have to convince a majority of Americans or, at least,
persuade them not to support your opposition.
Juliet
Kleber is a reporter-researcher at The New Republic.
Links:
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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