American League Against War and Fascism

AMERICAN LEAGUE AGAINST WAR AND FASCISM. The League was formed at a U.S. Congress against War held in New York City in the fall of 1933 and attended by over twenty-six hundred delegates from trade unions and women’s, farm, religious, and political organizations. They gathered in response to a call signed by three widely read authors of the time—Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, and Upton Sinclair—following an international antiwar congress in Amsterdam in August 1932. It became one of forty-three national committees of a World Committee against War and Fascism centered in Paris and headed by Lord Robert Cecil of Great Britain and Pierre Cot, a prominent French Socialist.
The Japanese invasion of northern China, Hitler’s rise to power in Germany at the beginning of 1933, and maneuvers of the Western powers, including the United States, to use international disarmament conferences as screens behind which each participant sought to promote its own military superiority were seen by the Amsterdam and New York meetings as signs of an impending world war that only mass action by all peoples might derail. Since the Nazis had built their movement around the goal of destroying “Bolshevism” within Germany and internationally with at least the tacit approval of the other capitalist powers, the first League program warned that the immediate danger of war proceeded from Western determination to overthrow the sixteen-year-old Soviet government.

In addition, the founding program called on the people “to oppose the policies of American imperialism in the Far East, in Latin America, especially in Cuba” (where thirty U.S. warships were then stationed as threats to the revolutionary movement for democracy). While the initial program reflected the influence of the Communist Party, the need for a coalition that went far beyond traditional peace organizations and left-wing political parties was widely accepted. The rise of an antiwar movement in which Communists were conspicuous participants paralleled what was happening in the anti-Depression activities that led to the passage of unemployment insurance and social security, the rise of the industrial union movement and the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and the creation of a united student movement, the American Student Union, out of the Socialist-led Student League for Industrial Democracy and the Communist-led National Student League.

Among those who addressed the founding congress of the new League were Devere Allen, editor of the pacifist World Tomorrow; the feminist leader Harriot Stanton Blatch; Communist Party general secretary Earl Browder; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People field secretary William Pickens; American Federation of Hosiery Workers president Emil Rieve; A. J. Muste, head of the Conference for Progressive Labor Action; and Professor Reinhold Niebuhr of Union Theological Seminary. Support by adherents of the Socialist Party was reflected in sponsorship of the League by the Norman Thomas-led League for Industrial Democracy and the naming of J. B. Matthews, a prominent Socialist Party member, as first national chairman. When Dr. Harry F. Ward—professor of Christian ethics at Union Theological Seminary and author of In Place of Profit, based on his sabbatical year in the Soviet Union—replaced Matthews after the latter’s resignation some months later, the League began attracting extensive support among Protestant and Jewish religious leaders and organizations.

Besides seeking affiliation of existing organizations that approved of its policies and activities, the League built citywide membership groups through which it conducted such activities as promoting a boycott of Japanese consumer goods, halting the sale of war materials to Japan, and providing assistance to the Spanish Republic and opposition to anti-democratic legislative probes and legislation. Its efforts to bring together trade unionists and members of the largely middle-class peace organizations was reflected in those membership groups as well as in the speakers who addressed its national congresses and wrote for its monthly publication, Fight against War and Fascism, or Fight, as it was generally referred to. These included Congress of Industrial Organizations president John L. Lewis, American Newspaper Guild founder and president Heywood Broun, and A. J. Whitney, president of the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen. Leading artists including William Gropper, John Groth, Harry Sternberg, Art Young, and Moses Soyer were regular contributors to the magazine, as were prominent American and foreign authors.

Pioneers in understanding that special efforts had to be made to bring young people into the peace movement, the League’s founders set up a youth section to do so. This section began its existence by organizing a campaign against proposals to turn the Civilian Conservation Corps, set up early in the Roosevelt administration to provide work for unemployed youth, into military training camps. Despite widespread political and press support for this diversion, it failed. The Youth Section worked against military training in the schools and sent delegates to World Youth Congresses in Geneva in 1936 and at Vassar College in 1938 and participated in student antiwar strikes. The broad constituency the League appealed to was reflected in its organizational structure, which included trade union, women’s, and religious committees on national and local levels.

The organization’s name was changed to American League for Peace and Democracy in 1936 to emphasize its commitment to “protect and extend democratic rights for all sections of the American people,” with special emphasis on defending trade unions from corporate and legislative assault and winning passage of an anti-lynching law. With the outbreak of war in Europe in the fall of 1939, the American League for Peace and Democracy had lost its reason for existence and folded soon after. Before its end, the organization registered support of over four million people at its annual congresses.

Klehr, Harvey. The Heyday of American Communism. New York: Basic Books, 1984.

Lerner, James. Course of Action: A Journalist's Account from Inside the American League Against War and Fascism and the United Electrical Workers Union (UE) 1933-1978. Berkeley, Calif.: RNL Publishing, 2013.

The Fight Against War and Fascism, 1933-1945. Published by the American League Against War and Fascism. New York University Libraries. http://dlib.nyu.edu/fawf/

American League for Peace and Democracy Collected Records, 1933-1939, CDG-A. Swarthmore College Peace Collection. https://www.swarthmore.edu/library/peace/CDGA.A-L/alpd.htm