Peace Movements

PEACE MOVEMENTS. Peace activities began early in the nineteenth century as outgrowths of religious and utopian ideas rooted in contemporary perfectionism. During the social movements of the 1840s–1850s, the advocacy of peace figured prominently among reformers dedicated to woman’s rights, abolitionism, and temperance. The approach of the Mexican-American War attracted wide opposition including that of a young Abraham Lincoln. The Civil War wreaked havoc upon popular faith in mediation and nonresistance, but organizations such as the American Peace Union revived afterward and with them a respectable call for benevolent internationalism.

The immigrant- and native-based Left, however, rarely interacted with these movements, beyond the efforts of prominent women reformers such as Julia Ward Howe and Frances Willard, until the US overseas expansion of the 1890s. Anti-imperialism, so described for the first time, drew upon a circle of distinguished intellectuals centered in Boston, many of them touched by Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and by an imported version of British Fabian Socialism. Ernest H. Crosby (1856–1907), a Tolstoyan socialist, the most prolific of radical agitator against war, wrote many antiwar essays, three volumes of poetry, and a satirical novel, Captain Jinks, Hero (1902). An aging Mark Twain added his august name to the Anti-Imperialist League, wrote satirical pieces against the US war on the Filipino population, and sometimes called himself a socialist. Political socialists, for their part, were generally content to denounce the US actions as the inevitable fruit of capitalism. A prominent section of Jewish socialists led by Abraham Cahan, editor of the daily Yiddish Forverts, applauded the invasion of Cuba and the Philippines as revenge against the persecution of Jews in the Spanish Inquisition. Former socialist, AFL leader Samuel Gompers argued against wars that brought non-white populations into US possession and potential citizenship.

After 1910, Socialist Party lecturers and publications warned almost obsessively against the prospects of a world war. Socialists correctly intuited that many of their supporters would be corrupted by pseudo-patriotic militarization and that opponents of war would endure fierce repression. To be sure, socialists were caught off-guard by the endorsement of war budgets by their European comrades. They had believed, naively, that socialist parliamentarians would never agree to armed conflict, and that rank-and-file European socialists would never fight in wars against other proletarians. Socialists regained a sense of political balance by conducting vigorous propaganda against the “preparedness” craze symbolically led by former president Theodore Roosevelt. They understood the US invasion of Mexico in 1914 as a dastardly act of intimidation and a dress rehearsal for wider American military action. Courageously, and much to the chagrin of American liberals as well as conservatives, socialists attacked the imperialistic motives of the invasion and the bloody practices of the invaders.
In 1916, journalist Allan Benson won the party’s presidential nomination on the strength of a propagandistic anti-war series appearing in the Appeal to Reason. Woodrow Wilson’s own campaign slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War,” dealt Benson and the Socialist Party a severe setback. Nevertheless, in March 1917 an emergency convention in St. Louis reaffirmed absolute socialist opposition, including “continuous, active, and public” agitation against conscription.

In building a massive peace campaign, socialists successfully tapped an indigenous isolationist sentiment and an educated pacifist constituency. As the only large-scale social movement opposed to the war, the Socialist Party became a focus for activity. Petitions, marches, and street speaking proved especially successful where socialists had long-standing political support. Specific ethnic neighborhoods or districts, especially Scandinavian, German, Jewish, and other Eastern European, had deeply-felt resistance to aggressive American nationalism. A scattering of areas with predominantly native-born populations sympathetic to past labor or agrarian radicalism, from Seattle to sections of Oklahoma, roused themselves against the threat of conscription and the brutal pointlessness of military conflict.

As the US entry into the war approached, significant numbers of socialist intellectuals and union leaders defected to Woodrow Wilson. A handful of former socialists went so far as to join government propaganda agencies and vigilante “loyalty legions,” arguing that the antiwar socialists had become pro-German. The Espionage Act of 1917 enabled the government to move against socialist publications and individuals, crippling the movement of native-born socialists too exposed and geographically dispersed to evade repression. Many immigrant socialists, on the other hand, found new support in their communities along with demands for specific policies suited to their groups’ nationalist aspirations for their own particular homelands.

Divided over support for Woodrow Wilson, their newspapers denied mailing permits, and their activists jailed, socialists had by 1920 nevertheless conducted the most important radical anti-war campaign until the 1960s. The imprisonment of Eugene V. Debs for speaking against the war and the near-million presidential votes for him in the 1920 election remain major events in the history of the Left.
Until riven by Communist and anticommunist factions, the Socialist Party also did well in some local elections, occasionally winning but more often raising vote totals over previous years. In New York City, Morris Hillquit ran an especially strong race for mayor on an anti-war platform. New rounds of indictments, along with the organizational schism of 1919, dashed Socialist hopes of rising to major party status on the anti-war position.

Even in their failure, socialists had formed new kinds of alliances useful for future struggles. The most popular initiative by far, the People’s Council of America for Peace and Democracy, formed in 1917 as a coalition of labor-farmer, Left, and pacifist forces, could be described as a “popular front.” Groups participating included the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America; the Women’s Peace Party (later the US branch of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom); the Fellowship of Reconciliation; and the National Civil Liberties Bureau (later the American Civil Liberties Union). All had active socialists in their leaderships and ranks.

A smaller, weaker Socialist Party re-emerging in the 1920s also gained a new constituency. Younger pacifists, often religiously trained intellectuals, became socialists as they engaged in militant anti-war work. Kirby Page, Devere Allen, Norman Thomas, and A. J. Muste among many others found common ground around the “conscientious objection” to participation in war. The Socialist Party had supported conscientious objectors even as it paid a heavy price for resisting war patriotism. By the middle 1920s, Christian Socialists gave the Party a special attraction otherwise absent. Within branches of the Young Men’s Christian Association and liberal churches, where public disillusionment with war-making found institutional support, and especially within the Fellowship of Reconciliation, socialists found a welcome home. The example of Mahatma Gandhi and his philosophy, popularized by the new Christian Socialist magazine, The World Tomorrow, impressed many as an antidote to the familiar class-struggle doctrines of the socialist movement.

The Communist Party, during the period up to the middle 1930s, added a note of militant anti-racist anti-imperialism, an unpopular view within most of American society, but explained regularly in Communist publications and supported loyally by Party members and followers. Thanks no doubt to fears for the Soviet Union, Communists campaigned about the war danger in the Far East, provoked by Japan’s initial moves against China. Occasionally, Communists, Socialists, and religious activists could join together, as in the public protest to the US invasion of Nicaragua in 1927. More often, in these years, Communist sectarianism erected barriers against cooperation with even such strident anti-war spokespersons as Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas.

During the middle 1930s, Communist- and Socialist-oriented student movements led massive campus demonstrations avowing non-participation in any future US war. At some colleges and universities, such as the University of Wisconsin, administrators broadly shared student sentiments (or adroitly co-opted them), declaring “Peace Assembly” days. At others, such as Brooklyn College, students faced punishment and even expulsion for their activities. The changing tides of history proved the most formidable difficulty of the American Student Union, an unstable coalition of the Left. By 1937, Communists and many students of particular ethnic backgrounds with relatives threatened by the Nazis now favored some kind of “collective security” against the global threat of Fascism. Socialists, with strong if short-lived support in mainstream liberal religious institutions, leaned toward pacifism and a widely-felt American isolationism.

The same strains limited the appeal of an otherwise exceptionally strong Communist-led group, the American League against War and Fascism, holding spotty but sometimes ardent support from ethnic and religious groupings, and likewise a student affiliate overlapping with the American Student Union. At crucial moments, such as the Italian invasion of Ethiopia or the Spanish Civil War, pacifism and principles of noninvolvement seemed to give way. The Socialist Party itself, seriously diminished by the withdrawal of older ethnic groups, exerted less political pressure as it grew more militantly opposed to war. Such important independent peace leaders as A. J. Muste, the emerging public face of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, operated almost outside the existing Left networks.

The Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939-1941 provoked a complex division on peace issues. Among American-born trade unionists, many of them but especially among Irish Americans, support of Communist policies probably reached an apex. By contrast, support for Norman Thomas fell sharply among most liberal and especially Jewish intellectuals. Socialists around Norman Thomas sought to guide the Keep America Out of War Congress, but found their efforts quickly eclipsed by the America First Committee, led by conservatives and tainted with anti-Semitism. Trotskyists, for the first time notably active in anti-war propaganda, conducted a lively campaign among union members and within the Black community against US involvement.

American entry into World War II, following Pearl Harbor, brought wholesale repression of peace activities, with important exceptions. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Communists abandoned all peace work and supported mobilization as a top priority. The Socialist Party, like the badly-diminished Industrial Workers of the World, offered support to conscientious objectors, who grew more numerous and even politically important in particular prisons, as military conflict wore on. The Workers Party faction of the Trotskyist movement, mainly economic in its appeal to industrial war workers, put forward a militant refusal to accept the logic of war as defined by the major powers. An “Imperialist War fought under democratic slogans,” in this view, the conflict encouraged the growth of the leviathan state and the preparation for future, even worse wars. Toward the end of the war and shortly afterward, this position and its supporters, notably Dwight Macdonald and his Politics magazine, became increasingly prominent and prestigious.

Until the height of McCarthyism, the new Progressive Party dominated peace campaigns. A significant bloc of New Deal supporters at first opposed the Cold War confrontation rhetoric of the Truman administration and its international equation of “freedom” with freedom of American commerce. Many ethnic groups, especially Greeks, southern Slavs, and Chinese, viewed the fate of the homelands better entrusted to Communist-linked coalitions than to American collaborators with fascism. Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt’s third-term vice president, moved leftward to meet these views, and his challenge to Truman first appeared to gain wide support. Wallace’s campaign for the presidency in 1948, waged around the issue of the Cold War as well as anti-racism, fell apart in the face of Red Scare tactics and the removal of Communists from leadership of the labor movement. What remained of the Left in 1949 hitched itself more firmly than ever to the peace issue, boldly carrying this perspective into the unpopular Korean War but unable break out of Cold War isolation. In the face of growing revelations about Eastern Europe and Russia under Stalin’s rule, “peace” lost much ground as a credible Left issue, especially among anticommunist socialists.

Pacifists, strongly tinged with anarchist sentiments, exerted considerable influence within this relative vacuum. Imprisoned by the hundreds during World War II, they had forged new links in the years afterward, especially on the East and West coasts. Pacifica Radio, in the Bay Area, brought together anarcho-pacifists with a friendly milieu of progressives. A series of literary-political publications, mostly from the West Coast but including Dwight Macdonald’s Politics, initiated a new wave of cultural expression culminating in the more pacifist-minded works of the Beat Generation. In later years, poet-publisher-bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti would play an important role as an impresario of peace sentiments among rebellious bohemians. Meanwhile, former prisoners of conscience formed a number of new peace groups including the Committee for Nonviolent Action and Peacemakers. They and their allies, especially the Catholic Worker group, demonstrated boldly at atomic weapons facilities.

The civil rights movement, with its seeming proof of nonviolence’s efficacy and public appeal, provided the spark to turn a small and sometimes ingrown pacifist movement into a major mobilization. With the virtual collapse of the Communist Party hegemony over peace issues, even anarcho-pacifists could become leading peaceniks. The US nuclear tests in the Pacific had alerted the public, for the first time, to the “fallout” issue. The pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation circulated a petition against testing, with Norman Thomas and Lewis Mumford among the signers.

Meanwhile, peace had begun to gain a respectability unimaginable at the height of the Cold War. The Albert Einstein-Bertrand Russell appeal of July 1955 united prominent scientists worldwide to call for measures of survival. Peace research among social scientists, with pacifist Kenneth Boulding as its leading figure, heralded the formation of many institutes and research organizations, some with radical pacifist connections. That same year, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (it was the suggestion of social-democratic psychologist Erich Fromm to call it SANE for short) formed and published its first of many advertisements in the New York Times, calling for an end to nuclear testing. By 1958, SANE could claim more than a hundred chapters and some 25,000 members, ranging from distinguished liberals to socialists. While the Committee for Nonviolent Action pressed direct action, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the Fellowship of Reconciliation arranged press conferences and academic conventions, gathered signatures, and located an interested public.

Popular direct action such as the resistance of 2,000 New Yorkers in 1960 to the annual civil defense drill matched spreading campus actions. The Student Peace Union, founded in 1959 (and staffed at the national office level, to a large extent, by members of the Young People’s Socialist League), announced a position independent of the two power blocs, conducting marches and rallies, and gathering signatures. Local progressive student groups, the leaderships of which included future New Left luminaries, echoed the call. The folk music revival, dating from the late 1950s and operating mostly on campuses, added considerable cultural ballast to stentorian peacenik exhortations. Mainstreamed in Bob Dylan’s early work, it rapidly achieved cult status among youthful self-styled nonconformists.

At an intellectual level, Liberation magazine, founded in 1957, brought pacifist positions and a broad spectrum of non-Marxist, Left perspectives, from utopianism to critiques of Cold War culture, into the mainstream of a vaguely reorganizing Left. Anarcho-pacifist intellectuals such as David Dellinger and Paul Goodman helped create the image of the post-Leninist radical thinker, just as dedicated as previous Old Left cadre but also more playful and avowedly existential.

The “Ban the Bomb” peace movement, buoyed by a sense of détente, fell short of influencing national policy and, over the 1960s, also lost many of its early ties to liberalism. In 1960, assorted congressional critics of SANE, then at the height of its influence, had challenged it to demonstrate its anticommunist purity. SANE did so by dropping Left staff members and changing membership rules to weed out “totalitarians.” A “peace delegation” grew in Congress, meanwhile, but only incrementally. The experience of the civil rights movement, largely unprotected by Kennedy officials in the South from the threats of the organized Right, once more proved instructive.

Ratification of the 1963 Test Ban Treaty, ending for the moment nuclear tests in the atmosphere, dampened the peace movement. But the Vietnam War soon gave it new energy. Led by radical pacifists and Socialist Party veterans including Norman Thomas, the first anti–Vietnam War protest took place in New York City in 1964. Lyndon Johnson’s rapid escalation of the war revived activity on campus. By April 1965, Students for a Democratic Society led a Washington, D.C. rally of twenty thousand, the largest peace manifestation in that capital’s history at that point. The Vietnam Day Committee in Berkeley, growing out of the free speech movement, rallied nearly half that number.

From the standpoint of the traditional Left, a period of deep isolation rather suddenly eased. The campus teach-in movement of 1965 not only ridiculed official views but also brought hitherto unpopular views and publications to the attention of students by the tens of thousands. Two coalitions, bringing together radical pacifists with Communists, Trotskyists, and Socialists, created an unprecedented unity in the name of common anti-war cause, not to mention major growth opportunities for each group. The efforts of the National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam precipitated a low-level renewal of factional conflict, this time over differences less ideological than tactical. The Communists, not large in number, but connected and influential, put forward the demand for US-Vietnamese negotiations, while the Trotskyists, more generally more active in local events), insisted upon the demand for immediate withdrawal. This tactical debate disguised another, deeper one. Communists and their allies sought to insist on a campaign within the Democratic Party, revising but also continuing the coalition against Barry Goldwater of a years earlier. Only by remaining among Democrats, they correctly insisted, could the peace movement embrace the more cautious African American leadership circles.

Democrats proved unreliable peaceniks, with marked exceptions. The proliferation of anti-war demonstrations and sentiment tended to resolve the tactical conflict in favor of a New Left formulations closer to Trotskyist positions but distant from the traditional Leninist style decision-making from the top down. In a remarkable and special case, given old divisions and hard feelings, the New York Fifth Avenue Parade Committee, founded in 1965 as a coalition of groups among which Communists. Trotskyists and radical pacifists all played prominent parts, managed to mobilize effectively and generally in accord over the next eventful few years. The sudden swelling of the peace movement and radicalization of its participants, especially visible on the campuses, effectively created the largest US radical movement since the 1930s. Far more than in the mid-1930s or the brief anti-Cold War tendency of the late 1940s, “peace” indeed tended to be equated openly with some larger social transformation. Twenty years of Cold War military buildup had forged a vast infrastructure that yielded to careful analysis the essential nature of contemporary American capitalism. The inclusion of well-paid, white industrial workers, especially those working in war production, and the exclusion of minorities from the benefits of the consumer society, together seemingly validated the view of a radicalism joined to the counterculture on one side and to Black Power militants on the other.

The further escalation of the war tended to reduce the role and prestige of pacifism without pushing pacifists or their strategies off the stage entirely. The assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968 removed the single leader who, increasingly close to articulating a sort of Christian Socialism, might have made peace sentiments the dominating spirit of the moment. Robert Kennedy’s death, and the fiasco of the Chicago Democratic Convention’s nominating Cold War hardliner Hubert Humphrey against a backdrop of police-and-peace-demonstrator street battles, seemed to close off the liberal option.

And yet the peace demonstration remained the dominant form of the social movement, as anti-war agitation remained the dominant form of radical education. A succession of coalitions and events preoccupied Left organizations and movements. Decisions about tactics, ranging from whether to allow public draft-card burning to whether placards should be regulated, became at times overinflated symbols of differences, at other times the careful calculations for reaching an ever-broader public. The Spring Mobilization Committee of 1967, assembled at a time when U.S. troop involvement in Vietnam numbered nearly a half-million, itself rallied a half-million demonstrators, including 400,000 in New York City. This added up to the largest march of its kind ever held in the United States, and one notably marked by tens of thousands from Harlem’s all-Black contingent. A handful of traditionally progressive unions, mostly locals such as District 65 of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, but also the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union and the United Electrical Workers lent support, but the crowds included mostly students and young people. Later coalitions and marches largely followed these lines, even while greater numbers of unionists, joined by Vietnam veteran GIs and others who presented a mainstream anti-war picture to the media. Women Strike for Peace, a grass-roots organization with a background in the Old Left, perhaps best exemplified the merger of peace and traditional women’s issues.

Not surprisingly, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, local Red Squads, and for a time the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) undertook the most massive campaign of anti-Left intervention since the McCarthy Era. Enormous energy was devoted, from roughly 1965 to the early 1970s, to collecting information on campus and community dissidents through photographs of crowds but also informants, mail checks, phone taps, some of these all tactics blatantly illegal. Government agencies of various kinds, law-enforcement to intelligence-gathering, collected files on perhaps a million and a half Americans. Agents of various kinds operated with virtually unchecked freedom to infiltrate and disrupt organizations, often through provocateurs’ insistence upon an ultra-Left, especially violent, response to government outrages. Police violence accelerated against black radicals during 1967–1970, making peace-oriented strategies for change increasingly unpalatable. To this government intervention, in no small degree, could be traced the precipitation of factional clashes and internecine warfare that devastated the New Left. Armed government assaults against peace demonstrators, most notoriously at Kent State University in 1970, had far more public emotional impact but less destructive influence upon the Left.

To old-line pacifist groups and sections of the Old Left went the laurels of staying with the peace movement after the war began to wind down. Major New Left groups, most prominently Students for a Democratic Society, fragmented and all but disappeared in any organizational sense. Later court cases would reveal an especially massive government campaign against the Socialist Workers Party, involving hundreds of agents, office break-ins, and other “dirty tricks,” a phrase coined for the Watergate burglary. During the last few years before US withdrawal, such new initiatives as the Indochina Peace Campaign of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden highlighted the increasingly orchestrated character of the protest.

Even before US withdrawal from Vietnam, some outlines of the future radical peace movement could be discerned. The failure of Alliance for Progress programs, the CIA-arranged overthrow of Salvador Allende of Chile and the wave of bloody suppression following that event swept in considerable sections of the Chilean Catholic clergy and turned Latin American Catholics in large numbers toward the left. Their sympathizers, some strategically located within the US Catholic Church, eased away from long-standing Cold War positions, increasingly criticizing existing regimes and Washington’s blatant manipulations. The covert and overt US support of “death squads” in Latin America provided American religious radicals with their first important radical martyrs since Martin Luther King, Jr. The Salvadorean killing of three American nuns and the assassination of Archbishop Romero stirred especially wide criticism and launched a peace initiative with radical overtones.

The participation of many ministers, priests, and laypersons in the sanctuary movement alone with US government persecution of them, dramatized the changing situation for peace tendencies. A majority of Americans queried in polls registered opposition to US intervention. Despite generational and other difficulties, wide and varied sections of the US Left managed to play an important role in the anti-contra aid and other support campaigns. At the local level, nominally nonpolitical movements, such as Sister Cities, had taken the place, more or less, of the 1920s and 1940s Russia Relief campaigns. Other campaigns in the later twentieth century, such as Witness for Peace, brought thousands of Americans to view firsthand the toll taken by American-directed intervention. “Peace” as a cry for justice had revived, in a remarkable diversity of American milieux, an almost vanished sense of internationalism. The reality of Latin American Catholicism meanwhile virtually banished aggressive atheism as a public Left trait and seemingly legitimized a religious radicalism of diverse qualities.

The Nuclear Freeze movement, peaking in 1981–1982, had similarly popular credentials and ambiguous radical connections. Representing a rejuvenation of the mainstream type of protest characteristic of the 1960s, the Freeze touched communities large and small with the hope of disarmament and brought more than a million people into Manhattan’s streets in June 1982. The largest US demonstration of any kind to that point, it drew upon wide circles of respectables, most notably from the religious and entertainment communities. Perhaps most spectacularly among the protest’s wide-ranging participants, Left community arts and protest arts tendencies such as New York’s Political Arts Documentation/Distribution expressed a graphics creativity for peace not seen since the 1930s, if ever. Like the early “Ban the Bomb” movement, however, the Freeze did not succeed in influencing national political policy and fell into disarray. By the mid-1980s, it had been all but captured and then robbed of meaning by centrist Democratic politicians. The merging of SANE and Freeze in 1986 also exemplified the victory of professionalism over grass-roots enthusiasm within Left-connected anti-war work, at least for the time being.

After the Freeze, small acts of direct action collective disobedience and large-scale protests against US policy in Latin America once again marked the peace movement. Sustained peace encampments sometimes highlighted New Age-influenced feminist tendencies related to gender essentialism and directed against the patriarchal world order. Meanwhile, Leftish electoral bids, notably Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential nomination run, espoused peace and disarmament issues. At the fringes of mass movements, but increasingly important in the 1990s, Jewish radicals (and liberals) of many varieties joined to urge Middle East negotiations and peaceful acceptance of Palestinian self-identity rather than escalating violence and territorial expropriations.

As the Cold War drew to an end, peace movements formed or revitalized in response to new or renewed US aggressions, with Left groups playing a major role. In 1990, an unlikely alliance formed between Ramsey Clark, Attorney General to President Lyndon Johnson turned peacenik, and members of the Workers World Party (WWP). Their joint work to document civilian deaths during the 1989-90 invasion of Panama prompted the creation of the International Action Center (IAC), with Clark as its first president. Responding to the crisis caused by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the IAC in turn formed the National Coalition to Stop US Intervention in the Middle East. It galvanized opposition to a threatened, direct US assault. It also attracted controversy, as it refused to publicly condemn the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein or to promote sanctions as an alternative to war. These positions, and the sectarian stridency of the Coalition’s WWP-connected leadership, led to the formation of a rival coalition, the National Campaign for Peace in the Middle East. Although some in its leadership had communist and socialist ties, the Campaign comprised the more traditional, non-sectarian, and pacifist antiwar Left, with connections to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

Both groups sought to stop an American assault on the Persian Gulf (First Gulf War) before it started. Differences of ideology and organizing style stymied collaboration, with the two coalitions organizing separate national mobilizations in Washington, D.C. in January 1991. George H.W. Bush, buoyed by a narrow Congressional vote authorizing war, launched an attack on Iraqi forces before the first of the mass demonstrations could take place. The hundreds of thousands attending the event ran up against a great tide of pro-war sentiment, eager to “Support the Troops” facing battlefield dangers and cleanse the bitter memories of defeat in Vietnam. With the rout of Iraqi forces in Kuwait, President Bush declared decisive victory over the “Vietnam Syndrome,” which had inhibited major US military operations for nearly two decades. Demoralized, what remained of the short-lived antiwar movement warned against the advent of a “New World Order” in which the United States, as the sole superpower, would use the military as a primary means to assert its dominance.

Undone by a flagging economy, George H.W. Bush failed to win re-election, giving way to the neo-liberal rule of President Bill Clinton, and an era of relative quiet for the US peace movement. Left energies, driven by youthful anarchists and international NGO’s, largely turned to addressing the inequities wrought by a US-led economic globalization. Post-war Iraq, crippled by devastating sanctions and periodic US bombings, remained for some a major issue. Throughout the 1990s, American and international activists broke sanctions laws by making trips to Iraq to deliver medicines and other vital goods. Leading many such trips was Voices in the Wilderness, founded by Chicago activist Kathy Kelly, with its roots in the Catholic Worker movement, anti-nuclear activism, and Central American solidarity work. The IAC also led sanctions-busting delegations, defending Iraq as a bulwark against US hegemony. As in prior eras, a functional (not formal) alliance formed between the pacifist Left, addressing primarily the humanitarian cost of U.S. predations in the name of anti-militarism, and the sectarian Left, addressing the human toll within a geo-political calculus.

The bombing of Kosovo by NATO force, chiefly the United States, in the Spring of 1999, sparked the brief resurgence of more traditional antiwar activism. A loose coalition formed to hold demonstrations and other advocacy efforts, highlighted by the notable leadership of SDS co-founder Tom Hayden. Once again, the IAC played a controversial role, when Ramsey Clark defended the reputed Serbian war criminal, Slobodan Milosevic, as a victim of bullying by international courts. Of short duration, the bombing campaign, even when directed against Serbian civilians and with wide use of Depleted Uranian shells on the bombs (seen by many as the European field-testing of “battlefield nuclear weapons”), could be perceived by Americans as aspects of a humanitarian intervention. The antiwar message found little traction here.

The attacks of 11 September 2001 put the United States on an instant war footing, in a political climate increasingly hostile to dissent. President George W. Bush successfully framed the “war on terror” as a near-holy crusade against a barbaric, global enemy that disdained American freedoms. Amidst the din of fear and calls for vengeance, left intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein argued that American policies in the region, including the sanctions against Iraq and support for Israel, must be held partly responsible for the terrorist attacks. Rather than launching war, they insisted, the United States should address the root causes of anger with the United States and prosecute the 9/11 perpetrators through international courts. Despite the fierce backlash at such views, an antiwar movement formed in the days after 9/11. The IAC created a new organization, ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and Racism). It sponsored the first sizable antiwar demonstration in Washington, D.C. in late September 2001. A handful of family members of 9/11 victims offered outspoken views promoting alternatives to war, lest civilians in Afghanistan or elsewhere suffer similar losses. “Not in Our Name” became both their rallying cry and the first great slogan of the newest antiwar movement. In the early months Afghanistan campaign, ANSWER, campus activists, and traditional peace advocates held small but spirited rallies and vigils, while the American public mostly cheered what it judged a just war.

Another Left grouping, formed around the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), created the next prominent antiwar organization, the Not in Our Name Coalition. In 2002, NION published in major media a statement against the billowing war on terror, signed by prominent intellectuals and artists, and soon led major demonstrations vastly beyond the circles of the RCP. Peace activists warned of “endless war” as the United States sought out new enemies.

By contrast to ANSWER, the RCP worked well in coalitions, including liberal circles, weaving an internationalist, anti-imperialist perspective into NION messaging. Meanwhile, victims’ families formed September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, personally “witnessing” the victims of American bombings in Afghanistan.

Bush administration threats of war with Iraq, based on false claims of an Iraq-9/11 connection and an active Iraqi “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (WMD) program, dramatically expanded antiwar sentiment and organizing. ANSWER-sponsored demonstrations drew hundreds of thousands to Washington, where strident critiques of the American empire split time with modest pleas to pursue sanctions as an alternative to war. Even so, major, historic players in the US peace community felt that ANSWERS’s hardline views would badly limit the reach and respectability of the movement. In December 2002, they formed United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), comprising hundreds of antiwar, human rights, and labor organizations. Partnering organizations included Code Pink: Women’s Strike for Peace. Started by Bay Area activists Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans, Code Pink combined longstanding feminist protest of militarism with telegenic direct actions, notably the public confrontation of government officials. The main antiwar energy, however, lay at the grassroots, marked by immense ideological diversity. Some dissenters had a developed, broadly Left critique of American power, while many others saw war with Iraq as an unnecessary over-reach, unconnected with security concerns.

UFPJ’s crowning protest, on February 15, 2003 in New York City, rallied some 400,000 participants. Under the banner that “The World Says No to War,” the protest ran in conjunction with others worldwide. Spanning nearly 800 cities in five continents, the rallies drew between fifteen and thirty million people, making them the largest coordinated demonstrations in recorded history. Most massive in Western Europe, they identified the threatened war with Iraq as an imperial power grab. Undeterred, the United States, with Great Britain as its main partner, launched the war just weeks later, at first achieving what appeared to be swift and absolute victory, marked by the rapid fall from power and eventual capture of Saddam Hussein.

Unable to find Iraq’s non-existent WMD, the US occupiers also faced an increasingly tenacious insurgency amidst what had become a brutal civil war in Iraq. For the next several years, both UFPJ and ANSWER turned out large numbers for national demonstrations, while resistance grew within the military itself. Iraq Veterans Against the War, like the prior Vietnam Veterans Against the War, formed to educate the public about the grim reality of the conflict, in which Iraqis largely rejected America’s guise as their country’s “liberators.” Parents of the military dead, most prominently “Gold Star” mother Cindy Sheehan, humanized the costs of the war. Eager advocates of the war, including hawkish liberals, prestigious journalists and major supporters of Israeli causes hoping for a large-scale shift of power within the Middle East, suffered a swift and embarrassing reversal.

Domestic repression and human rights violations became especially great concerns of the era’s renewed peace movement. Antiwar activists protested the post-9/11 detention of thousands of Arab, Middle Eastern, and South Asian peoples on baseless anti-terror suspicions, and worked to combat Islamophobia within both state policy and public culture. Opposition to the torture used in the “war on terror” suspects at the U.S. detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and far-flung CIA “black sites” constituted a subset of the larger anti-war effort. Legal collectives like the Center for Constitutional Rights and mainstays like Amnesty International played major roles in this work, expanding beyond the traditional range of antiwar organizing. Grounded in Left Catholicism, Witness Against Torture brought an ecumenical spirit of direct action to its protest, with Muslim activists rising within the anti-torture cause.

More than anything since Vietnam, the turmoil in Iraq and the rising toll in American blood and treasure turned large sections of the public and political establishment against the war. In retrospect, the newer solidarity movements had laid the groundwork for antiwar sentiment to blossom. In 2006, movement networks helped elect large numbers of Democrats to congress, winning on an antiwar message. A year later, Senator Barack Obama used his antiwar pedigree to campaign in the Democratic primaries against Hilary Clinton, an enthusiastic and prestigious backer of the Iraq War. Obama’s victory over the pro-war Senator John McCain could be seen, in no small part, as a referendum on the Iraq war. The stalled campaign in Afghanistan, earlier perceived as the “good war” and triumph of democracy through American intervention, also bled public support.

Bereft of liberal backing, the antiwar movement receded drastically in size but grew more ideological during the Obama presidency. Peace activism largely turned toward discrete aspects of the war on terror, such as the use of armed drones in the Middle East and North Africa and the ongoing detention of “terror suspects,” often innocent and arrested by mistaken identity, at Guantanamo.

On the political Right grew a certain neo-isolationism, with sharply divided elements. One section, reflecting the traditions of Realism, found value in the past writings of historian William Appleman Williams and the current writings of retired Lieutenant-Colonel Andrew Bacevich on the continuation of Empire as a self-destructive over-reach. The emergence of the magazine American Conservative brought something new into the peace conversation. Another, highly hypocritical section of neo-isolationists might be perfectly epitomized by Donald Trump. This section’s journalists and orators claimed to abandon “stupid wars” involving US ground troops while supporting proxy wars, including Saudi Arabia’s brutal assault on Yemen, and adopting a hawkish stance towards Iran. Peace movements embraced the first tendency, most especially in the prestigious writings of Bacevich, and helped to keep the second at bay. Stalwarts continued to protest US-backed aggression and saber-rattling, instead promoting diplomacy to address global conflicts. In practice, confusion reigned in public opinion, with some sections of military veterans themselves increasingly skeptical about war, while other sections of the public leaned far rightward toward neo-fascist ideologies and armed threats to American law and order.

The presidential election of Joseph Biden, Jr., in 2020 sent the usual ambivalent message of a Democratic administration. Peace activists warned against the so-called “BLOB” or foreign policy establishment, including high ranking career officers in diplomacy and the Intelligence agencies, who warned against an American “retreat” from the world. Peaceniks resisted the proposed aggressive action of various kinds against Russia, China and Iran. A qualified retreat from full support for the Saudi war against Yemen might conceivably mark a long-range victory of the peace movement, together with a return to negations over Iran nuclear policies.

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DeBenedetti, Charles. An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1990.

Gosse, Van. “‘The North American Front’: Central American Solidarity in the Reagan Era,” and John Trinkl, “Struggles for Disarmament in the USA.” In Reshaping the American Left: Popular Struggles in the 1980s, edited by Mike Davis and Michael Sprinker. London: Verso, 1989.

Halsted, Fred. Out Now! A Participant’s Account of the American Movement against the Vietnam War. New York: Monad Press, 1978.

Kaufman, L.A. Direct Action: Protest and Reinvention of American Radicalism. New York: Verso, 2017.

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Wittner, Lawrence. Rebels against War: The American Peace Movement, 1933–1983. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984.

Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, Pa. https://www.swarthmore.edu/peace-collection