Publishers Weekly
09/21/2020
Journalist Lombardi debuts with a well-researched and wide-ranging history of America’s “soldier-dissenters” and their efforts to speak truth to power. She contends that Revolutionary War soldiers who refused to fire their weapons in combat or defied orders to guard private farms helped to define what it would mean to be an American citizen, and details how “paltry soldier’s wages” and new taxes to pay off war debts sparked an armed uprising in Massachusetts in 1786. Disenchantment with plans to add Texas as a slave state led to mass desertions during the Mexican War, Lombardi notes, and set the stage for the Civil War, which saw acts of courage and defiance on both sides. Quaker soldiers served as medics or fled to Canada, while Black men and women, including Harriet Tubman and Lewis Douglass, the son of abolitionist Frederick Douglass,eagerly proved their mettle in combat. WWI and WWII saw harsher penalties for desertion, crackdowns on conscientious objectors, and battles to integrate the military. Lombardi also describes Vietnam War veteran John Kerry’s involvement in the antiwar movement, details protests by soldiers who enlisted after 9/11 and became disillusioned with the war on terror, and profiles Iraq War whistleblower Chelsea Manning. The wealth of detail impresses, though some sections drag. Still, this is an enlightening roundup of the long tradition of resistance within America’s armed forces. (Nov.)
From the Publisher
Praise for I Ain't Marching Anymore:
“I Ain’t Marching Anymore is a must-read addition to books on the U.S. peace movement.”
—CounterPunch
“In writing I Ain’t Marching Anymore, Chris Lombardi examines dissent in a manner that glorifies those who object to war as much as the public generally glorifies the nation’s most heroic warriors. I strongly recommend that high school and college students read her book as part of establishing a value system for life.”
—The VVA Veteran
“Lombardi covers a lot of ground and chronicles events too little remembered today. Anti-war activists and civil libertarians will find aid and comfort in stories of those who just said no.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“An enlightening roundup of the long tradition of resistance within America's armed forces.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Lombardi's book is well written and thoroughly researched, and includes many personal stories that offer great insight into the courage each dissenter had to summon and the consequences of their action.”
—Booklist
“This big-picture overview makes Lombardi’s meticulously researched text essential reading. Beginning with Ritter’s revolutionary act of conscience, she covers every armed conflict the U.S. has engaged in and zeroes in on the many principled acts of courage that have turned flag-waving patriots into anti-war activists. The result is both harrowing and inspiring.”
—The Indypendent
“What is striking and uplifting about this densely researched book is how often, and how naturally, people rediscover or unearth their humanity by refusing to kill and organizing against war.”
—Frida Berrigan, Waging Nonviolence
“Tens of thousands of books have been written about the American military in battle. But this is the first I've ever seen that tells the full story of more than two centuries of brave and stubborn dissenters who questioned whether these wars should be fought at all. Chris Lombardi honors these heroes with the vivid and lively narrative that they deserve.”
—Adam Hochschild
“With I Ain't Marching Anymore, Chris Lombardi has given us both a thorough history of military dissent going back to the American Revolution and a vivid series of wartime set pieces that bring these dissenters to life. The result is a highly original book, at once scholarly and intimate, exposing the clash between personal conviction and social expectation whose significance stretches far beyond the battlefield.”
—Eric Jaffe, author of A Curious Madness: An American Combat Psychiatrist, a Japanese War Crimes Suspect, and an Unsolved Mystery from World War II
Kirkus Reviews
2020-08-27
An episodic account of Americans who, in times of war, have gone against the mainstream.
The title comes from Phil Ochs, and it’s on the mark, since many of journalist Lombardi’s subjects marched, fought, bled—and then resisted. One case in point is Daniel Shays, who fought bravely during the Revolutionary War but then, underpaid and with a family to support, had to sell the sword given to him by the Marquis de Lafayette. “The inadequate pay made soldiers like Shays…suspect that those in power, from state legislators to General Washington, saw them as somehow disposable,” Lombardi writes. Thus Shays’ Rebellion and other actions by veterans demanding compensation, a theme that would be picked up 150 years later with the Bonus Army. Some of the author’s other subjects include Ethan Allen Hitchcock, who went against his superiors in objection to the terms of the “Indian removals” of the Jacksonian era; “after nearly a year of crossing the country and talking to tribal leaders,” writes Lombardi, Hitchcock wrote a detailed report showing that, as he put it, “every conceivable subterfuge was employed by designing white men on ignorant Indians.” That report was suppressed. The author also writes about the women who fought in disguise in the Civil War and Clara Barton, whose “gender-dissent lay in her creation of a formerly inconceivable all-female battlefield nursing corps.” The definition seems stretched to the point of breaking before returning to familiar ground with such figures as Vietnam War fighter–turned–anti-war activist–turned-politician John Kerry, who “was among the eight hundred veterans on the steps of the Capitol who threw back their medals, ribbons, war memorabilia.” The narrative often runs out of steam, and there’s not much of a thesis—there are those who go along and those who don’t—but Lombardi covers a lot of ground and chronicles events too little remembered today.
Anti-war activists and civil libertarians will find aid and comfort in stories of those who just said no.
