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The American Peace Movement and Social Reform, 1889-1918
By C. Roland Marchand PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1972 PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-04609-9
CHAPTER 1
Up from Sentimentalism
The year 1909, to the casual observer, may easily assume the appearance of a banner year for the peace movement in the United States. Statements by leaders of the movement during that year bristled with pride, expectancy, and optimism. "No congress in our land," boasted Frederick Lynch, gained so large an attendance as the recent New York Arbitration Congress of 1907. "Now we have the sight of statesmen and governors and kings of finance almost fighting each other at peace gatherings to get the rostrum to plead for the peace of the world...." During the same year, Edwin D. Mead in Boston proclaimed the arrival of "the critical hour in the history of the peace movement," an hour when "decisive success ... seems clearly within sight."
From a more distant perspective, the single year 1909 retains little of this implied significance as an apogee or turning point within the peace movement in the United States. Prophecies and assessments, equally sanguine, had flowed regularly from the lips and pens of leaders of the peace movement every year since the turn of the century. Yet Lynch and Mead, both of whom were soon to gain positions as directors of endowed peace foundations, were not entirely mistaken in their perceptions. A change had occurred in the peace movement in recent years. Other leaders soon announced their own, corroborating discovery: that the "missionary" or "sentimental" phase of the peace movement had come to an end. A new age of practical advance had begun.
With increasing frequency, after about 1909, leaders of the peace movement emphasized how what formerly had been merely a moral reform was now becoming a "science." Idealists, necessary in their time, were giving way to practical men of affairs. As the sentimental and relatively obscure apostles of peace proved ill equipped to meet the problems and take advantage of the opportunities of a new age, prominent businessmen, national religious and educational leaders, and men of political influence were taking over the leadership of the peace organizations. The day of the statesman and organizer was at hand.
But this much-proclaimed transformation from ineffective idealism to influential practicality had only recently begun. At the turn of the century the peace societies at least partly deserved inclusion among those "somnolent and inactive" reform associations described by John Jay Chapman as having fine names, an "aroma of original benevolence," and a constituency of "respectable, rich, lazy and conservative people." (Radicals were later to argue that, despite all the recent changes in the peace movement, Chapman's description still applied in 1914.) Having first come of age in the 1830s and 1840s, in company with such compatible moral and social reform movements as temperance, religious perfectionism, and abolitionism, the American peace movement carried forward into the twentieth century many characteristics acquired during the reform surge of half a century earlier. A number of its leaders at the beginning of the twentieth century were also active in the temperance cause. Many still identified the moral reformism of the peace movement with that of the abolitionist crusade, comparing their progress with that of the abolitionists of the 1850s. Such a comparison served to stimulate their optimism and exaggerate the extent of their radicalism and martyrdom. Identification with abolitionism, a moral crusade which had triumphed despite initial unpopularity, may have helped sustain them while they were forced to acknowledge, as late as 1900, that leading newspapers still characterized their conferences as gatherings of "enthusiasts, visionaries and cranks." Certainly during the first few years of the twentieth century, the structure, personnel, and literature of the peace movement reflected as much of the genteel reformism of its origins as it did of the businesslike practicality of the decade to come.
To understand the transformation that took place in the peace movement during the first decade of the century, it is necessary to look first at the composition, ideas, and leaders of the major peace organizations at the opening of the century and then at the way in which international events and new leaders were beginning to push the peace movement, by 1905, toward new prominence and popularity. The changes that had already taken place by 1905, and the new leaders who had begun to appear on the peace movement's horizon, had by then set the stage for the emergence of the organized international lawyers, the impact of endowed peace foundations, and the campaign for business support that would bring the peace movement affluence, influence, and respectability by the eve of World War I.
The largest and oldest of the peace organizations at the turn of the century was the venerable American Peace Society. Now laboring under the burden of over seven decades of accumulated Victorianism, the society had begun in 1828 as a coalition of several local peace societies. Its goals were "to illustrate the inconsistency of war with Christianity, to show its baleful influence on all the great interests of mankind, and to devise means for insuring universal and permanent peace." At its founding, the society had been impoverished, provincial, and without significant influence upon national leaders or policies. Three-quarters of a century later none of these conditions had changed. In the interim the society had oscillated between modest prominence and quiescent obscurity. It had condemned a host of minor wars; but in 1861 the abolitionist sympathies of many of its leaders had brought it to reject compromise with the South and acquiesce in a major conflict. During the 1870s and 1880s its energies had been largely absorbed in the effort simply to stay alive. In all these years the society had advanced little beyond its founders' ideas or methods.
Needless to say, the American Peace Society drew certain strengths from its continuity with the New England reform tradition. The society's leaders at the turn of the century could still rely with absolute moral certainty upon those Enlightenment ideas of reason, education, and the dignity and universality of man which antebellum New England reformers had embodied in their moral crusades. The giants of New England's nineteenth century intellectual life and moral activism — Emerson, Thoreau, Channing, Alcott, Garrison, Parker, Samuel Gridley Howe, Dorothea Dix, Horace Mann — seemed to stand behind them, as well as their more direct reform ancestors — Elihu Burritt, William Ladd, and Noah Worcester. In a host of civic commitments and reform movements, from temperance and abolitionism to feminism, school reform, municipal housing, and insane asylum and prison reform, their predecessors had taught them that men, by their active efforts, could succeed in shaping their society in the image of the ideal. Edward Everett Hale, an active leader in the peace movement in 1900 and a living link with the antebellum reform tradition, succinctly described the legacy of reform optimism in James Russell Lowell and His Friends: "If they made a school for the blind, they made it for all the blind people in Massachusetts. They expected it to succeed. They always had succeeded. Why should they not succeed?"
After the tarnished years of the late nineteenth century, of course, the heirs of the New England reform tradition were no longer so accustomed to prompt success. But they retained a deep sense of social responsibility and the conviction that labor and self-sacrifice on behalf of a cause with moral connotations could not go unrewarded. The ultimate success of such an endeavor was inevitable. The frustrations of current defeats and the indignities of ridicule or neglect could thus be endured with fortitude, even with a complacency born of faith in eventual triumph. To a certain degree, the leaders of the peace movement "measured pleasure," as Arthur Mann remarks of other heirs of the reform tradition, "by the amount of pain they suffered in helping mankind," accepting "public indifference or hostility as a sign that their ideas were predestined to prevail in the future."
The leaders of the American Peace Society, so intimately connected with the political mugwumps of the age and region, thus buttressed their optimism with a willingness to fall back upon the mugwump sense of moral grandeur in defeats suffered on behalf of principle. But since the defeats suffered by the peace movement were so easily dismissed as aberrant outbreaks of violence that would reinforce public abhorrence of war, an atmosphere of hopefulness was sustained. In this movement, men who had inherited a need for a sustaining reform optimism might escape the dismaying frustrations of local politics and overwhelming urban problems by fixing their attention on a universal cause. In this new reform arena, they might rest confident that the irresistible forces of universal progress would themselves insure the triumph of world peace, a reform (like antislavery in the nineteenth century) whose time had come, if only its champions kept alive the ideas and spread the message.
The issues arising from immigration, urbanization, and industrialization had found the inheritors of the New England reform tradition politically ineffective, unable to formulate a simple, satisfactory moral response, and unwilling to contemplate fundamental economic and social reforms that might challenge continuity, harmony, and social balance. But such reform issues as the peace movement provided an attractive alternative for exercising reform propensities. Here genteel reformers might continue to satisfy their impulses toward civic responsibility and public action. Here they could apply the methods of moral suasion and intellectual leadership through education that they believed had achieved victory for abolitionism and would yet be vindicated in the temperance cause. Hence, the American Peace Society not only drew upon the same professional groups and social circles for its leadership in 1900 as it had in the 1830s, but it also carried forward the same reform attitudes, by now less ardent in intensity, more "pastel" in tone, more antiquated in style, that it had developed during its period of early growth.
It was not only the inherited nineteenth century reform attitudes that gave the American Peace Society a slightly archaic cast. The average age of those who held positions as officers in the society between 1900 and 1905 was sixty-three. Of the ninety officers in this period whose birthdate could be determined, twenty-nine were seventy or over. Members of the group directly responsible for the operation of the society, the board of directors, averaged a more sprightly sixty-one. Prominent Bostonians such as Julia Ward Howe, Edward Everett Hale, and Mary A. Livermore, characterized by Arthur Mann as already "old-time reformers" and "survivors in the age of newness" in the 1880s, were still active in the leadership of the American Peace Society and other peace organizations two decades later.
Nor were all the octogenarians as active as this triumvirate. Occasionally one of the elder members of the board was too ill or senile to join the discussions, and the society's organ, the Advocate of Peace, found cause for elation in 1899 because the new members that year had managed to more than replace those lost by death. Several octogenarians were reported to have attended board meetings until a few weeks or days of their death. In 1901, when the society changed offices, its announcement of the move proclaimed the most notable improvement to be the acquisition of an elevator, making access easier to those who had difficulty climbing two flights of stairs. Judged in physical terms alone, the American Peace Society of 1900-1905 did not seem a likely source of vigor for pressing the peace campaign in the century ahead.
The debilitating effects of superannuation upon the society were supplemented by the weaknesses of provinciality. Although it pretended to national scope and influence, the society drew nearly all of its active leadership from the environs of Boston. All seven members of the executive committee in 1905 were from the Boston area. All nineteen directors of the society were residents of Massachusetts. Even a majority of the vice-presidents, most of whom played no direct part in the management of the society, were drawn from New England. In June of 1905, out of eighty-six officers, only two came from south of Washington, D.C. and only ten from west of Ohio. An auxiliary society had been formed in Chicago in 1902 but it had expired when its president left Chicago shortly thereafter. By 1904 the Advocate of Peace was listing three auxiliaries outside of New England — the defunct Chicago society and two others in Kansas and Minnesota — but none of these represented an effective or growing organization. Such regional provinciality was nearly matched by the degree of racial and religious exclusiveness. In 1905, among eighty-six officers, not one blemished the purity of the society's Protestantism and only Booker T. Washington represented a minority race.
The regional provinciality, in particular, seems now to have been both symbolic and appropriate, just as the emergence of New York City as the center of the peace movement of the subsequent decade and the transfer of the American Peace Society headquarters to Washington, D.C. in 1912 were symbolic of the triumph of new forces in the movement after 1905. Not only did the Boston setting reflect the continuity of the American Peace Society with the New England reform tradition, but the predominant style of the society, that of gentlemanly high-mindedness, scholarly reasonableness, and righteous but restrained moral activism could scarcely have enjoyed as congenial an environment elsewhere as it did in Boston. Here, among the sons and daughters of the Brahmins, those social amenities were instinctively observed which reflected the qualities of restraint, dignity, order, and a sense of fitness and taste that were understood to embody the characteristics of a world at peace. And here the relatively leisurely pace of the seventy-year-old peace movement's reform activities found a partial haven from the intense pressures of a wider culture dominated by the new standards of business efficiency. If the Boston of that day seemed to have undergone a cultural decline in the face of foreign immigration and the vulgarities of urban politics and business amoralism, its "better element" might compensate for being shut out of local politics and having their proffered reform leadership discounted by asserting their standards in a wider realm. Perhaps the violence and restlessness of immigrant and other turbulent and uneducated groups at home could be counteracted by the reeducation of the whole society in the ideas of order and restraint that would also stave off potential threats to order and stability by turbulent nations and peoples abroad.
In many ways, as we shall see, the leaders of the peace movement were eager to enter the new age; but they parted reluctantly with the amenities, the security of very slow and undisruptive progress, the sense of moral autonomy and partly imagined martyrdom that characterized their Bostonian past. Under the heading "Pleasant Days at the Peace Office in Boston," James L. Tryon, a subsequent director of the society, later recalled nostalgically the rows of the old, historic literature of the peace movement "tastefully bound" upon the secretary's shelves and the days when the Boston group was the peace movement, when popular interest was low, when the president and other gentlemen of the society would call at the office and invite the staff to luncheon. To such sensibilities, the success of such subsequent events as the 1907 Arbitration and Peace Congress in New York City was "bewildering." "What followed almost immediately," Tryon reminisced, "I have often likened to a tidal wave, sweeping everything before it."
But in the first years of the twentieth century, the "tidal wave" that brought the movement prominence, prestige, and "establishment" status was as yet hardly visible upon the horizon. While the American Peace Society's leadership included several figures of regional and even national prominence, few of these leaders could wield political power or exercise direct influence upon foreign policy. In the early twentieth century clergymen still played a large role in the peace organizations, their presence serving to accentuate the moral and nonpolitical nature of the movement. In 1905 ministers and bishops constituted nearly one-third of the vice-presidents and directors of the American Peace Society. The same kind of moral emphasis was represented by presidents of small colleges such as Amherst, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Macalaster, and Western Reserve. Influential university presidents such as Charles W. Eliot of Harvard and Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia, who were later prominent in the peace movement, had not been attracted to the society. The other officers of the society, largely lawyers, journalists, philanthropists, and assorted freelance reformers, included several persons of national reputation such as Jane Addams, Edward Atkinson, Josephine Shaw Lowell, Moorfield Storey, and Booker T. Washington, but few who were in a position to influence national policy on international matters. Moreover, most of these prominent figures served merely in honorary positions. Except for the presence of three former Boston mayors among its vice-presidents, the society's only claim to direct political influence or even recognition by American political leadership in these first years of the century was the name of the aging Secretary of State John Sherman among its honorary officers. The absence of political "influentials" among its leadership meant that as of 1905 the American Peace Society could hope to influence national action only by shaping public opinion.
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Excerpted from The American Peace Movement and Social Reform, 1889-1918 by C. Roland Marchand. Copyright © 1972 PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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