War By Other Means: The Pacifists of the Greatest Generation Who Revolutionized Resistance

by Daniel Akst

Overview

"Akst argues that the modern progressive movement, wide-ranging in its causes and narratives today, has origins in the pacifist response to American involvement in World War II... At its best, one gets the sense of generative force born from such intense intellectual, moral and religious pressure." — The Washington Post

Pacifists who fought against the Second World War faced insurmountable odds—but their resistance, philosophy, and strategies fostered a tradition of activism that shaped America right up to the present day.

In this provocative and deeply researched work of history, Akst takes readers into the wild, heady, and uncertain times of America on the brink of a world war, following four fascinating resisters — four figures who would subsequently become famous political thinkers and activists — and their daring exploits: David Dellinger, Dorothy Day, Dwight MacDonald, and Bayard Rustin. The lives of these diverse anti-war advocates—a principled and passionate seminary student, a Catholic anarchist, a high-brow intellectual leftist, and an African-American pacifist and agitator—create the perfect prism through which to see World War II from a new angle, that of the opposition, as well as to show how great and lasting their achievements were.

The resisters did not stop the war, of course, but their impact would be felt for decades. Many of them went on to lead the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, the two most important social stands of the second half of the twentieth century. The various World War II resisters pioneered non-violent protest in America, popularized Gandhian principles, and desegregated the first prison mess halls. Theirs is a story that has never been told.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781612199245
Publisher:	Melville House Publishing
Publication date:	12/06/2022
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	1,008,544
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

A native New Yorker, Daniel Akst is a writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Slate and other leading publications. He has written scores of book reviews over the years and was a board member of the National Book Critics Circle. He has been a Koret Fellow at the University of California (Berkeley) Graduate School of Journalism, a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, DC, and a public policy fellow at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College.

Read an Excerpt

The first time young David Dellinger made the New York Times was on November 3, 1932, under the headline, “Yale Cub Harriers Pick Dellinger.” The story, all of two sentences, reports that the former high school track star was elected captain of the university’s freshman  cross-country team. The doings of leading Yale men were news in those days, and although Dellinger was an enemy of hierarchy all his life, he was paradoxically a natural leader. Later, at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, he was made president of his class. Eventually he would become famous as a towering and uncompromising figure in radical causes; Paul Berman, an insightful historian of the postwar left, writes that, during Vietnam, Dellinger “became the single most important leader of the national antiwar movement.” He became a great deal more famous as a member of the Chicago Seven, whose trial on charges of  criminal conspiracy and inciting to riot arose from their antiwar protests during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Dellinger sat through the proceedings with awkward dignity along with  codefendants including Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Tom Hayden—all radical celebrities in those fraught times. But surely Dellinger, the oldest of the lot (and in the judge’s view, the guiltiest) was the only one entitled to a sense of déjà vu, because he had been through something similar so long before.

In 1940, as he was about to begin his second year at Union, Dellinger was the de facto leader of an idealistic band of students who had decided not to register for the nation’s first peacetime draft. Long before anyone might have dreamed of the Chicago Seven, newspapers across the country were reporting on the antiwar seminarians who would become known as the Union Eight. Despite considerable pressure from Henry Sloane Coffin—Union’s president was known as Uncle Henry behind his back—these young pacifists refused to avail themselves of a provision in the new draft law that was included with precisely their sort in mind: “Regular or duly ordained ministers of religion, and students who are preparing for the ministry in theological or divinity schools. . . shall be exempt from training and service (but not from registration) under this Act.”

So determined were these resisters to remain untainted by the apparatus of war that they went to federal  prison—a segregated prison, reflecting a segregated society—rather than violate their beliefs by filling out a piece of paper. “The war system is an evil part of our social order,” the students wrote, “and we declare that we cannot cooperate with it in any way.” Because their objections genuinely were religious, they probably would have been granted conscientious objector status even had they not been divinity students. “War is an evil,” they wrote, “because it is in violation of the Way of Love as seen in God through Christ.” Reinhold Niebuhr, probably the nation’s leading theologian and a Union professor they had looked up to, may have been their harshest critic. A reformed pacifist himself, and perhaps therefore imbued with the zeal of the convert, he met with the students individually to try and change their minds. Dellinger’s hysterical father, in a hair-raising phone call, threatened suicide. But the young men were immovable, explaining: “We do not expect to stem the war forces today; but we are helping to build the movement that will conquer in the future.”

These words will seem impossibly idealistic today, much like the belief that freedom could be preserved from fascist military aggression by the sheer moral force of nonviolence. Yet to a great extent Dellinger and his fellow pacifists did conquer the future, even if he and many others left Christ behind. By 2004, when Dellinger died at the age of 88, Berman was able to put the late radical’s activism into remarkable perspective. Dellinger, he said, “came of age in one of the tiniest currents of the American left—the Rev. A.J. Muste's movement for World War II pacifism, a movement based on radical Christian values and vaguely anarchist instincts. No rational person observing that movement during the 1940’s would have predicted any success at all, and yet during the next two or three decades, Mr. Dellinger and his pacifist allies transformed whole areas of American life.”

That tiny current—which somehow became a tsunami of social change—has also given birth to this book, whose aim is not to make the case for pacifism but to tell the story of its remarkable adherents during its greatest trial: the Second World War. No one can dispute the horrors of war, or that opponents of our nation’s many military engagements were all too often right to challenge them as pointless, unjust or both. But it will come as a surprise to most Americans that, even after Pearl Harbor, thousands in this country opposed World War II. That’s the war we all seem to approve of—the quintessential “good” war during which Americans pulled together and sacrificed.

For the most part, they did, but it was a war thrust upon them despite their most strenuous efforts to avoid it. Before the outbreak of formal hostilities in Europe, polls showed that most Americans were firmly against U.S. involvement in yet another massive and bloody foreign conflict.

Conditioned by the bitter disappointment of the Great War, which by the 1930s was widely seen as a waste and a scam, many Americans were determined not to be conned again, this time by a war erupting from an unjust peace. “You were supposed to be wised up about the War,” said Mary McCarthy, explaining: “We were afraid of making a mistake, of being ‘taken in.’”

The evils of Nazism, early on visible only as the tip of a Satanic iceberg, competed in the public mind with those of Stalinism. The lies of the Great War had bred skepticism toward alleged German atrocities. People also worried that another foreign war would beget tyranny at home, for war always increases the power of the state, and tyranny in those days seemed to be in the air, spreading like a virus from nation to nation. American civil liberties had been trampled in connection with the last European war. This time, many feared, would be worse.

During the interwar period, moreover, the United States had developed perhaps the largest and best-organized pacifist movement in the world. Pacifism was part of the curriculum at some schools and firmly on the agenda of the mainline Protestant denominations that were such important institutions in the life of this churchgoing nation at the time. Liberal clergymen, including such celebrity ministers as the indefatigable Harry Emerson Fosdick, spoke out against war from their Sunday pulpits and via the popular new medium of radio, whence the gospel of pacifism reached a student by the name of Martin Luther King Jr. Pacifism was well-established on campuses thanks to a massive and diverse national student antiwar movement, with thousands pledging not to fight under any circumstances.

Even after the Nazi invasion of Poland, some people could find little basis for choosing between the growing array of combatants; alliances were shifting, and there were uncomfortable parallels between the imperialist Western powers and their enemies. Hitler’s persecution of the Jews (the “final solution” not yet in view among outsiders) was widely condemned. But why was it fine for Britain to occupy India and wrong for Germany to occupy Poland, or even France? Why not go to war with the Soviet Union, which invaded not just Poland but Finland and the Baltic States too? Who exactly were the good guys, aside from nations already crushed and beyond help? “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia,” Harry Truman would suggest on the Senate floor, “and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany.”[viii] But when Hitler’s Panzers turned on Western Europe, more Americans began to side with the Allies and see U.S involvement as inevitable. The mass pacifism of the interwar years began to dissolve. After Pearl Harbor, which surprised nearly everyone by bringing war to America from Asia, domestic opposition to entering the fight collapsed.

Yet against all odds, and perhaps all reason, some Americans adhered so doggedly to the principle of nonviolence that they persisted in opposing the fight. About 43,000 men were granted conscientious objector status once the draft law of 1940 took effect. Most were purely religious objectors, and some contributed to the war effort as combat medics or in other non-lethal roles. About 12,000, unwilling to cooperate in military activities, accepted assignment to a far-flung network of rural work camps run by the traditional peace churches in uneasy partnership with government.

But a small number of resisters were radical pacifists whose opposition to war was—or would soon be—part of a vastly more ambitious reformist impulse. Not all these radicals were religious, and some who were grew less so. Some were granted CO status and some weren’t, the haphazard local adjudication system inevitably producing widely disparate results. And some, like Dellinger, refused to seek that status. “Extreme pacifist is the best description I can think of,” Christopher Isherwood wrote of them a few years after the war, “but it is unsatisfactory and vague; for the group combined several sorts of anarchists, individualists, religious and non-religious objectors. Some of them had refused even to register for the draft, holding that registration itself implies acceptance of the military machine.”

Isherwood’s description serves well enough. Of the roughly 6,000 Americans who went to prison for refusing to cooperate with the war in any way, most were apolitical Jehovah’s Witnesses whose confinement reflected the government’s refusal to accept that everyone in the church was a minister. That left nearly 2,000 absolute resisters, a small number that belies a large impact. For the most radical resisters, who emerged from the experience hardened against prison, poverty and social disrepute, the war became a laboratory for developing the ideas and approaches they and others would employ, in the turbulent decades ahead, to bring about some of the most important social changes in this country since the end of slavery.

Table of Contents

Introduction xi

Part 1 Before

1 And Now, Youth! 3

2 Class Acts 20

3 The Making of a Radical 31

4 The Fog of War 43

5 Feeling the Draft 56

6 Catholic Dynamite 69

7 Not Quite Everybody 88

8 Union Men 102

9 Hardball and Softball at Danbury 122

Part 2 During

10 The War Comes Home 137

11 A Congress for Equality 155

12 Peace Against Prejudice 165

13 A One-Man Army 180

14 The Conservative Anarchists 198

15 Déjà Vu for Dellinger 218

16 Playing Ball for Keeps 236

17 Work of National Importance 247

18 Déjà Vu for Rustin 264

Part 3 After

19 Doldrums 281

20 Movement 292

Epilogue 310

Acknowledgments 315

Notes 317

Index 339

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

The stories of the brave people in this book are a profoundly important, and unduly ignored, part of modern American history. Daniel Akst tells them with grace and scope, showing how the convictions of his characters carried them through their whole lives, and into some of the most important battles for social justice of our time.

—Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost

Daniel Akst has written an engaging and eloquent book about American pacifists in times that tried their world-views. He tells a morally complicated, compelling story that will intrigue especially anyone interested in 20th century American intellectual and political history.

—Mitchell Cohen, former co-editor of Dissent; author of The Politics of Opera

Dan Akst liberates the history of World War II-era pacifism from familiar “Greatest Generation” narratives. Buoyed by anti-authoritarianism and nonviolent theology, antiwar activists—ranging from David Dellinger and Dorothy Day to Bayard Rustin and Dwight MacDonald—passionately opposed the conflict. With lucid prose, Akst explains how their resistance planted the seeds for the modern progressive movement.

—Betsy Wood, author of Upon the Altar of Work

Editorial Reviews

10/17/2022

Journalist Akst (Temptation) focuses this deeply researched and wide-ranging study on the WWII-era pacifist movement. Framing resistance to war as a form of fighting itself, Akst spotlights four prominent pacifists—seminary student David Dellinger, Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, Partisan Review editor Dwight Macdonald, and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin—who “sought to ‘weaponize’ nonviolence by translating moral authority into power.” Resisters to the military draft, including Dellinger, often found themselves “held up as exemplars of unpatriotic villainy,” and many were incarcerated in federal prisons. Yet the lessons these and other WWII pacifists learned were “carried forward... into their later nonviolent battles,” including the Montgomery bus boycott and Vietnam War protests. Akst draws incisive comparisons and contrasts between the isolationist and pacifist movements and argues that while pacifists may have been wrong about the need to go to war, they called important attention to “the treatment of blacks at home, the internment of Japanese Americans, and the wrongness of bombing civilians in enemy cities.” Though long-winded digressions slow things down, Akst convincingly places his protagonists in a lineage of antiauthoritarian activism that runs from Thoreau to the 1960s counterculture and beyond. This history casts the Greatest Generation in a new light. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

"Akst argues that the modern progressive movement, wide-ranging in its causes and narratives today, has origins in the pacifist response to American involvement in World War II... At its best, one gets the sense of generative force born from such intense intellectual, moral and religious pressure." — The Washington Post

"In focusing on four pacifists who fought against the war rather than fighting in it ... Akst wants us to consider what it meant to take an unpopular (and often illegal) stand against arguably the last war Americans widely supported." — The Los Angeles Times

"Akst handles a potentially controversial topic gracefully... War by Other Means is a valuable piece of nonfiction, shedding light on a small but strong group of people whose activism is mostly overlooked in the study of World War II, but who were, in Akst's words, a "tiny current — which somehow became a tsunami of social change." —The National Catholic Reporter

"Akst provides fascinating biographical sketches of his protagonists...They taught Americans to be wary of authority, consolidation and dehumanization." —The Star Tribune

"This text is an important, detailed and captivatingly told history of an under examined piece of US history. It raises questions about war and peace, allegiance and conscience, nation and humanity. It is certainly worth your time." —Counterpunch

"Akst convincingly places his protagonists in a lineage of antiauthoritarian activism that runs from Thoreau to the 1960s counterculture and beyond. This history casts the Greatest Generation in a new light." —Publishers Weekly

"A worthy exploration of a little-known episode in the history of American involvement in WWII." — Kirkus Reviews

"Fascinating... Akst grounds his protagonists’ accomplishments as well as their failings in their individual personalities; when your activism is a part of a lifelong intellectual pilgrimage, staying pinned down to one philosophy or strategy is difficult. Nevertheless… on a host of issues—racism, militarism, authoritarianism, and the looming threat of the Bomb—they broke through where others were often afraid to make a fuss. Channeling their principles into a more enduring resistance is the necessary work of their successors." —The History News Network

"A vividly written history of conscientious objection to war and militarism from 1941 to 1945 and beyond... a compelling and challenging book... [Akst's] scholarship can help us as we confront today the looming threats of wider war..." —The Catholic Worker

"Rich on interesting details" - Journal of Peace Research

"War by Other Means paints a compelling portrait of World War II–era pacifist militance." — Reason Magazine

"Inspiring and challenging." —The New York Journal of Books

"Absorbing...The human conscience is a complicated organ, and generational greatness can take more than one form." —The Pennsylvania Gazette

"Fascinating... a sympathetic and compelling story of pacifists’ courage and the enduring impact of their testimony." —Friends Journal

"Journalist Daniel Akst’s well-written War by Other Means tells the story of U.S. pacifists facing off against the Good War — and how being on the wrong side of 1940s America steeled and trained leaders who used nonviolence decisively in the Civil Rights Movement two decades later." —The Washington Independent Review of Books

"War By Other Means offers the most well-rounded exploration of the wartime pacifist's story I have yet read. Beyond that, it analyzes in depth the personalities and philosophies of some of the most prominent COs, helping us to understand their ethical decisions and the way they went about making their opposition to war felt." --The Anarchist Review of Books

"An important and engaging look at a cast of remarkable American characters and their unique blend of ideological pacifism." —The Marginal Revolution

"Interesting and well written ... If War by Other Means does help to popularize these too often forgotten figures more widely, then this book will have contributed a great service." —Matt Meyer, Fellowship Magazine

"An engaging popular account written for a general audience ... this is a terrific book ... lively and absorbing." —Scott H. Bennett, Peace and Change

The stories of the brave people in this book are a profoundly important, and unduly ignored, part of modern American history. Daniel Akst tells them with grace and scope, showing how the convictions of his characters carried them through their whole lives, and into some of the most important battles for social justice of our time. —Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost

Daniel Akst has written an engaging and eloquent book about American pacifists in times that tried their world-views. He tells a morally complicated, compelling story that will intrigue especially anyone interested in 20th century American intellectual and political history. --Mitchell Cohen, former co-editor of Dissent; author of The Politics of Opera

Dan Akst liberates the history of World War II-era pacifism from familiar “Greatest Generation” narratives. Buoyed by anti-authoritarianism and nonviolent theology, antiwar activists—ranging from David Dellinger and Dorothy Day to Bayard Rustin and Dwight MacDonald—passionately opposed the conflict. With lucid prose, Akst explains how their resistance planted the seeds for the modern progressive movement. —Betsy Wood, author of Upon the Altar of Work

"War by Other Means offers the most well-rounded exploration of the wartime pacifists’ story I have yet read." — Eric Laursen, Fifth Estate

From the Publisher

2022-09-24
Study of conscientious objectors who made waves during World War II and helped pave the way for successors in Vietnam and other conflicts.

When the draft went into effect in 1940, roughly 43,000 men “were granted conscientious objector status,” writes journalist Akst, who breaks down that number: “Most were purely religious objectors, and some contributed to the war effort as combat medics or in other non-lethal roles.” Some 12,000 were assigned to rural work camps in the U.S., continuing the work of the New Deal–era Civilian Conservation Corps and other infrastructure-building agencies. Of the 6,000 left, two-thirds were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and there were “nearly two thousand absolute resisters.” Those in the last category were imprisoned. Objecting to the war was politically fraught, and people such as David Dellinger, who, years later, became part of the Chicago Seven, had to wrestle with being decried traitors to honor their “radical antiauthoritarianism.” In addition to Dellinger, the author describes the work of future civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, a brilliant tactician who later helped organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington; dissident journalist Dwight Macdonald; “Catholic firebrand” Dorothy Day; and a host of lesser-known characters in the struggle. Some were followers of Gandhi’s satyagraha movement, which advocated nonviolent but by no means passive resistance; some were followers of Christian pacifism, such as the pastor Reinhold Niebuhr. A few, such as Dellinger’s friend Don Benedict, decided while in prison that “it suddenly began to make a difference to me who won the war” and enlisted after all. Akst writes effectively of these pacifists and objectors, noting that many of them took important roles in later resistance against war and for advances in civil rights. “They saw themselves as revolutionaries,” he writes, “and they were tough, having withstood violence, prison, poverty, and social opprobrium.”

A worthy exploration of a little-known episode in the history of American involvement in WWII.

Kirkus Reviews