Ernest Howard Crosby’s Swords and Plowshares: A Lost Anti-Imperialism, Anti-Militarism, and Anti-War Classic

In November 1902 a volume of poetry was published simultaneously in New York and London that put forth the sharpest indictment of war, militarism, and imperialism ever penned by an American. The book was titled Swords and Plowshares. Its author was Ernest Howard Crosby. Today the work and the author are virtually unknown.

To say that Ernest Crosby is forgotten, verges on understatement. The last published essay to take Crosby as its focus appeared in 1973. The only published biography, a forty-page work titled Ernest Howard Crosby: A Valuation and a Tribute, appeared soon after his death in 1907. Yet, in addition to being the most prolific anti-imperialist writer of his era, Crosby was also the founding president of the New York Anti-Imperialist League and extremely active in both the American Peace Society and the American Anti-Imperialist League.

Crosby has been neglected, and even more thoroughly neglected has been his volume Swords and Plowshares. No study of the work has ever been published. Nonetheless, the book is one of the most radical volumes in American history and a key work of anti-imperialist writing. The volume melds Whitman’s poetic style with Thoreau’s call for civil disobedience, and it draws inspiration most directly from the Russian prophet of nonresistance Leo Tolstoy. This essay outlines Crosby’s work as a radical reformer and examines how he boldly attacked war, militarism, and imperialism – especially on the pages of Swords and Plowshares.

Though he may have been tilting at windmills in his efforts to demilitarize America and stop the course of imperialism, Crosby put forth the most extensive, radical, and potent literary attack against war and the war-makers of any writer of his day. Arguably, no author has yet surpassed him.