Rebels Against War, The American Peace Movement, 1941-1960 (review)

118QUAKER HISTORY Readers will find this volume valuable as well as entertaining, and Edwin B. Bronner is to be congratulated for recognizing the worth of. the manuscript and for so ably editing it for publication. Earlham ColkgeOpal Thobnbubg Rebels Against War, TL· American Peace Movement, 1941-1960. By Lawrence S. Wittner. New York: Columbia University Press. 1969, 339 pages. $10.00. Recent history of the peace movement comes to life in this well-written, thoroughly documented study of the two decades after Pearl Harbor, which is a worthy companion to the monumental volume written by Peter Brock, Pacifum in tL· United States (1968). Lawrence Wittner has written a graceful, balanced analysis and description of the peace movement for a twenty-year period, centering around the years when "nuclear pacifism" was at the forefront of the peace movement. Actually, his study is extended back into the 1930's by a thirty-five page chapter portraying the pacifist movement in the years before the traumatic experience on December 7, 1941. Much of his work was done in the superb Swarthmore College Peace Collection , but he worked also in other major repositories and supplemented his research by interviewing a number of peace leaders. The bibliography is unusually complete , and will be a valuable source of information for other scholars. Copious footnotes have been printed at the bottom of the pages of text, providing additional scholarly support. Unfortunately, it is sometimes difficult to combine footnote references with textual points, because one footnote covers several sentences in the narrative. Having spent three and one-half years in Civilian Public Service in a variety of tasks, this reviewer was curious to see how a historian born in 1941 would view his World War II experience, and that of the other 12,000 pacifists in C.P.S. It was surprising to find that the eight million man-days of work, ranging from firefighting to starvation experiments, from care of the mentally ill to conservation efforts, were all summarized and dismissed in a paragraph, while twenty-five pages were devoted to a description of the various forms of resistance to the draft within the C.P.S. system and through imprisonment. It is useful to be reminded of the repression under which pacifists and others lived in the McCarthy era, when citizens were so fearful of accepting leaflets that one might offer material for twenty minutes on Times Square before a person would accept. Plans to make a movie about Hiawatha were abandoned because the Indian chief had attempted peace efforts among the Five Nations and this was suspected of being a Communist plot. The American response to atomic bombs, to fall-out, and to the threat of push-button atomic war led to the development of what Wittner calls "nuclear pacifism." There had been some flurry of organization in the late 1940's, and a much larger movement developed a decade later after the McCarthy era. BOOK REVIEWS119 Wittner emphasizes the most radical wing of the peace movement, although he does devote some space to the more moderate elements. He points out that pacifists tend to be on the radical edge of society generally, and are involved in other issues of social change such as the race question. This is a sympathetic study of the peace movement, yet is not sentimental. It is useful for us to study these two decades, for it helps us to understand the present. Now we need to have someone study the World War I years and the decades between the two wars, to bridge the gap between this study and the Brock volume. Haverford CollegeEdwin B. Bbonner Crusade for Freedom: Women of tL· Antislavery Movement. By Alma Lutz. Boston: Beacon Press. 1968. 338 pages. Illustrations. $7.50. This is an excellent narrative account of the contributions women made to the antislavery movement. It provides more information about such notable women reformers as Elizabeth Chandler, the Grimké sisters, Prudence Crandall, Maria Weston Chapman, Abby Kelly Foster, Lucy Stone, and Lydia Maria Child than is collected in any other single volume. Since William Lloyd Garrison assumed a strong stance on the question of women's rights, it is not surprising that most...