War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861–1914 (review)

In this well-written, fast-paced, and remarkably efficient book, Cynthia Wachtell traces the rise of American antiwar literature from the Civil War to World War I. Defining antiwar writers as those who, publicly or privately, questioned the “fundamental morality of war,” she carefully analyzes the published and unpublished writings of many of the major authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to uncover “telltale signs of their inner turmoil” over the existence and practices of modern warfare (2, 7). Challenging the conventional view that the American antiwar tradition arose in reaction to the blood and filth of World War I, Wachtell pushes back the chronology and shows that while antiwar authors may have enjoyed unprecedented popularity and respectability after 1918, the impulse that drove them and the critiques they leveled were nothing new.

Wachtell is hardly the first scholar to examine the literary impact of the Civil War; nor do her interpretations of specific texts by Melville, Whitman, De Forest, Bierce, Twain, Hawthorne, or Crane differ substantially from those of previous literary historians. What is new is her grouping of these works and her use of the antiwar lens to shed new light on these canonical writers. The parallels Wachtell discovers, the similarity of ideas, imagery, critiques, and concerns that her authors voice, illuminate a common, if often private, impulse many of these writers did not know they shared.

The book is divided into two sections: the first dealing with writing about the Civil War, the second with writing about war in general in the aftermath of the Civil War. Wachtell argues that Civil War–generation authors felt constrained by the romantic conventions and popular expectations of their day and, as such, refrained from expressing publicly their full-throated antiwar outcry. She is at her best when analyzing the seemingly minor revisions between early drafts and published versions of Melville’s and Whitman’s war poetry in order to reveal how these men attempted to strike a compromise between romanticism and realism. Nevertheless, she maintains, the antiwar impulse was already present, even if partially hidden by self-censorship. What is more, that restraint would steadily erode as the twentieth century approached and postbellum writers confronted their readers with an unapologetically unromantic depiction of their fathers’ war.

The second section examines how American writers grappled with the changing realities and new technologies of combat, starting with Hawthorne’s dim view of the Monitor and continuing through World War I and beyond. Both fascinated and horrified by the increased efficiency and dehumanizing mechanization of the killing, Wachtell’s antiwar authors rejected the glory of the battlefield and warned of unlimited carnage to come.

Through it all, Wachtell finds that “antiwar literature remained surprisingly consistent in its fundamental points and moral arguments, even as warfare itself was quickly changing” (181). What was different by the twentieth century was not the critique of war but rather the sheer number of writers leveling it, the forcefulness of their denunciations, and the popularity they enjoyed. This is the central narrative of Wachtell’s book as she charts how peace moved from the periphery to the mainstream. Ideas that Whitman dared only confide to his journal, Hemingway and others later would “flaunt” (183). The true literary significance of World War I, then, was not to give birth to antiwar sentiment but rather to make peace fashionable. As Wachtell notes in her conclusion, following the Great War “the antiwar upstarts . . . had stormed the gates of literary (and cinematic) respectability and gained control” (186).

In any survey of such sweep and concision, there are bound to be areas demanding further analysis, and so it is here. For instance, the “popular” war literature Wachtell’s authors challenge is never really defined except in very generalized terms, and the reader would benefit from a fuller, more nuanced discussion of the restrictive literary norms against which her figures...