James Morton Callahan and the Great War: A Crisis of Conscience or an Occasion for Patriotism?

Virtually from his arrival at West Virginia University as an associate professor of European history in 1902, James Morton Callahan’s scholarship and extramural interests displayed consistent characteristics: a devotion to “scientific” history and a commitment to peace. But the onset of war in the summer of 1914 created for Callahan, as it did for many American academics, an occasion to confront and attempt to sort out the apparent contradictions between their academic tendencies and their patriotic instincts. Callahan, additionally, needed to reconcile, or reject, his longstanding support for the peaceful resolution of international disputes with the onset of war. Solidly committed to objectivity in history, to the extent that he seldom provided insightful interpretations of his meticulously organized and factually based narratives, during the war Callahan abandoned both perspective and nuance in pursuit of vengeance and hostility. These attitudes, which would find a postwar legacy in Callahan urging patriotic citizenship education in the university curriculum, collided with years of his membership in a variety of pacifist groups. In short, World War I highlighted for Callahan the conflicting philosophies that peacetime had partially hidden: his longtime interest in peace and his need to rally enthusiastically around the flag, even before the call to arms was sounded. During the global conflict, his fierce patriotism quickly smothered his scholarly tendencies and overwhelmed his years of association with peace organizations and ideals.

Earlier war had tempted the citizen-scholar to long for participation. The Spanish-American conflict had briefly offered Callahan the chance to participate in the ranks, but a lack of opportunity to register for service in New York state, where he was then residing, had foreclosed that option for the thirty-four-year-old. The outbreak of war in August 1914, however, and the subsequent years of conflict in which his former professor, President Woodrow Wilson, sought to keep the United States out of war, engaged Callahan as never before. The Great War would test the degree to which his sentiments straddled the continuum from pacifism to engagement.

“James Morton Callahan in his office, 1912,” courtesy of West Virginia and Regional History Center, WVU Libraries

Although a proud pioneer specialist in diplomatic history and a political activist who prized his Theodore Roosevelt brand of progressivism, Callahan remained relatively quiet during the early months of the Great War. Within seven months of the first shots of the conflict, however, events on the high seas took on new and deadly drama following the first American death aboard an English steamer, Falaba, in March 1915. A subsequent and far greater diplomatic crisis erupted in May of that year when the Lusitania was sunk with 1,201 deaths, 128 of them Americans. Later, U-boats attacked the Arabic and the Sussex in 1915 and early 1916, respectively, again causing US casualties. All of these episodes occurred within a twelve-month period of continual crisis and intense negotiation. Later, Callahan would write that after the Lusitania episode, “[The] only true sensible pacifists were those who recognized the necessity of taking their places in the battle line trenches where France and England had been so courageously defending civilization.”¹

It is impossible to trace Callahan’s thoughts with any precision during this period, as he seems not to have left a written record of specific responses, but it seems clear, both from his general sentiments and later speeches, that he was angered and appalled, fiercely anti-German, and intensely impatient with Wilson, whom he had strongly admired when Wilson had lectured each winter at Johns Hopkins when Callahan had been a graduate student there. That Callahan’s views were intensely emotional and calibrated at a highly generalized level was obvious from a brief article he wrote for The [West Virginia] Educator in the summer of 1915. Intended as background for public school teachers, it viewed the origins of the war in an entirely one-sided and highly abstract manner. Although conceding that Great Britain had once been “the bully of the seas,” he now saw...