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  • They Kept Us Out of the War
  • Daniel H. Borus (bio)
Michael Kazin. War Against War: the American Fight for Peace 1914–1918. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017. 378 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $28.00.

War might not be the health of the state, but, for many observers, it is the measure of presidential gravitas. Even such ostensible critics of Donald Trump as Anne-Marie Slaughter and Paul Miller praised his 2017 escalation in Syria and Afghanistan. 'Twas not always so. As Michael Kazin indicates in his timely and intelligent discussion of the peace movement of 1914–18, a sizable portion of the American public regarded U.S. entry into the Great War as ill conceived, a risk to both American democracy and chances for the peaceful settlement of the conflict. So prominent were antiwar forces in the early years of the hostilities that President Woodrow Wilson felt it prudent to hold meetings with its leaders and to affirm continually his commitment to peace.

Even as the peace movement initially stymied militarists' desire to commit the United States to the fray, it rarely held the upper hand. Circumstances always favored the interventionists, who seized the initiative by exploiting longstanding emotional links to England among native-born Americans, outrage at German war conduct in Belgium and at sea, and associations of military action with true manhood and real patriotism. Antiwar groups constantly gave ground, mobilizing less to reverse the march to war and the militarization of American life than to halt its further advance. An initial goal of preserving true neutrality became blocking preparedness programs, then preventing the declaration of war and finally stopping conscription. Kazin maintains that antiwar movements have special difficulties. Unlike their feminist, labor, and civil rights counterparts, they lack a natural constituency. Rarely active during peacetime, they need to mobilize quickly but the obvious leaders are not available since they usually have "more enduring political commitments" (p. 275). For all that, resistance to the Great War persisted, even after the April 1917 vote for war. Opponents managed to extract concessions, the most important being the progressive income tax on the grounds that those who wanted and stood to benefit from the war should pay for it. [End Page 613]

Public awareness of the war and the peace movement has been negligible in recent years. Like Kazin's, my students had little idea what November 11 commemorates. Yet, as peace advocates feared, the conflict had horrendous consequences. In the short term, the war resulted in the deaths of 116,516 Americans.1 At less than one percent of the nation's population, that number paled in comparison to losses of the other major belligerents. That figure was, however, twice as great as the number of Americans who lost their lives in Vietnam. The comparison is all the more telling when one realizes that World War I deaths took place over eighteen months while the Vietnam numbers span from 1956 to 1975. On the home front, the conflict unleashed attacks on hyphenated Americans and exacerbated racism. The war normalized federal surveillance of dissent and control of crucial information. It strengthened celebration of military prowess over diplomacy and enshrined Wilsonian rhetoric as the established cover for accelerated economic and political expansion. Kazin plausibly speculates that American entrance may have made the war more intense and foreclosed the possibility of a negotiated settlement. Fearing less American troops on the battlefield than the American economy propping up teetering Britain and France, the German high command undertook the last-ditch desperate offensives and especially ferocious attacks on shipping. These actions in turn increased the resolve of the Allies to impose a punitive peace that contributed to the 1939–45 war.

The great achievement of The War Against War is its reconstruction of the complexities of opposition to the war. It brilliantly counters entrenched misconceptions. Antiwar sentiment was not particularly pacifist in the current-day sense of renunciation of violence. At the time, the term meant advocating agreements that "would further 'the policy of avoiding or abolishing war,'" which allowed for support of military action under a number of contingencies (p. 4). Neither was the peace movement particularly isolationist. Few in the...

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