'War by Other Means' by Daniel Askt
Albert Einstein, a lifelong pacifist, made an exception for World War II. A small band of American pacifists did not follow his lead. Daniel Akst’s War by Other Means is a close look at several prominent refuseniks, their milieu and their legacy of progressive activism. It will be a surprising book even for people familiar with 20th century American history.
Given the rightward tilt of political Christianity in recent decades, Akst’s first surprise might be his reminder that mainstream Protestantism, the nation’s dominant religion in the first half of the last century, leaned liberal. Prominent Protestant clergy were imbued with pacifism and looked to Gandhi as a contemporary exemplar of Jesus’ social gospel. Their voices were amplified by the nascent medium of radio where they preached nonviolent resistance to evil through boycotts and protests and resolutely opposed U.S. intervention in World War II (until Pearl Harbor).
One of their lot, David Dellinger, a seminarian at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, survived into the ‘60s to march with the freedom riders in the South and stand trial as a member of the Chicago Seven. Pearl Harbor or not, he remained determined in his opposition to America’s war effort. His was the minority view and he was imprisoned.
Among the other prominent personalities Akst singles out were some fascinating figures. Dwight Macdonald is sometimes remembered as a film and cultural critic who set impossibly high standards in his crusade against all things middle brow. But during the war, he launched a radical antiwar magazine, politics, whose contributors (many of them not pacifists) included Simone de Beauvoir, Clement Greenberg, George Orwell and Marshall McLuhan. “Macdonald was a troublemaker and dissident throughout his career” who rebelled against what he called the dehumanizing effects of “bigness.” Also of interest is a Black (and gay) activist, the scholarly Bayard Rustin, who “throughout his life confronted a hostile world with unflinching courage.” Bayard was sentenced to three years in a federal penitentiary as a war resister.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
Many of the pacifists included in War by Other Means went on to various civil rights struggles after the war ended, working on nonviolent campaigns that could achieve real results in contrast to their fantasy of stopping fascism through passive resistance. Franklin D. Roosevelt was correct in calling the struggle against the Axis a “War of Survival,” but his pacifist opponents were also right to push for a better New Deal, an America that lived up to its ideals more fully than any politician of those years was willing to contemplate.
