# Rebels Against War: The American Peace Movement, 1941-1960 By Lawrence S. Wittner **URL:** **By** Joseph R. Stromberg **Published:** August 1, 1974 --- “In 1842 Richard Cobden wrote to a friend that free trade and the peace movement were “one and the same cause.” Libertarians ought to evaluate recent American pacifism in this spirit.” In 1842 Richard Cobden wrote to a friend that free trade and the peace movement were “one and the same cause.” Libertarians ought to evaluate recent American pacifism in this spirit. _Rebels Against War_ gives us the opportunity for sympathetic and critical reflection. It is a thorough study of the peace movement and its unavailing struggle against war and militarism. World War II crippled pacifism politically; at the same time it enlarged the pacifist hard core by forcing men to take a stand on military service. Mostly leftists, the pacifists were ill disposed to work with isolationists, and Wittner shares their bias. His account of A. J. Muste’s vendetta against “right-wing” George Hartmann’s Peace Now Movement—which sought to end terror bombing—nonetheless illustrates the futility of such sectarianism. This narrow purism was compensated for by the heroism of the radical pacifists in the C.O. camps and federal prisons. Seeing they were slave laborers, they engaged in Gandhian resistance, striking, fasting, and refusing all cooperation with the authorities. Wittner’s account of this provides inspiring reading for libertarians. An equally interesting anarcho-pacifist tendency also emerged during the war, centering around _Politics_, which published Paul Goodman, Milton Mayer, C. Wright Mills, Simone Weil, and editor Dwight MacDonald. Weil denounced “the Apparatus . . . that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves.” Libertarians who, like this reviewer, doubt that World War II was the One Just War, will welcome Wittner’s acid presentation of that crusade as the brutal and racist bloodbath it was. He unveils skeletons in the patriotic closet from Admiral Halsey’s charming advicė, “Kill Japs,” to polls revealing surprising support for genocide against Japan. Equally startling is the enthusiasm for Stalin displayed by right-wing industrialists. Wittner sees as the chief result of the war faith in American power and virtue buttressing our government’s self-appointed role of world policeman. Wittner traces the course of the draft and tax refusal undertaken by the Peacemakers, War Resisters League, the Alternative, and the Catholic Worker anarchists in the face of Cold War mobilization and bipartisan “McCarthyism.” Quaker groups criticized U.S. imperialism, Muste announced a “Third Camp,” and others applied Gandhian tactics to the civil-rights struggle. Finally, _Liberation_ was founded in 1956 and expressed the humanism and broad (noneconomic) libertarianism of radical pacifists. The atrocities at Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought into peace circles many shallow “nuclear pacifists” and universal-statists. The author probably gives too much space to such “friends” of peace, many of whom fell for Truman’s “police action” in Korea. By 1957 real pacifists coalesced’ with such liberals in SANE, thereby bringing the first pacifist successes in postwar politics. Wittner treats atom-test and civil-rights protests at length, and discusses the rise of the New Left in an epilogue. He notes that preoccupation with nuclear weapons left many pacifists unprepared for Vietnam. Even so, he concludes that pacifism was more deeply realistic than the supposed “realism” of American foreign policy makers. _Reviewed by Joseph R. Stromberg / History (339 Pages) / BFL Price $2.95_