Radical Pacifism in Modern America: Egalitarianism and Protest

Radical Pacifism in Modern America

POLITICS AND CULTURE IN MODERN AMERICA

Series Editors: Michael Kazin, Glenda Gilmore, Thomas J. Sugrue

A complete list of titles in this series is available from the publisher

Radical Pacifism in Modern America

Egalitarianism and Protest

MARIAN MOLLIN

Copyright © 2006 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mollin, Marian.

Radical pacifism in modern America : egalitarianism and protest / Marian Mollin.

p. cm. (Politics and culture in modern America)

ISBN: 978-0-8122-0282-3

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Social movements—United States. 2. Pacifism—United States. 3. Radicalism—

United States. I. Title. II. Series.

HN65 .M575 2006

303.6’6—dc22

2006046177

To my resister sisters

and in memory of

Mary Moylan, Ernest Bromley,

and Philip Berrigan

Contents

Illustrations

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1. The War for Total Brotherhood

2. The Peacemakers’ Alternative Vision

3. Familialism and the Struggle Against the Bomb

4. Reviving the Compact of Brotherhood

5. Reversing the Traditional Pattern

6. No Bars to Manhood

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

Radical Pacifism in Modern America tells a story of contradictions. Its subject, the members of the American radical pacifist movement from World War II through the Vietnam War era, is the militant activists who were committed to countercultural revolt but nonetheless mired in mainstream social and cultural values. These organizers and grassroots leaders preached the gospel of open-mindedness in their political pursuits; at the same time, they remained profoundly closed to self-criticism and change in their political practice and personal lives. Ardently egalitarian idealists, they nevertheless replicated many of the hierarchies of power they explicitly sought to undermine. Although they were willing to risk their freedom and their safety, they were unwilling to risk questioning the basic assumptions that defined their lives and their work.

From 1940 to 1970, American radical pacifists stood at the cutting edge of a wide range of efforts for social and political change. Most of their work focused on campaigns against the broad sweep of American militarism: they refused to cooperate with conscription, they protested against war and U.S. military interventions overseas, and they resisted the development and deployment of nuclear weapons. Radical pacifists rejected war on an absolute and personal level, but as radicals who advocated a revolutionary transformation of American politics and society, their efforts went far beyond a purely pacifist agenda. The members of this movement dedicated themselves to the pursuit of social justice, a pursuit that they wed to the militant use of nonviolent Gandhian direct action.¹ Through their words and their deeds, American radical pacifists struggled to implement a far-reaching and egalitarian vision of social change to be achieved by working for civil rights, civil liberties, cooperative economics, and anti-imperialist struggles. Their commitment to change reached into the private dimensions of their highly politicized lives. Radical pacifists built communities of support, shared the burdens and risks of their organizing efforts, and challenged the cultural conventions that defined politics and identity in modern American life.

Radical pacifists were a small and self-selected group whose influence far exceeded their numbers. The men and women who served as the movement’s leaders and public spokespersons, activists such as A. J. Muste, Bayard Rustin, Barbara Deming, David Dellinger, and Daniel Berrigan, also stood at the vanguard of labor activism, the black civil rights movement, feminist pacifism, revolutionary nonviolence, and Catholic radicalism. These prominent activists carried the tactics and philosophy of radical pacifism’s distinct style of nonviolent direct action into the broader currents of American dissent. At great personal and political risk, they experimented with tactics and strategies that other movement groups adopted only after their potential to galvanize people and capture public attention had been demonstrated. Their history as part of this vanguard highlights the extent of what it was possible to achieve during the three decades that followed the start of World War II.

What they hoped to achieve was a world defined by their uniquely egalitarian and Utopian vision. Radical pacifists ardently believed in what they called human brotherhood within the family of man, a set of what were then gender-inclusive kin terms for relationships that deliberately disregarded differences based on race, class, ethnicity, religion, and nationality. This outlook framed their pacifism: in their eyes, violence against another human being was an unconscionable and immoral act akin to fratricide. Uprooting violence in all of its forms, including the myriad varieties of violence that generated, enforced, and resulted from social inequality, defined their political agenda. This was a comprehensive perspective that led radical pacifists to promote cooperative economics, radical trade unionism, socialism, and interracial justice alongside world peace. It was a commitment that informed everything that they did.

The Possibilities and Limits of Egalitarianism

Like female activists in other explicitly egalitarian movements, including the radical abolitionists of the nineteenth century, communists and socialists of the early twentieth century, grassroots trade unionists of the early and mid-1900s, and civil rights workers from the Civil War through the present, the women of the radical pacifist movement took the language of equality to heart, believing that it referred to them in the same way as it did to their male counterparts in the struggle.² Women interpreted the rhetoric of brotherhood to mean that they deserved equal standing within their political movement, even if they could not achieve such equality within society at large. Defying the prevailing patterns of their time, radical pacifist women stood shoulder to shoulder with male activists on the front lines of protest, where they worked as courageous risk takers whose pluck and endurance at times exceeded anything demonstrated by men. Women simply assumed that this was where they belonged.

Nevertheless, the activism promoted by the radical pacifist movement was a highly gendered phenomenon that shaped the experiences of women and men in different and unequal ways. Male activists actively promoted a definition of pacifist action that equated political militancy with a rough and rugged style of heroic manhood. In their hands, political protest became a way to defend and define their masculinity—a type of direct action identity politics disturbingly similar to that promoted by the culture of militarism, which identified self-sacrifice and courage as the primary markers of manly citizenship. In this ironic historical twist, antimilitarists found themselves and their protests profoundly shaped by the values of militarism itself, whether rooted in World War II, the Cold War, or the conflict in Vietnam. As a result, radical pacifist leaders overwhelmingly celebrated men as the movement’s most valued heroes and cast women in supporting roles, imagining them as faithful and nurturing companions who provided succor and assistance to the male activists who put their freedom and safety on the line. Egalitarianism notwithstanding, no matter what women accomplished on behalf of their organizations or where they stood on the front lines of political protest, female activists were most visible as second-class members of the movement, when they were lucky enough not to have their presence entirely erased.³

Periodic efforts at interracial cooperation for the advancement of civil rights revealed other limitations in radical pacifism’s egalitarian philosophy. From its inception, the radical pacifist movement committed itself to the cause of racial justice. Its members, both black and white, believed that resistance to war and opposition to racism were integrally related in their struggle against violence and inequality. Indeed, pacifists led many early campaigns against segregation and other racist laws and practices, most notably in the 1940s during the formative years of the modern civil rights movement. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, radical pacifists across the nation quickly allied with the southern struggle and helped extend it into the North. Some of these activists remained relatively anonymous, nonviolent foot soldiers in the struggle for a better world. Others, especially the black pacifist Bayard Rustin, who worked as an assistant and adviser to two generations of civil rights leaders, gained national recognition for their prominent role in the freedom movement. The shared goal of social justice and a common allegiance to the tactics of nonviolent direct action made these two movements appear to be a natural fit, at least from the radical pacifists’ perspective. Nevertheless, the relationship between these two causes was fraught with difficulties that proved almost impossible to overcome. Peace and freedom were not always compatible goals; white and black activists rarely saw the connections between goals, strategies, and tactics in the same ways. These differences, which could be covered over in abstract statements of principle, often hampered joint campaigns in practice. Most important, they undermined the ability of white radical pacifists to make lasting alliances with black activists devoted to the advancement of their race.

Sadly, where issues that turned on egalitarianism were concerned, radical pacifists seemed to learn very little from their mistakes. This is not a story of gradual progress: neither gender relations nor race relations steadily improved over the three crucial decades covered in this book. Instead, moments of great promise in changing predominant patterns of interaction between female and male peace activists and between black and white advocates of nonviolence were followed by setbacks and stunning missteps that subverted the advances and alliances that activists had made. Women rose to prominence in the antinuclear movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, only to be overshadowed several years later by male heroics in protests against the Vietnam War. White activists earnestly enlisted as pacifists in the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, yet made many of the same mistakes as had their predecessors fifteen to twenty years before. Only the rare alternative communities of black and white activists who shared their daily lives as well as political struggles, and who rooted themselves in specific localities during the worst period of political repression, sustained gender-integrated and racially egalitarian models of organizing that exemplified the beloved community and enabled pacifists to mount effective mass campaigns against racial segregation. But these were the exception, not the rule.

Instead, the movement trapped itself within a maze of contradictions. It provided women with breathtaking possibilities for action, which women seized and expanded. But it also constrained women’s opportunities for leadership and recognition, leaving them subordinate and marginalized despite years of service and militant risk taking. Male leaders, for the most part, failed to recognize that their culture of protest privileged men like themselves and rendered women invisible, and they repeatedly dismissed women’s critiques of this culture. This predominantly white movement also failed to see how racial blinders impeded their work with black activist communities. White activists genuinely sought to ally their pacifist program with the black freedom struggle, but they frequently did so for transparently instrumentalist or naively abstract reasons. Certain that their view of the political and moral universe was more comprehensive than that of black radicals, elevating their interpretation of nonviolent direct action into holy writ, and detaching themselves as moral exemplars from the masses they sought to inspire, they came to seem irrelevant to a freedom movement bent on transforming relations of power. Well before black separatists determined to gain autonomy from white allies, radical pacifists had alienated themselves from the black freedom movement.

These recurrent failures to put principles into practice and to learn from mistakes were not due to a simple lack of continuity in the movement. Radical pacifism’s pioneering members remained in positions of influence from the early 1940s through the Vietnam War years and beyond, and they shepherded their movement through successive periods of growth and change. Pacifist leaders and longtime activists successfully passed on critical knowledge about using the techniques of nonviolent direct action as a tool for social change; this information allowed the movement to build on its experience and to develop increasingly effective forms of resistance. Veteran activists also acted as sources of inspiration, especially for the young people who entered the movement in the late 1950s and the 1960s. Yet, time and again, the movement repeated destructive patterns that reflected the limits of radical pacifism’s egalitarian vision. More important, when activists did come to constructive conclusions based on their experiences, they failed to pass them on. Many left the movement and took their knowledge with them. Others kept quiet. The kind of social learning that would have promoted real movement toward gender equality and meaningful cooperation with civil rights efforts repeatedly failed to occur.

The forces that led to these shortcomings were complex. Critiques of male chauvinism and white privilege were present in both the Old and the New Left, so a simple lack of consciousness is an unlikely explanation. How much this failure to learn and grow as a social movement was a consequence of powerful waves of political repression that prompted American radicals to assume a low profile is difficult to assess. Yet radical pacifists swam in a sea of sexism and racism, as well as militarism, and their most valiant efforts to forge a culture that would provide an alternative to the dominant powers in the United States were simultaneously corrupted from within and opposed from without.

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

In this book I explore what radical pacifists discovered and then forgot, as well as what they remembered and passed on, by focusing on what activists did, rather than only, or even primarily, on what they wrote and said. Action was, above all else, the distinguishing feature of this movement. Radical pacifism drew its strength as a political force from the willingness of its adherents to put their bodies and their lives behind their rhetoric, often at great personal risk. Militant pacifists embraced the techniques of nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience. They believed, as longtime activist Dave Dellinger explained in the early 1960s, that the power of a nonviolent movement stems from the actions it undertakes, not from its political statements or the private beliefs and associations of its participants. Engaging in nonviolent acts of resistance—climbing aboard nuclear submarines, picketing at segregated amusement parks, holding vigils at the Pentagon, or staging jailhouse hunger strikes—placed radical pacifists in direct confrontation with the state. Resistance was also a performance designed to influence public opinion. Actions, more than words, embodied activists’ hopes for the future, their commitment to change, and their philosophical and political beliefs; they were a central part of the radical pacifist conception of politics and a vivid expression of the movement’s culture and values. Actions were how radical pacifist leaders hoped to create a vanguard political culture that would challenge the most fundamental relations of power in public and private life.⁴

I analyze the collective actions of the radical pacifist movement through a chronological series of case studies of critical protest campaigns, always keeping an eye on the dynamics of gender and race. The first chapter discusses the emergence of radical pacifism during the difficult years of World War II, highlighting the explicitly egalitarian rhetoric that defined this nascent movement as well as the distinctly masculine culture of resistance that rose to prominence at that time. Wartime, with its emphasis on a martial model of masculine citizenship, presented pressures that even the most principled of male pacifists found difficult to resist. This becomes evident when examining the gendered political culture that arose within the movement, which bore a striking resemblance to the gendered culture of military life.

Chapters 2 through 5 examine the ways that radical pacifism and its culture of protest responded to changes in American society and politics through a peacetime profoundly marked by the Cold War and the escalating nuclear arms race: first, the early moment of peacetime possibilities, and then, all too quickly, the frighteningly repressive onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s; the apparently more stable Father Knows Best domesticity of the 1950s; and the ferment of the early 1960s, when youthful rebels emerged to challenge the containment, conformity, and consensus that had come to dominate postwar American life. The tug of masculine militancy, both as a personal stance and as a media performance, was ever present. Nevertheless, the movement’s rhetorical commitment to egalitarianism and its willingness to engage in tactical experimentation led to the emergence of alternative models of resistance that simultaneously built on prevailing cultural values and increased women’s power and influence. As the final chapter explains, the Vietnam War and the movement’s concomitant return to more conventional forms of war resistance steered radical pacifism back to the wartime gender roles that cast men as militant heroes and women as stalwart supporters and secondary members of this radical political movement. It was a cycle from which the movement seemed unable to escape.

Ideas about masculinity, femininity, and the power relationships of gender and race played out with vivid complexity in the concrete activities in which radical pacifists engaged. These actions, more than their rhetoric or their consciously articulated ideas, remain the most telling and compelling evidence of what these activists attempted, what they achieved, and where they fell short. Examining their actions as well as their words reveals underlying contradictions that plagued the history of this idealistic movement for social change, as well as that of the society that surrounded it. These contradictions were not only between ideology and practice but within them. The radical pacifist movement came close to challenging the fundamental relationships of power in twentieth-century American life, but not close enough. Some of its inability to root out the causes of injustice and war reflected forces beyond the power and control of movement activists. But internal decisions and cultural assumptions also constrained radical pacifism’s influence. Egalitarianism only went so far, and not all displays of militancy were valued in the same way. Despite its best efforts to the contrary, this deliberately democratic and countercultural force of rebellion ultimately betrayed the same fault lines of inequality that divided American society at large.

Chapter 1

The War for Total Brotherhood

It started off simply enough. Tired of complying with regulations that mandated racial segregation in the dining halls, eighteen white prisoners at the Federal Correctional Institute in Danbury, Connecticut, all pacifists incarcerated for resisting the draft, went out on strike. Calling their protest A Witness for Interracial Brotherhood, the men argued for the right of prison inmates to dine at tables of their own choosing, regardless of race. Officials immediately rewarded the protesters’ refusal to work by placing the group in an isolated facility. There, under extremely punitive conditions and separated from the general prison population, the men managed to survive and even thrive. After 135 days, they had formed a viable, albeit contentious, community of solidarity whose connections to the outside world helped create enough pressure to force the warden to accede to their demands. By the time they were through, Danbury had become the first federal prison to abolish the practice of racial segregation.¹

Incarcerated war resisters in other institutions took note and, over the next several years, led similar protests against Jim Crow in federal prisons in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Virginia, Michigan, and Arizona, all the while expanding the scope of their demands. They began to complain about censorship within the prison system and the abridgement of First Amendment rights and basic civil liberties. And they began to explore the possibilities of fostering broader changes in politics and society. As they wrote to their allies on the outside, these prisoners hoped to do more upon their release than simply witness against war or stage strikes to integrate dining halls. They wanted to create nothing less than an expansive and popularly supported non-violent revolutionary movement.²

The year was 1943, hardly an auspicious time for extreme pacifists, as they proudly called themselves, to inaugurate a radical new movement for social and political change. The United States was in the midst of World War II, one of the most widely supported wars in this nation’s history. Unprecedented numbers of men had answered the call to combat, while millions of other Americans worked at home to support the soldiers overseas. In a climate like this, pacifism seemed to have no place in American life. During an era when most Americans believed that their primary duty as patriots was to work to win the war, such men were not only woefully outnumbered but bitterly despised. Labeled cowardly, treasonous, and un-American, conscientious objectors to war lived in a state of political and cultural exile.³

Yet, as the story of the prison strikes suggests, opportunities for protest and sources of inspiration could be found even in the most inhospitable of political climates. These were prime times for those fighting to achieve racial equality in the United States. The black labor leader and head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, A. Philip Randolph, had threatened to organize a massive march on Washington to protest the unequal treatment of black workers in federally funded defense industries. Buckling under the pressure, President Franklin Roosevelt signed an Executive Order that banned racial discrimination in war industries and established the Fair Employment Practices Commission. At the same time, African Americans enlisted in large numbers in what became known as the Double-V campaign for victory over fascism overseas and racism at home. Observing masses of black people in struggle emboldened these antiracist objectors to war. So did the example of Mohandas Gandhi’s direct action campaign against British colonial rule, which provided an inspiring model of protest well suited to those opposed to violence in any form. Even life behind prison bars, although oppressive and confining, could have surprisingly positive implications. In a prime example of the power of unintended consequences, the government’s imprisonment of thousands of conscientious objectors (COs) during World War II created a concentration of an otherwise geographically dispersed group of men that fostered a sense of community. This community not only strengthened the men’s resolve but pushed them to take their resistance even farther. United in their quest for interracial brotherhood, pacifist resisters discovered the makings of an ongoing struggle for social and political change.⁴

The Roots of Resistance

The radical pacifism that emerged in the 1940s traced its roots to longstanding American traditions of Christian pacifism and radical protest. Its absolute opposition to war came straight out of the principled nonviolence of the historic peace churches; Quakers, Mennonites, and the Brethren had long equated pacifist witness with the refusal to participate in war and other acts of violence. For centuries, pacifism had been a religious rather than a political act, made most visible by individual COs who refused to go along with war. But many of the protesters in Danbury prison were not members of the historic peace churches; they were mainline Protestants, self-described anarchists, and radicals of various stripes. Their pacifism reflected not just the traditional moral opposition to war but an American legacy of radical resistance to the power of big business and the state. These activists insisted that pacifism needed to move beyond acts of individual witness and a solely religious commitment to nonviolence. The abolition of war, they argued, could only be accomplished by addressing militarism’s economic and political roots. And they could only do this by building a viable social and political movement organized to shape public opinion and government policy.⁵

This merger of peace and justice concerns, and the consequent politicization of pacifist beliefs into a radical movement, initially developed in the aftermath of World War I. In the immediate postwar period, Protestant leaders and congregations, aroused by the Social Gospel’s call for Christian service and social reform, adopted the cause of peace as part of their social and political agendas. Pacifism moved beyond the historic peace churches and into the mainstream, becoming closely tied to larger struggles for social change. Cultural forces, including a widespread and growing revulsion against war, amplified the power of the intellectual shifts within organized religion. Horrified by the wholesale slaughter and stalemate that had characterized World War I and the apparent pointlessness of so many millions of deaths, Americans snapped up antiwar novels, crowded into theaters to watch antiwar films, built monuments to peace, and carefully followed the Nye Committee’s congressional investigation into the munitions industry and the way that war profiteering had led the nation into the war. Women’s groups, flush from their recent victory in the fight for suffrage, took up the flag of antimilitarism as well. Drawing upon longstanding ideas about women as essentially peaceloving and concerned with extending the principles of virtue, morality, and order to society at large, former suffragists and experienced female social reformers argued that women had a unique interest in the fight against war and created powerful lobbying groups and organizations that linked the prevention of war to the advancement of women’s rights.⁶

The Great Depression-era radicalization of America’s political culture also aided the development of a distinctly radical pacifist movement. In the midst of the economic upheaval and collapse of the early 1930s, the American Left achieved an unprecedented degree of appeal, influence, and mass support. Positioning themselves as the voice of the multiracial working class, Socialists and Communists utilized organizing strategies that gave them reputations for militant and effective leadership that attracted idealists and pragmatists of all ages. Their work dovetailed with that of the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), whose successful union-organizing campaigns in the steel and auto industries epitomized the power of grassroots protest to generate concrete political gains. For many activists involved in these and allied organizations, it seemed only logical to move from fighting against capitalism to fighting against capitalist wars. And as political radicals adopted explicitly antiwar goals, their groups attracted growing numbers of principled pacifists for whom eliminating war was the critical step toward achieving a more just and egalitarian world.⁷

The political journey of white minister and labor activist A. J. Muste epitomized the merging of radicalism and religious pacifism during the interwar years. Muste was best known for his leadership in the post-World War II antiwar movement, but he had joined the ranks of the pacifist cause during World War I. His primary affiliation at the time was with the nondenominational Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a newly formed organization that quickly became the preeminent voice of Protestant antimilitarism. There he forged important relationships with a growing number of ministers who regularly used their pulpits to preach of peace. Like other Christian activists of his generation, Muste refused to separate the goals of peace and justice and insisted that social harmony could only occur when class conflict was resolved through economic justice. A talented and visionary political leader, Muste played a key role in the 1919 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and for the next twenty years worked in left-wing movements for social and political change. He directed the influential Brookwood Labor College for over a decade, chaired the Conference for Progressive Labor Action in the late 1920s and early 1930s, championed interracialism, and experimented with the tactic of the nonviolent sit-down strike. Although he temporarily abandoned both his Christian and his pacifist beliefs in favor of Marxism, a spiritual reawakening returned Muste to his nonviolent roots and to the FOR in 1936. Within a few years he had moved to the Fellowship’s top leadership position, where he consistently pushed an agenda that linked working-class progress to the struggle against violence and war. As an indication of the great appeal of Muste’s ideas about peace and justice, Time magazine publicly named him the No. 1 U.S. Pacifist in 1939.⁸

A younger generation of activists also worked during the 1930s to make the connection between political radicalism and an antiwar stance. As the depression deepened, student radicals organized to address the problems of poverty and joblessness which plagued a nation gripped by economic decline. Motivated by an intensely egalitarian ethos, college activists sent organized delegations to the mining regions of Kentucky and to impoverished inner-city neighborhoods, volunteered for union-organizing drives, rallied for free speech rights on university campuses, and, believing that wars reflected the imperialist designs of capitalist nations, pushed the goal of world peace to the center of their political agenda. These youthful idealists believed that they could change the world. But they also feared that they would become cannon fodder in the next global conflagration. Students converted to pacifism and antimilitarism in unprecedented numbers, swelling the ranks of a small but active group of collegiate radicals and transforming it into the first mass student movement in U.S. history. Each year between 1933 and 1938, tens of thousands of young people took the Oxford Pledge, which renounced personal involvement in military conflicts of any kind, and organized student strikes against war on college campuses across the nation. Along with women and clergy, these students became the backbone of the 1930s antiwar movement. Although not all of these students were pacifists, this broad-based antiwar movement encouraged them to view pacifism as a vital stepping stone to political engagement and militant action.⁹

David Dellinger’s experiences as a college activist in the 1930s sparked a lifelong career as a leader in movements for nonviolent social change. Dellinger encountered radical Christianity in his first week as a student at Yale. Inspired by the action-oriented version of the Social Gospel he saw practiced and preached, Dellinger ventured from the privileged environs of the university campus to experience the world in life-changing ways. He volunteered to work with the poor in the neighborhoods of New Haven, Connecticut, enlisted in a number of union-organizing efforts (including a stint with the Steel Workers Organizing Committee in southern New Jersey), and joined other student radicals seeking concrete solutions to the problems of joblessness and class conflict. These experiences convinced Dellinger that economic justice was central to the pursuit of social change. At the same time, his association with progressive campus Christians nurtured a growing commitment to pacifism that fed off the broader student antiwar movement. Like many of his fellow student radicals, Dellinger believed that economic exploitation and greed were among the primary causes of war; only by eradicating the first could one eliminate the second.¹⁰

What distinguished Dellinger and Muste from many of their radical contemporaries was an aversion to violence that developed into a principled pacifist stance. What they shared with them was a commitment to an egalitarian vision of social change. For activists like Dellinger and Muste, egalitarianism and pacifism converged in an ethos of brotherhood that reflected their Left and Christian roots. This language of brotherhood harked back to the rhetoric of the labor movement and to traditions of working-class solidarity which had informed and influenced the work of numerous peace advocates during the interwar years, and echoed the ideals of the depression-era radical student movement. But this pacifist brotherhood also emphasized the work of Jesus, who saw all men as brothers, and highlighted pacifism’s roots in what one writer described as the Jewish-Christian faith in the universal community. From this spiritual perspective, the principles of brotherhood united people across all boundaries of difference. One did not kill one’s brother or inflict violence upon fellow members of what FOR staffers typically called the human family. Such pacifists believed that everyone was an equal partner who related to others in the nonhierarchical style of brothers and sisters. This rhetorical commitment to an egalitarian brotherhood, to the belief, as FOR leader A. J. Muste phrased it, that there was a fundamental kinship among all men, pervaded all aspects of their organizing efforts. It quickly became their most powerful discourse of dissent.¹¹

This language of brotherhood as part of the family of man was meant to be universal and inclusive. In the parlance of the times, people assumed women and men to be equal partners in this family of man. But it was very difficult to avoid the culture of male dominance which pervaded American society at that time. The idea of women being full members of the body politic was still relatively new. Female suffrage had been achieved only some twenty years before. As women struggled to gain acceptance as first-class citizens, they had to fight against a variety of masculinized political frameworks, including New Deal government programs that intentionally supported male breadwinners over women in need, and the impending threat of war, which elevated the masculine activity of soldiering into the ultimate of patriotic deeds. Egalitarian intentions notwithstanding, the pacifist rhetoric of brotherhood in the late 1930s could not help but carry gendered connotations that marginalized and excluded women.¹²

Pacifists’ primary concern, however, was with finding alternatives to violence and war. The widely publicized example of Mohandas Gandhi’s nonviolent campaign for Indian independence from British colonial rule in the 1930s made this task easier. Gandhi’s liberation struggle and his innovative methods of protest gained an attentive audience among those seeking new ways to challenge the structures and institutions of power. As David Dellinger later reflected, for many, [it] made respectable the idea that there was a ‘moral alternative’ to war as a method of solving political problems. For the radical wing of the American peace movement, Gandhi’s methods presented a new paradigm of political action: an example of how nonviolence could be used on a mass scale to achieve concrete social, economic, and political gains. No longer relegated to acts of religious witness and individual refusal, pacifism could now move into the realm of active and meaningful political resistance. Because Gandhi echoed Jesus’ admonition to love one’s enemies while relying on a spirit of sacrifice and redemption, activists believed that his otherwise foreign ideas could be readily transplanted onto American soil. As Bayard Rustin, a black Quaker and Youth Secretary at the FOR, confidently argued, Gandhian nonviolence provided a workable and Christian technique for the righting of injustice and the solution of conflict.¹³

The need for a moral alternative to violence intensified during the late 1930s when World War II erupted in Europe. Popular sentiments against war quickly evaporated in the face of the Nazi threat and Japanese military aggression—so much so that by the time