PACIFISM

"Never Again."

In the early years after the Great War of 1914-1918, a sense of revulsion swept over the Western world as the cost of that war in men and money was reckoned. Americans in particular felt they had been pulled into a conflict of little direct importance and of little positive consequence. A strong mood of "never again, never again war" developed. War itself was the enemy, since it resolved little and destroyed much. This antiwar mood intensified in the first half of the decade, when domestic issues dominated the American consciousness and when conflicts raged in Asia, Africa, and Europe in the second. The antiwar mood in the United States was not just an opposition to wars that did not affect American interests but to war itself. Pacifism became a deeply held conviction, particularly in religious circles.

Catholic Attitudes toward War

The Roman Catholic Church was lightly affected by this pacifist mood. The church had long ago worked out a concept of just wars, wars that in Catholic theology did not violate Christian ethics, that limited the impact of pacifism within its ranks. In addition, the immigrant backgrounds of many in the American Catholic community, with their ties to family members and friends in their countries of origin, gave the American church an interest in accepting the wars of the 1930s. However, Dorothy Day, who did not abandon her left-wing pacifism when she converted to Catholicism, spoke vigorously and openly against war during the decade. Her Catholic Worker movement insisted that Christians, especially Catholics, live their religious values, and one of the greatest of these was to oppose killing. For her there was no just war, only war.

Protestant Pacifism

Pacifism ran most deeply in the Protestant community, although even there it was shallower than it sometimes appeared. Several antiwar activists came from the Protestant clergy. The clergy, regretting the excessive enthusiasm with which they supported the American effort in World War I, seemed convinced they would not allow themselves to be used in the same way again. Many of these ministers, particularly the younger ones, admired and respected the example of Norman Thomas, who as a Presbyterian minister refused to support World War I and moved from that antiwar position into the Socialist Party as the organization that would most effectively prevent wars in the future.

The Fellowship of Reconciliation and The World To-morrow

Thomas was one of the founders and the first editor of the pacifist magazine The World Tomorrow, the voice of the antiwar Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). In the 1930s the journal was edited by Kirby Page, a minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), While FOR had a modest membership on the left wing of Protestantism and The World Tomorrow had a modest circulation, their existence reflected an important view in the early part of the 1930s. In 1934 The World Tomorrow conducted a mail poll of thirteen thousand Protestant clerics. Of the respondents 85 percent said they would not support the United States if another war were declared.

Conflict

FOR and The World Tomorrow both suffered as men and women wrestled with the issue of violence for political aims. Could and should force be used to make a better world? Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr answered yes in his influential book Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), in which he suggested a major weakness of liberalism was its inability to understand the nature of power and the unwillingness of those who have it to give it up voluntarily. Force could be used to bring justice to an unjust world. Protestants in groups such as FOR and the Socialist Party split over the question of force in 1934 and over the issue of whether violence could be used to advance the cause of the working class. When the Socialist Party adopted a platform that supported force in a revolutionary situation, social democrats charged that this position was just communism in another guise and left the party. FOR split effectively over the same issue the same year, and both organizations drifted into impotence. The World Tomorrow ceased publication with the reorganization of FOR when J. B. Matthews, later a paid witness before anticommunist congressional committees, tried to urge FOR to accept revolutionary violence by workers.

Communism

While some Protestants worked with pacifist and socialist antiwar organizations, others drifted into the Communist Party as a way of expressing their revulsion with war. The party was particularly effective in setting up organizations that attracted people who supported issues currently advanced by the party. After 1935 many of these were "front" groups—organizations often financially supported by the Communist Party but headed by liberals, socialists, or those sympathetic to Communist causes. One of the largest was the League Against War and Fascism, headed by Harry F. Ward, a prominent Methodist minister and professor at Union Theological Seminary. This antiwar group gave Ward an opportunity to advance his beliefs in the ethics of Jesus and join with large groups of people in the United States and abroad who would work to block the coming of another war. The league became the largest front for the Communist Party. The league was able to expand its influence and take along with it fellow travelers such as Ward when it was reorganized to support collective security—that is, to support armed conflict against the aggressive fascist powers—as the League for Peace and Freedom in 1938. Real pacifists left, but they were replaced by others who had no objection to working with Communists against the increasing threat of Germany, Italy, and Japan.

Other Approaches to Pacifism

Realists such as Niebuhr refused to follow the various leads of the Communist Party, but others like him insisted that a great weakness of modernist Protestants was their refusal to understand power, at first in the class struggle and then, as the decade wore on, in the aggression that characterized the last half of the decade. Niebuhr's influence was great, but many prominent Protestants remained committed to the ideals of pacifism. Some worked with the concepts of passive resistance being developed by Mohandas K. Gandhi, and others committed themselves to an attempt to understand the pacifist message of Jesus. Leaders such as Harry Emerson Fosdick, John Haynes Holmes, and Bishop Francis McConnell continued to insist, even after war erupted in China and Europe, that if Christianity were to have real meaning and a real connection with Jesus' words, then his followers must be willing to turn the other cheek when attacked and strive to find alternatives to violence before being attacked. They believed reason and moral suasion could make a difference in human affairs.