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BOOK REVIEW | NONFICTION

The War to Stay Out of the War Against

War
By KEVIN BAKER JAN. 4, 2017

WAR AGAINST WAR

The American Fight for Peace, 1914-1918
By Michael Kazin
Illustrated. 378 pp. Simon & Schuster. $28.

Yet it was our lives that were at stake, and we had been taught even as
children that God himself created them and set us humans above all his other
creatures, Alfred Dblin has one German veteran of World War I tell another in
his novel about postwar Berlin, A People Betrayed. And here we were flinging
them aside, our lives, as though they were dead logs, as though we had never
learned anything.

The Americans who struggled mightily to prevent their own entry into this,
the most senseless of wars, must have thought much the same thing about their
compatriots. They must also have wondered how it was that they did not prevail.

After all, they seemed to have everything going for them, as Michael Kazin
makes clear in his fine, sorrowful history, War Against War. Unlike most of
Europe, which had sleepwalked into the conflict, Americans had almost three
years to watch and absorb just how horrible and futile 20th-century warfare could
be. Never had politics made stranger, or more numerous, bedfellows than the
movement to keep us out of World War I.

Working actively against American intervention were the countrys growing

Socialist Party, which had 1,200 members in elected office; key figures in
Congress, including the great progressive Republicans George Norris and Robert

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La Follette, and the populist Democratic House majority leader (and white
supremacist) Claude Kitchin; powerful industrialists like Andrew Carnegie and
Henry Ford; revered social reformers such as Jane Addams and the liberal rabbi
Stephen Wise; the peace-loving secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan; the
publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst; Helen Keller, civil rights groups,
labor unions, the womens movement, Irish- and German-American groups,
countless clergymen and assorted independent radicals. Even, for a time, the
president of the United States himself, Woodrow Wilson. Not until the
movement to end the Vietnam War half a century later would there be as large, as
influential and as tactically adroit a campaign against U.S. intervention in
another land, Kazin notes.

And yet we did go to war, and in just a year and a half over 116,000 young
Americans about twice the number of Americans killed over 20 years in
Vietnam would throw their own lives like so many more dead logs into the
terrible fire. Kazins work is an instructive one, an important book in chronicling
a too often neglected chapter in our history. Most of all, it is a timely reminder of
how easily the will of the majority can be thwarted in even the mightiest of
democracies.

Kazin contends that the antiwar forces were ultimately unable to overcome
two main obstacles. One was simply outside events, primarily Germanys
determination to use unrestricted submarine warfare against any ships trying to
supply the Allied Powers. The other was that many of the groups and individuals
leading the opposition to the war were distracted or restrained by their loyalties
to other goals and institutions. They had to decide, for instance, whether their
dedication to winning womens right to vote, or the right of labor to organize or
the electoral prospects of Wilsons new, progressive Democratic Party outweighed
their need to keep the country out of war.

A longtime historian of the American left, Kazin establishes early on where

his own sympathies lie: I wish the United States had stayed out of the Great
War. The failure to do so created the establishment of a political order most
Americans now take for granted, even if some protest it: a state equipped to fight
numerous wars abroad while keeping a close watch on the potentially subversive
activities of its citizens at home. Americas intervention, Kazin argues,
foreclosed the possibility of a negotiated peace, and led to the punitive peace

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of the Versailles Treaty, and pretty much everything that came afterward,
including the Nazis, World WarII, the Holocaust, even the Iraq war.

No matter how familiar one is with the era, it is still shocking to read the
breathtaking swiftness with which the country flipped into reaction once war was
declared. A national vigilante group, the American Protective League, encouraged
by the authorities, took to stopping men on the street to check for slackers. The
Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917-18, passed by a suddenly belligerent
Congress, were the most outrageously unconstitutional violations of our civil
liberties since the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts. The Supreme Court supinely
upheld this legislation, and the Wilson administration ruthlessly exploited it,
censoring the mails, shutting down publications and sentencing the likes of
Eugene V. Debs, the gentle 63-year-old Socialist leader, to jail for 10 years for
making a speech indirectly questioning the draft. The waves of reaction rolled on
after the Armistice. Strikes were brutally crushed and labor unions all but
annihilated. Black churches and neighborhoods were burned to the ground, and
hundreds, maybe thousands of African-Americans murdered in white-on-black
pogroms. Civil liberties continued to be curtailed, elected Socialist leaders were
thrown out of office and radicals like Emma Goldman were deported.

While our entry into the war proved every bit the disaster for the liberal-left
that Kazin claims, it is less clear that it was avoidable or that it can be blamed
for everything bad that has happened since. Before we even entered the war,
Germany was caught sending the notorious Zimmermann Telegram to Mexico,
urging it to invade the United States. From nearly the start of World War I,
German spies and saboteurs in the United States caused numerous explosions,
and set off the huge 1916 detonation of the Black Tom munitions depot in New
Jersey, which killed seven people, blew out windows of St. Patricks Cathedral,
caused nearly a half-billion dollars worth of damage in current dollars and raked
the Statue of Liberty with shrapnel.

Germanys rationale for such actions was the same as that for its policy of
unrestricted submarine warfare. American supplies went almost exclusively to
the Allies. Even if Americans had wanted to sell food and weaponry to Germany
they would not have been able to thanks to the British naval blockade, which was
slowly starving the German people. Thus, Germany protested, it had to use its
U-boats to try to starve England as well. Many in the American peace movement

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accepted this argument and wanted to cut off trade to the Allies.

Yet does a nation at war have the right to demand that another, neutral
nation end most of its foreign commerce? Wouldnt any nation consider
murderous deeds of sabotage to be acts of war?

America by 1914 had much deeper ties to Britain and France than to the
German Empire. This may have been unfair, as the Germans maintained, but
World War I was not a tennis match. Germany needed only to move toward peace
to escape such unfairness.

For that matter, Kazin seems to sympathize with the antiwar movements
adamant opposition to the preparedness campaign being urged on the nation by
more hawkish voices, like that of the almost hysterically bellicose Teddy
Roosevelt calls for the nation to start raising a true modern army and
expanding its navy. With reason, peace advocates saw this as just the way Europe
fell into war.

Yet might not a larger American Navy have been able to escort ships to
Europe in the teeth of the U-boat menace and thus keep American boys out of
the trenches? Might the threat of bringing another well-prepared army into the
fight have made the Kaiser and his general staff think again about provoking the
United States?

It is, in the end, difficult to believe that the United States could really have
stayed as pure and unentangled in foreign affairs as Kazin would have preferred.
Not that we didnt try. Revulsion over the war and the reactionary backlash it
loosed caused America to turn its face away from the world once more, leading to
the failure to join the League of Nations and to the widespread isolationism that
left the country woefully unprepared for World War II. Kazin would trace our
existing national security state back to the decision we made to enter the Great
War in 1917, but in fact that prototype was almost entirely dismantled. It was the
ways of the world, alas, that forced us to rebuild it.

Kevin Baker is the author, most recently, of America the Ingenious.

A version of this review appears in print on January 8, 2017, on Page BR13 of the Sunday Book
Review with the headline: Peace Then.

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