American Gandhi. Leilah Danielson
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world-order based on Love’’ by following the example of ‘‘the life and death of Jesus Christ.’’76 Hodgkin had helped to establish an American branch at a conference in Garden City, Long Island in November of 1915, soon after President Wilson initiated a preparedness campaign. The Fellowship was a ‘‘combination of Christian parochialism and expansive sentiment,’’ as one historian has put it aptly.77 Its members were exclusively Protestant, with strong roots in the Social Gospel movement, highly educated, and often from elite backgrounds. Many of them had been active in the YMCA, and its statement of principles reflected this evangelical heritage. The organization also had a strong Quaker influence, signified by its commitment to individual spiritual autonomy. As one early statement put it, ‘‘It is intended that members shall work out personally and in their own way, what is involved in their membership. There is no program or theory of social reconstruction to which all are committed. The chief method is a life lived in loyalty to Christ, expressing itself in every activity and relation of life.’’78
The FOR was, in other words, exactly what its name implied: both a fellowship of Christian pacifists, eager to witness for their beliefs, and a political organization committed to using ‘‘the method of Jesus’’ to resolve vexing industrial, racial, and international problems. There was some tension between these two aims, and what exactly was meant by ‘‘the method of Jesus’’ would soon become a matter of intense debate, but in its founding years the FOR functioned as an important source of support and camaraderie for opponents of war.
In becoming a pacifist in 1916, Muste remained a part of the liberal mainstream, which was largely opposed to American intervention. But all of this changed on April 2, 1917, when President Wilson summoned the Congress and the American people to war, explaining that ‘‘the world must be made safe for democracy.’’ Wilson’s language of American mission was the language of American progressivism, and the majority of progressives and even most self-described ‘‘pacifists’’ shifted from hostility to interventionism to support for the state. For progressives, the war offered an opportunity for reform. The war, John Dewey declared, was ‘‘full of social possibilities’’; it would constrain ‘‘the individualistic tradition’’ and teach ‘‘the supremacy of public need over private possessions.’’79
The Federal Council of Churches, representing the mainline denominations, similarly viewed the war as an opportunity to modernize and liberalize the country and to extend American values to a decadent and corrupt Europe. William Adams Brown, one of Muste’s former professors at Union, headed up the Federal Council’s crusade to uplift the morals of American soldiers and make them ‘‘fit to fight.’’ Other Protestant luminaries such as Harry Emerson Fosdick, Shailer Matthews, Sherwood Eddy, and John Mott also joined the effort. Especially devastating was Brown’s incisive criticism of pacifism in which he suggested that it was ‘‘a kind of fundamentalism.’’ Though he had ‘‘the greatest respect’’ for pacifists, he argued that they were attempting ‘‘to apply an absolute ideal’’ to a progressive, changing society, and thus represented a regression to the orthodoxy and dogmatism against which they had rebelled.80
On one level, progressive optimism was not misplaced; the war offered them the opportunity to rationalize American society and to spread their values to the larger world. At home, the wartime state created agencies like the War Industries Board, which assumed greater control over industrial production, and the National War Labor Policies Board, which adjudicated labor disputes, enacted an eight-hour workday, and guaranteed collective bargaining rights for some industries. Abroad, President Wilson expressed his commitment to constructing a postwar international organization that would prevent war through planned reconstruction, liberalized trade, and democratization, and he welcomed the assistance of liberal internationalists in making his dream a reality.81
At the same time, the war exposed the dark side of the modern, managerial state and the imperial assumptions behind Wilson’s idealism. As critic Randolph Bourne predicted in his famous 1917 essay rebuking his idol John Dewey, a war of rival imperialists could not be molded to ‘‘liberal purposes,’’ but would rather empower the least democratic forces in American life.82 Perhaps because progressives believed so completely in the justness of their cause, they viewed any evidence of dissent as a sign of disloyalty. A repressive atmosphere soon enveloped the country; eager to quash antiwar sentiment, the federal government enacted statutes to restrict freedom of speech with the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. Approximately one thousand Americans were convicted of violating these statutes, including the Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs. Numerous publications, including FOR’s World Tomorrow, were denied use of the mails. State governments were even more repressive; thirty-three states outlawed the possession or display of the red flag of Communism or the black flag of anarchism, and twenty-three adopted laws defining the crime of ‘‘criminal syndicalism.’’ Private groups, including churches, colluded in stifling dissent. Antiwar clergy faced harassment, were denied civil liberties, and often lost their pulpits. Many of them made their way into the FOR.83
For those, like Muste, who placed their religious obligations above national loyalty, the attacks on civil liberties and the acquiescence of the churches came as a profound shock. Many of them had assumed that their ‘‘reforming religion was more or less in accord with the enlightened outlook of progressive political leaders such as Woodrow Wilson,’’ and it was distressing to find that their opposition to war and conscription placed them ‘‘outside the terms of citizenship.’’84 The mistreatment of conscientious objectors (COs) reflected their newly marginal status. The Selective Service Act of 1917 initially only made provisions for COs who were members of the historic peace churches (i.e., Brethren, Mennonites, and Quakers), giving them a choice between noncombatant military service or confinement under military authority. Most of the four thousand COs who were confined to army camps were antimodern scriptural literalists, but a minority of them were pacifists of the FOR type, including Norman Thomas’s brother Evan, his friend Harold Gray, and the civil libertarian Roger Baldwin. Without clear guidelines, the military’s treatment of COs was inconsistent, ranging from benign neglect to beatings and abuse. At least two COs died during their internment.85
Together, these events radicalized pacifists. Though most of them had long supported social reform, their opposition to World War I was based upon religious belief. Yet the use of government power to suppress their Christian conscience, as well as dissent more broadly, gave meaning to traditional American civil liberties to which they considered themselves heirs. During World War I, FOR member John Haynes Holmes recalled, there ‘‘suddenly came to the fore in our nation’s life the new issue of civil liberties.’’86 In October 1917, Holmes, along with Norman Thomas, Hollingsworth Wood, Roger Baldwin, and other pacifists, founded the National Civil Liberties Bureau (later known as the American Civil Liberties Union) to defend the rights of individuals against the state and dissenters against majority opinion. In founding the ACLU, pacifists resisted the obligatory and coercive demands of modern citizenship and ‘‘gave voice to a politics that imagined the citizen first and foremost as an individual and as a bearer of rights.’’ In so doing, pacifists invented a ‘‘rights-based vision of citizenship’’ that has competed with and coexisted alongside the growth of the American national government ever since.87
In their defense of individual rights, pacifists broke from their progressive roots and drew closer to the modernist, revolutionary milieu known as the ‘‘lyrical left.’’ As the above quote by Dewey suggests, the progressive movement had rejected the individualist creed of the nineteenth century, viewing it as the ideological cover for the selfishness, inequality, and class conflict of the industrial capitalist order. Many progressives had almost a blind faith in the federal government as the agent of social progress. But World War I had demonstrated the potentially repressive power of the state, and some progressives (Dewey included) gained an appreciation for civil liberties. Significantly, pacifists and other early members of the ACLU did not believe their support for individual liberty and social democracy was a contradiction in terms. As Doug Rossinow has commented, ‘‘the theoretical conflict between legal individualism and social reconstruction that a later generation of political liberals would assert simply did not obtain in the minds