Michael Kazin's new book looks at the specific social movement and activist moment in American history, the anti-war movement that opposed U.S. involvement in the First World War. Kazin argues that the anti-war movement was a multifaceted movement that faced a near insurmountable challenge. Specifically, Kazin contends that unlike other social movements, which have a kind of “natural” or “assumed” constituency, the anti-war movement's broad appeal made it difficult to coordinate and build beyond the basic shared premise of anti-militarism. “They lived in every region of the country,” Kazin explains of the anti-war activists, “and belonged to every political party. Most wanted to make big changes in American society, although not always the same changes and not always by expanding the powers of the state” (xi). Yet, despite the difficulties of taking a shared political stance and transforming it into a sustained movement, Kazin ultimately places much of the blame of the anti-war movement not on internal politics, but instead an American state led by pro-war leaders whose insistence that the United States enter the war was only outdone by the draconian and reactionary response that the Woodrow Wilson administration had toward the anti-war movement. “Once the United States chose to enter the fray, the president, with the aid of the courts, prosecuted opponents of the war with a ferocity neither his defenders nor his adversaries had expected,” Kazin writes (xv).

Kazin argues that this backlash by the Wilson administration set a host of precedents with large and permanent ramifications on American and global history. First, the war created a precedent for the government to both utilize massive propaganda and a large-scale federal apparatus to monitor, arrest, and control anti-militarist voices. This ability to wage unpopular wars abroad, while curtailing dissent at home, is to Kazin one of the most devastating legacies of America's involvement in the First World War, surmounted only by the even more catastrophic post-war Europe that the so-called “Great War” produced. Here, Kazin poses a compelling counterfactual: if the American anti-war movement had succeeded and kept the United States out of the war, then it is feasible that the Entente and Central Powers would have continued in their imperial wars until both sides would have been forced to the table as equals. At such a point, France and Britain would not have been able to rely on American industrial strength, and as such would not have been able to levy punishing reparations upon Germany. Italy may not have been scorned at the negotiating table, and as a result the resentment politics that later fascists in Germany and Italy built off of would not have been present. “The U.S. decision to join the Allies was a turning point in world history. It altered the fortunes of the war. … If the Allies … had not won a total victory, there would have been no punitive peace treaty that completed at the Palace of Versailles in 1919, no reparations that helped bankrupt the Weimar Republic, no stab-in-the-back allegations by resentful Germans, and thus no rise, much less triumph, of Hitler and his National Socialist Party. The next world war, with its fifty million deaths, would never have occurred” (xv–xvi).

Kazin argues that the broader American anti-war movement was made of four major parts, corresponding to sections of political and civic society. First, there was the left-wing labor movement and the American Socialist Party. Second, there was the women's movement, early feminists, and the liberal pacifists. Third were members of Woodrow Wilson's own Democratic Party in the House of Representatives. Fourth were prominent members of the Republican Party in the U.S. Senate. Kazin expands on each of these groups to include a multitude of different actors and organizations, but for the most part focuses heavily on a handful of prominent members and their specific actions to move his narrative and analysis of the movement. For the labor movement, Kazin largely focuses on Morris Hillquit; for the feminists and liberal pacifists, Crystal Eastman and Jane Addams; for the House of Representatives, Kazin focuses heavily on Claude Kitchin of North Carolina; and for the Republican Senate, he examines Robert La Follette of Wisconsin.

Kazin also makes two much-needed historiographical statements. First, he disabuses readers of any idea that the broader anti-war movement was something that modern-day leftists would have wholeheartedly endorsed. Specifically, Kazin looks at the white supremacy and nativism that plagued significant portions of the anti-war movement—Kitchin and his followers being a prime example. As ardent a supporter of Jim Crow segregation and white supremacy as any southern Democrat, much of Kitchin's anti-war politics were situated in a reactionary logic. “A big boost in military spending, [Kitchin] feared, would put the federal government deeper into debt or force Congress to pass ‘an enormous increase of revenue,’” Kazin explains (92). Yet, despite this, anti-war activists in the North were able to use Kitchin and Democrats in the House (and vice versa) to force Wilson to stay out of the war during his first term. Kazin's other major point is that far from being isolationists, the American anti-war activists were globally connected. Here Kazin builds off of the scholarship of the Progressive Era and correctly identifies the way in which figures in the movement were globally engaged and part of multinational organizations. Instead, Kazin argues that the majority of the anti-war activists were anti-militarists, meaning they advocated for peaceful cooperation with other peoples and nations of the world. “That sharply pejorative term,” Kazin says of ‘isolationist,’ “which became popular only in the 1920s, accurately describes neither the thought nor the actions of key participants in the peace coalition. … Militarism, they argued, isolated peoples behind walls of mutual fear and loathing” (xiv).

Kazin's well-researched book is an accessible and clearly-argued piece of scholarship on one of the more understudied social movements of American history. Containing insights both into how the movement came together, and why it ultimately failed to stop the United States from entering the war, it is of interest both to scholars of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and activists of our own time.