This well-researched and timely book makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of twentieth-century pacifism, not as it was abstractly theorized but as it was lived by several generations of Americans. Echoing I've Got the Light of Freedom, Charles Payne's classic study of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Patricia Appelbaum contends that “religious pacifism was, and by implication is, a culture, not only an ethical and moral commitment” (2). Yes, pacifists had their intellectual heavyweights – Kirby Page, A. J. Muste, and Georgia Harkness, to name three – who presented meticulous theological justifications for opposing war under all circumstances, but it is incorrect to view the majority of Americans who called themselves pacifists from 1914 to 1965 as being animated by a systematic theology. “[L]ived pacifism was not schematized,” Appelbaum insists (204). In some cases, particularly those involving pacifist cooperative farms, “practice was … prior to thought,” as idealistic men and women “joined in cooperative living and farming first, and then argued about ideology” (155).
Lived pacifism was, moreover, not static, undergoing what Appelbaum calls a “paradigm shift” during the first few years of World War II. The bitter aftertaste of the Great War led to pacifism enjoying almost unprecedented respectability in the 1920s and early 1930s, but it fell out of favor as fascism overran much of Europe and Asia and Reinhold Niebuhr's neo-orthodoxy suddenly seemed a more realistic response to the growing worldwide conflict than Page's humanistic optimism. “Heroes of peace” like Charles Lindbergh – who had been glorified in much interwar pacifist iconography, including stained-glass church windows – found themselves scorned by millions of Americans as naive at best and treasonous at worst. Pacifism moved from a central position in cross-denominational mainline Protestantism to the margins. It became a “folk group,” and its doctrine, insofar as its members articulated one, was distinguished by “three principal characteristics”: “antimodernism,” “sectarianism,” and “a central emphasis on pacifism itself rather than on Christianity as the source of pacifism” (3, 6).
That third idiosyncrasy is most significant, and Appelbaum's unpacking of it is the strongest part of the book. She details how, beginning “[a]round 1940,” pacifists “develop[ed] a theology and practice that could accommodate various faiths and unbelievers as well as Protestant Christians” (70). Pacifism's restructuring was gradual and incomplete, hence the term “paradigm shift” instead of “revolution.” When mainstream Protestants abjured pacifism in the wake of Pearl Harbor, pacifists did not respond by striking out in a radically new direction. Rather, they “retained many of [Protestantism's] sensibilities, notably an emphasis on love and a whole way of life, and a sense of building a holy kingdom” (142). At the same time, they created separate communities and institutions; adopted ritual action to bolster group cohesiveness; and embraced experiential, as opposed to rational, spirituality.
These sound like the defining features of a sect, but pacifism differed from, say, the Doukhobors, in one crucial regard: it was not exclusive; its boundaries were elastic. A pacifist could be a Presbyterian, Methodist, Quaker, or Unitarian – or even a Jew, Muslim, or atheist. As the patriotic gore of World War II gave way to the nuclear tension of the Cold War, religious affiliation grew progressively less important to the beleaguered minority of American pacifists than commitment to complete nonviolence. Pacifism “slip[ped] its Christian moorings” and became an “umbrella theology” covering “all faiths and none” (71). Many of the people who resisted civil-defense drills and attempted to disrupt atomic weapons testing in the late 1950s and early 1960s organized their religious lives around absolute pacifism, not Jesus. Their theological flexibility, and the ecumenism of organizations like the Committee for Non-violent Action (CNVA), helped prepare the ground for the “large-scale movement reacting against the Vietnam War,” a movement which, as several historians have documented, drew upon Hinduism, Buddhism, and other non-Christian faiths for its inspiration and tactics (203).
Appelbaum illustrates the development of pacifist culture with a range of evidence, much of it heretofore unexplored by scholars: antiwar plays, peace pageants, worship services devoted to peace, Peaceable Kingdom woodcuts, and pacifist “exempla” such as the oft-recycled tale of a burglar disarmed by the intended victim's friendliness. She emphasizes that pacifism's paradigm shift was “complex, messy, and contingent,” following no long-range plan (2). Pacifists often responded intuitively to the constraints and pressures imposed upon them, and devised reasoned explanations for their behavior after the fact, if ever. Indeed, the value of an exemplum as a primary source lies precisely in its anti-intellectualism; it presents a “powerful” but “indirect and implicit” argument, and therefore tells us “as much about pacifism's heart as its mind” (183). The biographical profiles that bookend Appelbaum's study, of the pacifists Harold Grey and Marjorie Swann, stress Grey's and Swann's ambivalence, self-doubt, and frequent changes of course. Once they arrived at their crucial decisions – in Grey's case, to refuse to perform either combatant or noncombatant service during World War I; in Swann's, to participate in a civil disobedience action at a nuclear weapons site – they were unbending, but the paths they took to reach this end did not conform to some fixed doctrinal schema; rather, they differed according to the particulars of personality, circumstance, and historical moment, and their outcomes were determined by heart as well as mind.
A few weaknesses mar this work. Appelbaum, though a resourceful scholar, is an indifferent writer. Her index is much less comprehensive than her bibliography, with many key terms omitted. Since her chapters are not divided chronologically but topically, discussion of the same individuals and institutions surfaces again and again, and the redundancy is annoying. None of these points detract from the overall importance of the book.
