Pacifism in America

If Any "Manned" Flying Saucers from Mars have come near enough to observe this planet closely, I am quite sure their commanders have said to their pilots, "Home, James, this madness is contagious." For it is a mad world. Its scientists and technicians have given its nations the power of unlimited destruction. There are, now, many times more thermonuclear weapons than would be needed to obliterate human life on this earth. An hour of war between the United States and the U. S. S. R., President Kennedy once said, would cost 300,000,000 lives. The idea that this obliteration will be permanently deterred through a balance of tenor, history teaches, is preposterous. In the meantime, the weapons that compose the balance cost the world 133 billion dollars a year--while three quarters of the world's population lives in the narrow margin between hunger and starvation.

These brief, bleak, thoughts should make an objective observer wonder why all men are not pacifists. But an aggressive instinct in man--an inheritance from the evolutionary process that includes an infinite capacity for cruelty--has made war one of the most enduring human institutions. Hundreds of generations have failed to provide any alternative to it. Clans, tribes and nations, all possessed of powerful group loyalties, ideals and interests--in terms of profit and power--have waged almost uninterrupted war through the ages. There has been little attempt to give real political validity to the ideal that humanity itself is above all nations. Lacking this sense of a larger loyally, some of man's more redeeming characteristics--his capacity for courage and (continued on page 278)pacifism in america(continued from page 155) his sense of loyalty--have been turned to the support of war, whose heroes have been immortalized in song and story.

Yet man, who accepts and even loves war, can also love peace. Some men have rejected war as too ugly and terrible a means to be justified by any end. The dream of the Hebrew prophets--that men would turn their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks--has persisted down to the age of thermonuclear bombs.

The peace movement today has its roots in the pacifist movement of 50 years ago. The history of pacifism over the past five decades encapsulates the best and worst of human nature and has considerable relevance for America today.

Neither before our entry into World War One nor today, in our cruel and stupid war in Vietnam, has a strong, united peace movement emerged, completely opposed to war. In every crisis between the outbreak of World War One and the beginning of our involvement in Vietnam, there have been two groups among the general supporters of peace. One group is composed of pacifists, who condemn war outright. The other, far larger and more shifting group opposes particular wars that it does not feel are politically or ethically justified.

At the outbreak of World War One, I was a Presbyterian minister, a conventional advocate of peace on religious grounds. The War itself--by its contrast of horror with the ethics of Jesus--made me a religious pacifist. I also became a strong objector to the War on political grounds. Each position strengthened the other. I have never forgotten the words of a very able and honorable judge, Julian W. Mack, who was serving on a Government commission to consider the case of conscientious objectors who were in prison at the end of World War One. I was talking to him in behalf of a Jewish religious objector and the judge said, "I am not sure of a Jewish religious basis for conscientious objection, but I can't see how a Christian can fail to be an objector to war. To me, it is the greatest irony in history that the belligerent tribes of western Europe took a pacifist Jewish peasant not only as their prophet but as their god." But there came a time in the period between the two World Wars when, to my sorrow, my religious philosophy could provide me with no alternative to a possible support of some wars, as the lesser of two evils. It was, however, the passion of my life to find alternatives not only to war in general but to the particular wars that crowded upon us.

In this article, I shall use the word "pacifist" to describe only those who have been conscientiously opposed to participation in all wars. In the early years of this century. Tolstoy was by far the most influential of pacifist thinkers and writers. Philosophically, pacifists have added very little to Tolstoy's thinking. But there were some outstanding pacifists and many influential persons who stood out as peace advocates, often in opposition to particular wars. It is, however, not human voices but war itself and its consequences, even when the better side wins, that plead loudest for peace.

As I look back on it, the early part of this century, prior to 1914, was curiously an age of innocence. We in America knew of many evils, including war, but we believed in "progress" and the probability of peace. We believed this despite the Spanish-American War at the end of the 19th Century, despite our Manifest Destiny imperialism in the Philippines, despite our interventionist policy in the Caribbean area, despite the Boer War in Africa and the Russo-Japanese War in Asia. We took little account of the significance of colonial rumblings against the great capitalist imperialist powers. We had great hopes in arbitration. The steel baron Andrew Carnegie had a social conscience that was very weak in dealing with the sins of a rampant capitalism but made him a great financial supporter of libraries and schools. Around 1910, lie gave money for the Church Peace Union and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He also built the Peace Palace in The Hague. (The actual service to peace of these institutions has been very moderate.) Another tycoon, Henry Ford, so loved peace that he sent a peace ship to Europe after World War One had begun. It had no influential ellect.

In 1910, Norman Angell published The Great Illusion, proving that large wars would not pay the empires that waged them. It was almost universally applauded; but in four years, the First World War broke upon an astonished world. European socialists had gone so far in opposition to international war--as contrasted with revolutionary struggles--that the eloquent Jean Jaurès of France, James Keir Hardie of Scotland and others seriously discussed strikes against mobilization in France and Germany, in the event of a threat of war. In England, which had no conscription, a general strike against the entry into war was considered, but there was no formal adoption of this plan, nor were there any arrangements to carry it out. Jaurès was assassinated by a French "patriot," and soon socialist internationalists were killing one another in the name of loyalty to their particular nations just as cheerfully as Christians, who had had centuries' more experience in violating human brotherhood.

In the United States, there was at first an almost universal horror of the War and determination not to be dragged into it; but this opposition was chipped away by the growing involvement of our whole economy in the support of the anti-German Allies, by the fear that Germany might win and, particularly, by abhorrence of Germany's action in sinking ships that carried passengers as well as munitions. (In the Second World War, we did the Germans the honor of copying this practice, in our submarine destruction of enemy merchant ships.) I have long believed that we would not have entered World War One if we had traded with both groups of combatants. President Wilson would not have discovered a war for democracy in what amounted to a brute imperialist clash. When the President summoned the nation to war on April 6, 1917, most of the opposition to it--except from socialists, other radicals and a small group of religious pacifists--joined in the hysterical support the War received, at enormous cost to civil liberties at home. The conventional peace societies went along with the crowd. But some new societies had sprung up that persisted after the U.S. had got into the War. The American Union Against Militarism, under the leadership of Lillian Wald, Jane Addams, Oswald Garrison Villard and others, was actively opposed to the War and to Wilson's Caribbean policy. The Union persisted awhile alter our entry and then died. The present American Civil Liberties Union is, in a sense, its offspring, because it developed out of a subcommittee of the Union under the leadership of Roger Baldwin, himself a conscientious objector. The Fellowship of Reconciliation, founded in England in 1915, was the most important and durable of these new peace societies. It was an organization of Christian objectors to war and spread to the U. S. That magnificent humanitarian organization, the American Friends' Service Committee, founded in 1917, operated in the Quaker tradition of pacifism. In later years, it and its efficient secretary. Clarence Pickett, were to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

In the calmer times between wars, other American pacifists received that honor. Among them was Jane Addams, founder of Hull House in Chicago and probably America's most famous social worker. She spoke out for peace all during the First World War and was a principal founder of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (in April 1915). One of her associates, Emily Greene Balch, was similarly honored. So, too, in a later stage of the struggle for peace, were the famous scientist Linus Pauling, because of his opposition to thermonuclear weapons, and the Reverend Martin Luther King, who applied the principle of nonviolence in the American racial struggle.

But none of this regard for pacifists and their service to world sanity and peace was manifest during the First World War. The U. S. had never had conscription--except in a very bad form for part of the Civil War--but Wilson and his Congress felt it necessary to impose it, despite the fact that thousands of Americans had come here from European countries to escape it. There were hardly any provisions for conscientious objectors. Like all those who refused the draft, objectors were nominally subject to whatever penalty military courts might impose on them. The law defined conscientious objectors in a very narrow manner. They had to be members "of any well-recognized religious sect or organization at present organized and existing and whose existing creed or principles forbid its members to participate in war in any form and whose religious convictions are against war or participation therein in accordance with the creed or principles of said religious organizations."

A great many of the young objectors could not qualify as members of these pacifist churches. Even those who did qualify were required to take some form of prescribed noncombatant service. No systematic provision was made for such service until almost a year of war had passed. The result was confusion, rough handling of conscientious objectors and excessive court-martial sentences. One of the worst incidents concerned a small group of religious objectors called Molokani, who had settled in Arizona during President Grant's Administration, on his assurance that there would not be peacetime conscription in the United States. When the War came, their young men refused to register and, under the law, served about a year in prison. They were model prisoners in civil prisons, but then they were compulsorily registered and drafted into the Army. They again refused service and were sentenced for very long terms to Fort Leavenworth Military Prison. Here they refused to work, because the commandant of the prison was a colonel and his orders were military orders. Even the armistice made no difference. Under military law not of his making, the colonel sent the young men to dark, solitary cells, where they were manacled to the bars in a standing position during the period when the other men worked. My brother, Evan W. Thomas, was not a Molokani, but he, too, refused to work and was among this manacled group. Fortunately, he managed to get a message to me. To my shocked surprise, one of the clergy to whom I appealed, a leader in the Church Peace Union, said the men were traitors and deserved no sympathy. The onetime liberal Newton D. Baker, Secretary of War, denied that there was any such punishment in an American military prison. It was only after I got Don Seitz of the New York. World to send a crack reporter to Leavenworth that the truth was revealed. Armed with this evidence and with the belated support of liberals, the Reverend John Nevin Sayre, related to President Wilson by marriage, managed to reach the President, who ordered the end of such punishments. My brother was released on a technicality and the others were transferred to another prison and not too long thereafter were freed. I do not know of similar brutality directed against conscientious objectors to later wars, after the shooting had stopped.

It is estimated that during World War One, some 170,000 managed to evade the draft altogether by flight to Mexico or by obtaining false medical certificates or safe, exempt jobs. But these were not crusaders for peace. That role was far better filled by some 4000 objectors. The conscription law and its enforcement were very confused, but in the end, there were about 1200 who accepted civilian substitutes, such as farm furloughs: and 99 took work with the Friends' Reconstruction Unit. About 500 absolutists were court-martialed and sent to military prisons for long terms--25 years or even life. There were cases where the original sentence was death. After the War, Presidential clemency reduced these long sentences rather capriciously. The last of the objectors was not released until 1933, long after objectors in foreign countries had been released.

Conscientious objectors were not the only sufferers. Civil liberties were pretty well shot to hell under the "liberal" President Wilson. Mobs of "patriotic" citizens went even further than the President. Ray Abrams, in Preachers Present Arms, tells a melancholy tale of the wholesale expulsion of pacifist preachers from their pulpits. Very few survived. At the end of the War, there were some 1000 political prisoners still in jail, guilty of nothing except their exercise of rights that were supposedly guaranteed by the First Amendment. The best known, of course, was Eugene Debs, the Socialist who polled about 1,000,000 voles as a candidate for President while he was a prisoner in Atlanta.

I shall never forget the joy with which I greeted the armistice that finally ended the brutal War of mud and trenches in Europe. It was a joy very commonly shared by the world. But the War did not give us wisdom, as I had hoped, to guard against the recurrence of organized murder in the name of our nation or our political creed. At first, there was widespread hope in peace circles for President Wilson's plan for a League of Nations. What came out of the Versailles Conference by way of a treaty and the plan for the League of Nations was a great disappointment to pacifists, as well as to radicals. We believed that the treaty--which, to be sure, might have been worse--contained the seeds of another world war. How far this opposition should go divided radicals and pacifists, but many swung over to unenthusiastic support of the League during the Harding and Coolidge Administrations. As the Socialist candidate for President in 1928 and 1932. I favored joining the League on condition of some reservations (which could easily have been obtained) to prevent it from dragging us into a new war. We held this position as late as 1932, when President Roosevelt ended any talk of joining the League.

I have never believed that, given the general conditions of the world, our membership in the League would, of itself, have saved it from disaster and the world from the agony of World War Two. Communism had arisen during World War One and Mussolini's Fascism not long thereafter. They, rather than a struggle for peace, preoccupied most minds.

American attention to foreign policy was diverted by the Great Depression. But even before 1929, American attitudes toward the First World War had drastically changed. The old hysteria continued for a time after the armistice, but it changed rapidly and fairly early in the Twenties. I and others found ourselves being applauded for saying things about World War One that very likely would have called forth violent protests and probable arrests at the beginning of the decade. The idea grew that we had been victims of the "merchants of death." By the time of the Senatorial inquiry presided over by Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota, this idea was firmly based--and resulted in a rather weak Neutrality Act designed to prevent trading in arms with nations at war. Ironically, that idea of neutrality--and the way it was enforced under Roosevelt's direction--worked to the disadvantage of the democratic Spanish government in that country's civil war. Even the advocates of arms embargo eventually turned against the proposal when it was used, as it was by Roosevelt, to hurt the Spanish Loyalists and, hence, to help Franco and--through him--Hitler.

The general idea of neutrality had had support from peace advocates, including pacifists. The Nye inquiry itself was largely the result of work by the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Earlier peace organizations and their friends, with more or less enthusiasm, had supported Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes in engineering a treaty in 1922 limiting naval construction in the United States, Great Britain, Japan, France and Italy. In 1930, the London Naval Reduction Treaty provided for a proportional reduction of the navies of these five countries. Under President Coolidge, we were treated to the Kellogg-Briand Pact, signed by practically all nations. The Pad renounced war as an instrument of policy but never had any effect on real foreign policy. It was a piece of pious hypocrisy.

Then, in 1930, there was a strong, nearly successful effort in Congress, sponsored by Senator Lynn J. Frazier of North Dakota, to initiate a constitutional amendment making war totally illegal. Whatever the role local or national organizations played in support of the Frazier Amendment, it was not primarily the work of pacifists or pacifist leaders. Frazier himself owed his position and his fame only secondarily to his stand on peace. Primarily, he was part of the agrarian radical movement in North Dakota (and other states) that produced the Farmers Nonpartisan League and had a great influence on the Republican Party in the northern prairie states. Peace sentiment as such was earnestly presented by excellent men and women, but little or no new philosophy of peace was developed in America by them or by the fragmented peace movement.

In the world at large, the great exception was that remarkable Indian character Mahatma Gandhi, whose work before and during the Second World War brought to success India's nonviolent revolution against Great Britain and the establishment of Indian independence. Gandhi--who, by his own statement, had been principally inspired by the writings of Henry Thoreau--invented the tactics of nonviolent demonstration and action used today.

Americans generally, as the 1930s wore on, were far more occupied with the subject of violence in connection with the national and international problems raised by communism and fascism than with peace as the ultimate goal. The American League Against War and Fascism--which became the moderately influential League for Peace and Democracy--was much more concerned with opposition to fascism than with opposition to war. Toward its end, it was rather effectively captured by the Communists, although by no means were all its members Communists. Its usefulness was completely destroyed when Hitler made his pact with Stalin. Other organizations arose as the crisis in Europe drew nearer. The Keep America Out of War Committee was formed in 1937. It was opposed to the War, but it was not isolationist in its general foreign policy. The much larger America First movement was isolationist in general policy and intensely opposed to those policies of Roosevelt that it thought were leading us to war.

All of this controversy, however--in which there was little interest in pacifism as a principle--ended with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler's declaration of war on the United States. The political organizations opposed to war disbanded instantly and their members dedicated themselves to supporting war in Europe and the Pacific. The Communists, whose Manual had declared that the Soviet Union was the only fatherland of the workers, followed Russian policy; first, against Nazism ("The Yanks are coming!") and then, briefly, in support of the Hitler-Stalin Pact ("The Yanks are not coming!"). During the Second World War, they were 212-degree Fahrenheit patriots. I remember their sending hecklers to try to interrupt a poorly attended meeting that I called to protest Roosevelt's ordering all Japanese and Japanese-Americans within 100 miles of the Pacific Coast into concentration camps, without trial or hearing. This order was the greatest single outrage against civil liberty in both World Wars. The patriotism of many Japanese-Americans from other parts of the country, who served bravely in our Army, proved how unnecessary the camps were. Otherwise, civil liberties fared pretty well, for the simple reason that the Second World War was the only war in America's history to which there was practically no opposition. There were, however, conscientious objectors on religious and humanitarian grounds. These were better treated than in the First World War. Much more generous and elective provision for alternative service for them was provided. They were not required, as in the First World War, to be members of some pacifist religious body, but they were required to affirm that their pacifism was on the basis of their "religious training and belief." This phrase received very different interpretations by draft boards in different parts of the country. (The draft law of 1948 subsequently tried to solve this by requiring belief in a Supreme Being.)

At the end of World War Two, after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world and its peace forces faced a new situation. The immemorial practice of war became a threat to the very existence of mankind. Soon after Hiroshima, I heard a high military officer at a conference talk along the lines later followed by Norman Cousins in his Modern Man Is Obsolete. Nevertheless, this conviction by no means made all people automatically pacifist; nor did it provide alternatives to war, and so the struggle went on.

In a world where war had supposedly become "obsolete," the United States since the Second World War has been involved in military activity in Cuba, Lebanon and the Dominican Republic, as well as "police actions" leading to more serious wars in Korea and Vietnam. Behind all of these struggles lay the fear of an equally militant communism, and the somewhat stupid belief that communism should and could always be restrained by military force. Major assumptions about the nature of communism and its strength have been partially refuted by developments in its once monolithic structure. There have been modifications in the Stalinist version in Russia; and the growth of independent, nationalist and increasingly libertarian versions in several countries has been a welcome development. Recently, this liberalization has been most emphatic in Czechoslovakia--where, however, as I write, Russia and her satellites have intervened in force to put down a liberal Communist regime. Russia's rationale for invading Czechoslovakia resembles the reasoning Johnson used for intervening in the Dominican Republic. Both involved a combination of national self-interest and ideological concern. We intervened through a fear of "communism" while the Russians, according to Tass, intervened to combat the "threat to socialism."

However, not all post-War developments have been negative. A pragmatic sort of pacifism has won some victories in the United Nations. In 1963, peace forces here and abroad succeeded in securing a limited ban on nuclear tests, which greatly diminished the danger of radioactive fallout: and earlier this year, agreement was reached on a nonproliferation treaty that, as of this writing, has not yet been ratified by the Senate. Neither France nor the Communist government of China signed either treaty.

But it was still true that by 1968, the total military budget of the United States was 80 billion dollars, of which 30 billion dollars was spent on the war in Vietnam, a war that we were not winning but only indefinitely prolonging. Moreover, racism of various kinds had resulted in violent riots in more than 100 American cities, and many Negro and white activists who had formerly been committed to nonviolence saw no hope but in a kind of guerrilla war in our streets. Frantz Fanon, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Regis Debray became heroes.

Both violence and nonviolence have had remarkable and personally devoted advocates during this period. At the beginning of the post-War period, India still had her great and apparently successful proponent of a nonviolent revolution in Gandhi. In the United States, Dr. Martin Luther King had won some victories of importance, on principles developed by Thoreau and Gandhi. Before his tragic assassination, Dr. King's work was organized through the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (headed now by the Reverend Ralph Abernathy), which remains dedicated to fulfilling Dr. King's "dream."

In India, Gandhism had not been strong enough to prevent a tremendous clash between Moslems and Hindus, war with Pakistan, the take-over of Goa and several armed confrontations with China.

In these struggles both sides have their heroes. In the United States, Martin Luther King, Medgar livers and countless others stand as victims of the violence they so strenuously opposed. I would be inclined to add to this list the name of the late Reverend A. J. Muste, whose life and gift of leadership had been given to the cultivation of a nonviolent resistance and a pacifism that was never passive in the face of injustice. One also thinks of that remarkable woman, Dorothy Day, and others in the Catholic Worker movement.

On the violent side, one need only think of the fantastically courageous Ernesto Che Guevara and his group of little-known but extremely dedicated guerrilla comrades in Bolivia.

In the United States, pacifism as I define it has doubtless gained many new adherents. It has, however, been less influential as a direct force than as a spur to men opposed to particular wars. That sentiment, which is so large and prominent, in opposition to the war in Vietnam, was slow in growing, and is much greater now than it was during the Korean War. Many near pacifists felt that, on balance, that conflict was an international peacekeeping operation that could only be avoided by a dangerous yielding to the violence of international communism. Even so, there were approximately 8000 conscientious objectors 10 the Korean War. The latest report I have shows about three limes that many conscientious objectors to the war in Vietnam and each month sees a rise in the number of men registering their objection. Religions that have not been explicitly pacifist, such as Roman Catholicism, are producing more and more C.O.s. More and more objectors are insisting on the I-O classification, which means that they refuse noncombatant as well as combatant duty. The campaign against President Johnson's policy is widespread and growing. More people have spoken out and from a greater variety of positions.

But the churches and other organizations that now express great opposition to the war in Vietnam were frustratingly slow in awakening to its meaning and significance. Since this article is a short history of pacifism rather than a history of our times. I cannot go into the reasons why there was, on the whole, so little resistance to the American interventions in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, and during the early stages of the war in Vietnam. In general, the argument was that we: had to slop communism, which we have a tendency to falsely identify with am form of social revolution in Latin America and elsewhere. We have continued to work under the extraordinarily stupid assumption that the defeated Chiang Kai-shek, ingloriously driven out of mainland China, is still entitled to represent it at the United Nations. (The nonrecognition of China has been one of the more effective bars to peace, and pacifists and near pacifists have continued to point this out.)

Even President Eisenhower warned us against the military-industrial complex, which, coupled with some of the worst features of the CIA, has immensely hurt the cause of peace and American leadership for peace in the world. Sena for J. William Fulbright has warned us against some of these dangers in his line book, The Arrogance of Fairer. His criticism, as well as that of many others, both in public office and out, is not predicated on a complete pacifism, but: at least shows some recognition of the hard fads of life.

Unfortunately, most polls show less than total support by laymen for these relatively advanced opinions. The official labor body in the United States, the AFL-CIO, has not kept up with the churches, either in general support of peace or in specific actions, as, for instance, the war in Vietnam. Many strong unions have gained in wages as their employers have gained in profit-money that they do not want to lose, far too much of our economy is military, and recipients of its benefits are blind to the fact that the vast sums we have spent on the Cold War are far less productive, in jobs and benefits 10 the consuming public, than money directed into a war against poverty and for schools, hospitals and homes throughout the nation.

Labor in America has never been very close to communism, but before the Second World War it was influenced to a greater degree by Communists. Considerable sections of labor were friendly to communism during our alliance with Soviet Russia against Miller. All this was radically changed with the development of the Cold War, for which. I believe, Stalin was which responsible.

The chief crusader against communism in the labor movement was not Senator Joseph McCarthy but the little-known, very influential Jay Lovestone. Lovestone was a leader of die American Communist Party in the Twenties, from which position he was deposed by Stalin. For some years he tried to run a non-Stalinist Communist Party, with decreasing success year by year. About the time of the Second World War, Lovestone moved to the right. After the War, he acquired much influence behind the scenes in the AFL-CIO and devoted his life to living 10 build a world-wide anti-Communist movement in labor circles. His weapons emphatically did not include pacifism or any belief in the possibility of working out coexistence with evolving communism in Russia, still less in China. It is only recently that some sections of the labor movement have stepped out of this mold and actively protested against the Lovestone brand of anticommunism.

Against all this supermilitarism there still has not emerged a united peace organization. There are a great many groups--for youths, for women, for liberals, for pacifists, etc.--that have had a great influence. One thinks of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), among others. The National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam is a large alliance of peace groups responsible for several impressively largedemonstrations against that war, and against war generally. It is a very inclusive group, with a loose membership of groups and individuals ranging from liberals to the extreme radical left.

In both civil rights and antiwar groups the divisions are largely due toincreasingly strong differences of opinion on the uses of violence. For example, Dr. Benjamin Spock, a bitter, consistent opponent of the war in Vietnam, has said that while he hates all war on principle, he would support American commitments to Israel as the lesser evil if Israel's existence were threatened.

This problem may be examined best, perhaps, by a discussion of the role of demonstrations in both the civil rights and the antiwar movements. In Washington and, of course, in other towns and cities, thousands of people have found their way to join in such demonstrations as the August 1963 March on Washington--which was organized, incidentally, by a former staunch pacifist, Bayard Rustin. A comparison of this demonstration with the so-called March on the Pentagon in October 1967 is revealing. Great numbers of the same people marched in both demonstrations, but the spirit of the first march was expressed by Dr. King's magnificent eulogy of peaceful methods to achieve social change. The spirit of the second march was very different, and much more diffuse-- although its chairman, David Dellinger, was a genuine pacifist in his rejection of war, even guerrilla war, which had, by this time, attracted many white and black activists.

The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, inspired by effective young leaders like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, once supported nonviolent methods of resistance, both as tactics and philosophically. Now, some members call for guerrilla war in America and openly support the National Liberation Front in Vietnam. Their white counterparts in other organizations, notably in the Students for a Democratic Society (S.D.S.), hold similar views. These groups do not absolutely reject but have very little hope for electoral politics or for that form of pacifism that seeks to avoid all forms of violence.

In general, however, there is an extraordinary rise in popular interest in electoral politics in the United States. This interest was intensified when President Johnson, acceding to the great opposition against him, decided not to run again this year, and by the subsequent fight in the Democratic Party for the nomination. That fight culminated in the last week of August with the nomination for President of Vice-President Hubert Humphrey--while Chicago police were using Gestapo-like tactics against both demonstrators and newsmen in the streets and parks of that city. Through the simultaneous television coverage of the convention itself and the demonstrators in downtown Chicago, millions of Americans became aware of the numbers and determination of young pacifists.

Political opposition has compelled Washington to pursue negotiations with North Vietnam with at least some seriousness. But those negotiations are bogged down in Paris. They will remain ineffectual as long as this country continues to bomb North Vietnam and refuses to recognize the National Liberation Front as a chief negotiator.

The most radical activists against the war--many of them contemptuous of pacifists--have supported the right to expand a moral objection to the draft so that it applies, as it did not in the past, to particular wars. Anything less than such a provision in the law is opposed completely to civil liberties and gives the Government a dangerous power over the individual.

Dr. Benjamin Spock, the Reverend William S. Collin, Jr., Michael Ferber and Mitchell Goodman were recently found guilty of illegally conspiring to aid and urge young men to avoid the draft. The case is now on appeal. Of all the defendants, only one, Michael Ferber, can be described as a complete pacifist.

Most pacifists and other peace lovers would probably agree with the Socialist Party's position on the requirements for a secure peace: First among these is universal disarmament down to a police level, under much stronger international control than the UN at present affords. Simple fear of nuclear arms, accompanied by an increasing accumulation of them by one nation after another, will never keep peace indefinitely. Governments are scarcely more to be trusted with such arms than kindergarten children could be trusted if they were handed revolvers to use as deterrents in quarrels. Beyond disarmament, peace also requires a concerted, world-wide attack on poverty, illiteracy, disease and the exploding world population.

There will never be peace until the major powers--emphatically including the United States--cease to act unilaterally as armed policemen around the world. Tragically, America can take no leadership for peace while it plays out its present role in the Vietnam war. Peace can only come after the world recognizes that violence is never a logical deliverance from injustice. The most useful role for the pacifist in these times is to point to the incredible excesses violence has rained down upon humanity in this century--and to convince man that violence in any form must be recognized as his true enemy.