hostilities and means of resolving disputes. The United States imagined the world at peace and sought to preserve it. Europeans strove to build a peace they did not know, with a keen awareness that they could never possibly solve every dispute to everyone’s satisfaction.
Many U.S. peace groups, it should be said however, inclined toward the European perspective, while others did not. The United States had a larger peace movement than Europe did, but a more deeply divided one. Sincere advocates of peace came down on both sides of the questions of joining the League of Nations and the World Court. Nor did they all see eye to eye on disarmament. If something could be found that would unite the entire U.S. peace movement, the U.S. government of the day was sufficiently representative of the public will that whatever that measure was, it was bound to be enacted.
The Carnegie Endowment had profited from the war through U.S. Steel Corporation bonds. The Endowment’s president, Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, and its director of the Division of Economics and History, Professor James Thomson Shotwell, would play significant roles in the creation of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, after having advocated unsuccessfully for U.S. membership in the League of Nations. Shotwell had a $600,000 annual budget, or about $6.8 million in today’s terms. The World Peace Foundation, a U.S. organization, had a $1 million endowment (or $11.3 million in today’s terms) and, like the Carnegie Endowment, supported the League and the Court. Other major groups included the Foreign Policy Association, the League of Nations Non-Partisan Association, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Church Peace Union and the World Alliance for International Friendship, as well as the Federal Council of Churches of Christ and its Commission on International Justice and Goodwill.
Another U.S. group, the American Foundation, administered the Bok Peace Plan Award, which in 1922 offered $100,000 for a winning five thousand-word peace plan. Among 22,165 plans submitted was one from William Jennings Bryan (who had resigned as Secretary of State when President Wilson had lied about the contents of the Lusitania in order to build up war support) and one from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, although the winner was Charles H. Levermore.
More radical peace groups, often with less funding, in some cases supported the League and the Court, but they pushed for disarmament and opposed militarism, including U.S. imperialism in Central and South America, more consistently. Ferrell described the growth of this movement:
After the 1918 Armistice scores of new peace groups mushroomed into existence. The usual procedure was first to choose an impressive name and to select appropriate stationery (ordinarily a propagandistic, name-studded letterhead). There then began a frenzied round of fund-raising, conventioning, writing to congressmen. It was truly remarkable the amount of activity these crusading peace groups could generate.
Among these organizations were the American Friends Service Committee (100,000 members), American Goodwill Association (5,000), American School Citizenship League, Arbitration Crusade, Association for Peace Education, Association to Abolish War (400), Catholic Association for International Peace, Committee on Militarism in Education, Corda Fratres Association of Cosmopolitan Clubs (1,000), Fellowship for a Christian Social Order (2,500), Fellowship of Reconciliation (4,500), Fellowship of Youth for Peace, Friends General Conference (20,000), Intercollegiate Peace Association, National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War, National Council for Prevention of War, Parliament of Peace and Universal Brotherhood, Peace Association of Friends in America (90,000), Peace Heroes Memorial Society, School World Friendship League, Society to Eliminate Economic Causes of War (150), War Resisters League (400), War Resisters International (United States Committee), Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (6,000), Women’s Peace Society (2,000), Women’s Peace Union of the Western Hemisphere, World Peace Association, and World Peace Mission (58), and many others.
As the names of the groups above suggest, in the 1920s women, now with the right to vote, were a major part of the antiwar movement. The American branch of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom distributed stickers to place on income tax forms reading “That part of this income tax which is levied for preparation for War is paid only under Protest and Duress.” A split in the women’s peace movement led Carrie Chapman Catt to establish the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War, which would be instrumental in pressuring senators when it came time for ratification of the Kellogg-Briand Pact.
The National Council for Prevention of War, according to Ferrell, “during the twenties laid down a barrage of peace propaganda the like of which has seldom been seen in the United States.” With a budget of $113,000 in 1927 it sent out 430,000 pieces of literature. No one had thought to invent email yet, so “literature” meant hard copy pamphlets, and they tended to be read rather than deleted or sent into a spam folder.
THE OUTLAWRY OF WAR
One organization which happens to have far outstripped that volume of literature distribution deserves particular attention, although it was largely a front for a single individual and largely funded out of his own pocket. The American Committee for the Outlawry of War was the creation of Salmon Oliver Levinson. Its agenda originally attracted those advocates of peace who opposed U.S. entry into the League of Nations and international alliances. But its agenda of outlawing war eventually attracted the support of the entire peace movement when the Kellogg-Briand Pact became the unifying focus that had been missing.
William James’ influence could be seen in Levinson’s thinking. Levinson also collaborated closely with the philosopher John Dewey, whom James had greatly influenced, as well as with Charles Clayton Morrison, editor of The Christian Century, and with Senator William Borah of Idaho, who would become Chair of the Committee on Foreign Relations just when he was needed there. Dewey had supported World War I and been criticized for it by Randolphe Bourne and Jane Addams, among others. Addams would also work with Levinson on Outlawry; they were both based in Chicago. It was the experience of World War I that brought Dewey around. Following the war, Dewey promoted peace education in schools and publicly lobbied for Outlawry. Dewey wrote this of Levinson:
There was stimulus — indeed, there was a kind of inspiration — in coming in contact with his abounding energy, which surpassed that of any single person I have ever known.
John Chalmers Vinson, in his 1957 book, William E. Borah and the Outlawry of War, refers to Levinson repeatedly as “the ubiquitous Levinson.” Levinson’s mission was to make war illegal. And under the influence of Borah and others he came to believe that the effective outlawing of war would require outlawing all war, not only without distinction between aggressive and defensive war, but also without distinction between aggressive war and war sanctioned by an international league as punishment for an aggressor nation. Levinson wrote,
Suppose this same distinction had been urged when the institution of duelling [sic] was outlawed. . . . Suppose it had then been urged that only ‘aggressive duelling’ should be outlawed and that ‘defensive duelling’ be left intact. . . . Such a suggestion relative to duelling would have been silly, but the analogy is perfectly sound. What we did was to outlaw the institution of duelling, a method theretofore recognized by law for the settlement of disputes of so-called honor.
I’ve lifted this quote from John E. Stoner’s 1943 account, S. O. Levinson and the Pact of Paris: A Study in the Techniques of Influence, a book looking back at the lessons of the 1920s peace movement even as world war raged again. Quincy Wright claims in the introduction that “it is safe to say that if Levinson had not moved the isolationist Middle West and the isolationist Senator Borah to support the Pact, it would not have been achieved.”
Levinson wanted everyone to recognize war as an institution, as a tool that had been given acceptability and respectability as a means of settling disputes. He wanted international disputes to be settled in a court of law, and the institution of war to be rejected just as slavery had been.
Levinson understood this as leaving in place the right to self-defense but eliminating the need for the very concept of war. National self-defense would be the equivalent of killing an assailant in personal self-defense. Such personal self-defense, he noted, was no longer called “duelling.” But Levinson did not envision killing a war-making