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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2018
This article argues that Christian beliefs and concerns shaped the political culture of anti-nuclear activism in the early years of the Cold War. It focuses in particular on the origins of the Peacemakers, a group founded in 1948 by a mostly Protestant group of radical pacifists to oppose conscription and nuclear proliferation. Like others who came of age in the interwar years, the Peacemakers questioned the Enlightenment tradition, with its emphasis on reason and optimism about human progress, and believed that liberal Protestantism had accommodated itself too easily to the values of modern, secular society. But rather than adopt the “realist” framework of their contemporaries, who gave the United States critical support in its Cold War with the Soviet Union, radicals developed a politics of resistance rooted in a Christian framework in which repentance for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the first step toward personal and national redemption. Although they had scant influence on American policymakers or the public in the early years of the Cold War, widespread opposition to nuclear testing and U.S. foreign policy in the late 1950s and 1960s launched them into leadership roles in campaigns for nuclear disarmament and peace.
I would like to thank Eric Meeks and Susan Danielson for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay.
1. “Federals Arrest 3 Protesters,” Omaha Action Bulletin (July 1, 1959), Fellowship of Reconciliation Records, box 11, folder 8, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania (hereafter FOR Records, SCPC).
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9. See Bennett, Radical Pacifism, and Wittner, Rebels against War.
10. An exception to this is Danielson, Leilah, “‘In My Extremity I Turned to Gandhi’: American Pacifists, Christianity, and Gandhian Nonviolence, 1915–1941,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 72, no. 2 (June 2003): 361–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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14. Scholars have yet to assess fully Muste's influence on U.S. intellectual and religious history and on U.S. political culture more broadly. Still, a sense of his influence can be gleaned from monographs on the history of pacifism cited above, as well as in Boyer, Paul, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985)Google Scholar; D’Emilio, John, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (New York: Free Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Branch, Taylor, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988)Google Scholar; Robinson, Jo Ann Ooiman, Abraham Went Out: A Biography of A. J. Muste (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; and Hentoff, Nat, Peace Agitator: The Story of A. J. Muste (New York: Macmillan, 1963)Google Scholar.
15. Muste, A. J., “The True International,” originally published in the Christian Century (May 24, 1939)Google Scholar, reprinted in The Essays of A. J. Muste, ed. Hentoff, 214.
16. Ibid., 208. One of Muste's greatest fears was that New Deal reforms, while necessary, would lead to a rapport between labor and the state that would compromise labor's independence, diffuse its radical spirit, and make it an adjunct of American militarism and imperialism. See, for example, A. J. Muste, draft of article or speech entitled “Foundations of Democracy: The Role of Economic Groups,” circa 1945, copy in A. J. Muste Papers, microfilm reel 4, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania (hereafter Muste Papers, SCPC). Muste was not alone in rejecting the working class as the agent of social change. For the “demise of the union idea” among radical intellectuals, see Lichtenstein, Nelson, “Pluralism, Postwar Intellectuals, and the Demise of the Union Idea,” in The Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism, ed. Milkis, Sidney and Mileur, Jerome (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005)Google Scholar.
17. Muste, A. J., “Return to Pacifism,” The Christian Century (December 2, 1936)Google Scholar, reprinted in The Essays of A. J. Muste, ed. Hentoff, 199–202. 18. Muste, A. J., Nonviolence in an Aggressive World (New York: Harper and Bros., 1940), 175 Google Scholar.
19. A. J. Muste, untitled speech, 1941, reel 3, Muste Papers, SCPC.
20. A. J. Muste, address for Church of the Air, Columbia Broadcasting System, September 3, 1939, reel 3, Muste Papers, SCPC.
21. Muste, “Return to Pacifism,” 200; Muste, , Nonviolence in an Aggressive World, 175 Google Scholar.
22. As Muste put it, “The conviction is being expressed by a growing number of writers on the Left that in large measure the crisis in the movement is due to the neglect of ethical factors.” See Muste, , Nonviolence in an Aggressive World, 90–91 Google Scholar. Among the works cited by Muste in this book and in other forums during the late 1930s and 1940s were Huxley, Aldous, Ends and Means (New York: Harper, 1937)Google Scholar; Heard, Gerald, Pain, Sex, and Time: A New Outlook on Evolution and the Future of Man (New York: Harper, 1939)Google Scholar; Silone, Ignazio, Bread and Wine (New York: Harper and Bros., 1937)Google Scholar; Koestler, Arthur, The Yogi and the Commissar, and Other Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1945)Google Scholar; and Berdyaev, Nicholas, Slavery and Freedom (New York: Scribner’s, 1944)Google Scholar. The rise of the anti- Stalinist left has received much attention from historians. See, for example, Wald, Alan M., The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Pells, Richard H., The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (New York: Harper and Row, 1985)Google Scholar; and Lasch, Christopher, The Agony of the American Left (New York: Knopf, 1969)Google Scholar.
23. See, for example, “Build the Non-Violent, Revolutionary Movement—Now,” position paper, circa 1948, box 11, folder 8, FOR Records, SCPC. See also, McCarraher, Christian Critics, 112–14.
24. For a helpful overview of theology in the twentieth century, see Ferm, Contemporary American Theologies; MacQuarrie, John, Twentieth- Century Religious Thought (Harrisburg, Pa:. Trinity Press International, 2001)Google Scholar; and Hordern, William, A Layman's Guide to Protestant Theology (New York: Macmillan, 1957)Google Scholar. See also Herberg, Will, ed., Four Existentialist Theologians: A Reader from the Works of Jacques Maritain, Nicolas Berdyaev, Martin Buber, and Paul Tillich (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958)Google Scholar.
25. See Niebuhr, Reinhold, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932, 1948)Google Scholar, and Niebuhr, Reinhold, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense (New York: Scribners, 1944)Google Scholar.
26. Muste, , Nonviolence in an Aggressive World, 21 Google Scholar.
27. See Parekh, Bhikhu, Gandhi: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. See also A. J. Muste, “The World Task of Pacifism” [1941], reprinted in The Essays of A. J. Muste, ed. Hentoff.
28. For in-depth, scholarly discussions of Day and the Catholic Worker movement, see McCarraher, Christian Critics; Farrell, The Spirit of the Sixties; Piehl, Breaking Bread; and McNeal, Harder than War.
29. Day, Dorothy, “The Catholic Worker Stand on Strikes,” Catholic Worker 4, no. 3 (July 1936): 1–2 Google Scholar.
30. Those popular pacifist-minded clergy included Kirby Page, Henry Van Dusen, Sherwood Eddy, and George Coe. For a sympathetic discussion of pacifist sentiment within mainline Protestantism during 1930s, as well as their views once the United States entered the war, see Sittser, Gerald, A Cautious Patriotism: The American Churches and the Second World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997 Google Scholar). For a discussion of the influence of liberal Protestant clergy on the SCM, see Warren, Heather, Theologians of a New World Order: Reinhold Niebuhr and the Christian Realists: 1920–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. Very little has been written on the SCM during the interwar years. Warren discusses them briefly in Theologians of a New World Order, as does Cohen, Robert in When the Old Left Was Young: Student Radicals and America's First Mass Student Movement, 1929–1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.
31. Dave Dellinger, interview by author, February 8, 2001, Austin, Texas; Bill Sutherland, interview by author, April 1, 2000, Austin, Texas; George Houser, interview by author, May 7, 2000, Nyack, New York; and Marjorie Swann, interview by author, November 25, 2000, Berkeley, California.
32. Swann, interview by author.
33. Dorothy Hassler, interview by author, July 4, 2000, via telephone.
34. Nelson, Wally, interview by Hurwitz, Deena and Simpson, Craig, Against the Tide: Pacifist Resistance in the Second World War, an Oral History (New York: War Resisters League, 1984)Google Scholar, n.p. See also Meier, August and Rudwick, Elliot, CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942–1968 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 44 Google Scholar, which notes that Nelson and other pacifist founders of CORE were active in the SCM. 35. Part of their eagerness to prove that pacifism was politically relevant had to do with Niebuhr's attack on pacifism in Moral Man and Immoral Society. See Leilah Danielson, “‘In My Extremity I Turned to Gandhi.’”
36. See, for example, D’Emilio, Lost Prophet; Branch, Parting the Waters; and Meier and Rudwick, CORE.
37. Sutherland, interview by author. See also Dellinger, Dave, From Yale to Jail: The Life Story of a Moral Dissenter (New York: Pantheon Books), 48 Google Scholar and Roberts, William P. Jr., “Prison and Butterfly Wings” in A Few Small Candles: War Resisters of World War II Tell Their Stories, ed. Gara, Larry and Gara, Lenna Mae (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1999), 154 Google Scholar.
38. See, for example, “A Call to Pacifist Youth,” Fellowship 3, No. 10 (December 1937), for an account of a meeting of “All Youth against War,” a conference that helped lead to the formation of the Youth Mobilization Committee against War of which Dellinger, Houser, Farmer, Sutherland, Swann, and other young pacifists were members. For some thoughtful recent discussions of American anti-interventionism, see Alpers, Benjamin, Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s–1950s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003)Google Scholar, and Doenecke, Justus, Storm on the Horizon: The Challenge to American Intervention, 1939–1941 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000)Google Scholar.
39. Statement by Meredith Dallas et al., October 10, 1940, series A-3, box 12, folder 2, FOR Records, SCPC.
40. See, especially, Bennett, Radical Pacifism, and Wittner, Rebels against War.
41. Caleb Foote, “Prison Is Revenge,” Fellowship 12, no. 5 (May 1946). For similar arguments by imprisoned COs, see Walter G. Taylor, “Can We Outgrow the Prison System?” Fellowship 11, no. 10 (October 1945); Herbert Wehrly, “Conscription Slows Down,” Fellowship 12, no. 6 (June 1946); and “Statement of Aims of Assignees Striking at Civilian Public Service Camp #76,” April 30, 1946, series A-3, box 7, folder 5, FOR Records, SCPC. See also reminiscences by COs in Gara and Gara, A Few Small Candles.
42. For a useful discussion of intra-pacifist debates regarding administration of CPS camps, see Bennett, Radical Pacifism, 69–134. For an account of the experience of Catholic COs during the war, see Zahn, Gordon C., Another Part of the War: The Camp Simon Story (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979)Google Scholar.
43. Dellinger et al., “An Open Letter to FOR,” June 3, 1944, series A-3, box 12, folder 10, FOR Records, SCPC. See also Paton Price to A. J. Muste, reprinted in the Conscientious Objector, March 1943; copy in series A-3, box 7, folder 1, FOR Records, SCPC.
44. A. J. Muste, “Prospectus for a Study Conference on Philosophy and Strategy of Revolutionary Pacifism,” undated, series A-1, box 5, folder 10, FOR Records, SCPC.
45. “Report on Study Conference on Revolutionary Pacifism,” September 15–17, 1944; David White, “Notes for the Study Conference on the Philosophy and Strategy of Revolutionary Pacifism,” August 14, 1944. Both in series A-1, box 5, folder 10, FOR Records, SCPC.
46. Ibid.
47. Kierkegaard's writings became more widely available to Americans through Walter Lowrie's English translations, which began with the publication of Kierkegaard (London: Oxford University Press) in 1938.
48. More evidence for the influence of Kierkegaard on pacifists can be found in James Farmer's autobiography, in which he recalled that Muste opened a 1944 FOR meeting with quotes from Kierkegaard. See Farmer, , Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Arbor House, 1985), 75, 102Google Scholar. In 1950, Muste circulated excerpts from Kierkegaard's Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing among his fellow Peacemakers. See Ernest and Marion (Coddington) Bromley papers, private collection, Voluntown, Connecticut (hereafter Bromley Papers).
49. Elisabeth Dodds and Marion Coddington, “New Methods for New Growth,” Fellowship 11, no. 10 (October 1945).
50. John Nevin Sayre, “The International FOR and the Life of the Age to Come,” Fellowship 11, no. 11 (November 1945).
51. Muste, A. J., Not by Might: Christianity, The Way to Human Decency (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1947), 42–43 Google Scholar; Muste, A. J., “Conscience against the Atomic Bomb,” Fellowship 11, no. 12 (December 1945)Google Scholar.
52. Muste, , Not by Might, 56 Google Scholar; Muste, “Conscience against the Atomic Bomb.”
53. Muste, , Not by Might, 106–7Google Scholar.
54. Muste, A. J., “The Role of the Pacifist in the Atomic Age,” Fellowship 12, no. 8 (September 1946)Google Scholar.
55. Tuveson, Ernest Lee, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial Role (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968)Google Scholar. The notion of chosenness and the belief in rebirth and revival are not, however, exclusively American, as Peter van der Veer has reminded us. See Veer, van der and Lehmann, Hartmut, eds., Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.
56. Moorhead, James H., “Apocalypticism in Mainstream Protestantism, 1880 to the Present,” in The Continuum History of Apocalypticism, ed. McGinn, Bernard J., Collins, John J., and Stein, Stephen J. (New York: Continuum, 2003), 475 Google Scholar.
57. Muste, A. J., “The Atomic Bomb and the American Dream,” Fellowship 11, no. 10 (October 1945)Google Scholar. As the above discussion suggests, Muste's sense of the prophetic tradition differed sharply from Niebuhrian realists. Niebuhr saw himself as a Hebrew prophet when he inveighed against American temptations to power and illusions of omnipotence. Still, he justified the use of atomic weapons as having shortened the war and viewed the Cold War as an inescapable reality that could only be managed and controlled through realpolitik. Such arguments flew in the face of Muste's belief that peace was dependent on repentance. The role of a prophet, he wrote in an open letter to Niebuhr, was not only to warn people of the threat of divine judgment but also to call upon “your hearers to repent, act and so flee from that judgment.” But by preaching doom and gloom and then suggesting that there was no way for people to escape their sinful natures, Niebuhr and other Christian realists fostered not tension but “anxiety or a pervading sense of futility, for tension in the biblical sense is surely characteristic of a situation where man stands before his God and makes a decision.” The role of the prophet, moreover, was to bring God's judgment to bear on the nation as well as the individual; the “prophets address the nation or the community quite as much as the individual.” Niebuhr, however, believed that there was one law for society and another for the individual. In so doing, he accepted violence and the struggle for power as “normative” rather than the “very taproot of evil.” His theology, thus, expressed “despair,” not hope and vision. See A. J. Muste, “Theology of Despair: An Open Letter to Reinhold Niebuhr” (1948), reprinted in The Essays of A.J. Muste, ed. Hentoff, 302–7. See also Muste, , Not by Might, 91, 106–9.Google Scholar
58. See Record of Proceedings, Retreat Conference on Pacifist Orientation and Strategy, Pendle Hill, Wallingford, Pa., May 20–23, 1947, series A-1, box 5, folder 12, FOR Records, SCPC.
59. See Harold Chance, “Toward Fellowship with God and Man,” paper circulated for discussion prior to November 1947 conference, series A-1, box 5, folder 13, FOR Records, SCPC.
60. See Record of Proceedings. See also Cecil Hinshaw, “Discipline and Group Life,” paper circulated for the November conference, series A-1, box 5, folder 13, FOR Records, SCPC.
61. “Minutes of Retreat-Conference at Pendle Hill, Wallingford, PA, May 20–23, 1947,” series A-1, box 5, folder 12, FOR Records, SCPC.
62. Milton Mayer, letter to Pendle Hill Conferees, November 5, 1947, series A-1, box 5, folder 13, FOR Records, SCPC.
63. “Proceedings of Second Pendle Hill Retreat, Conference on Pacifist Orientation and Strategy, Wallingford, PA, November 13–16, 1947,” series A-1, box 5, folder 13, FOR Records, SCPC.
64. “Crusade for a Changed, Warless World,” circa November 1947 (emphasis in original). See also “One World Groups: Draft of Manifesto,” circa December 1947, which was “another step in the effort to carry out one of the suggestions emphasized at Pendle Hill Conferences of the Consultative Peace Council in May and November.” Both documents in series A-1, box 5, folder 13, FOR Records, SCPC.
65. “Call for a Conference on More Disciplined and Revolutionary Pacifist Activity,” circa February 1948, Peacemakers Papers, Swarthmore College Peace Collection (hereafter Peacemaker Papers, SCPC).
66. While MacDonald would eventually withdraw from politics in the face of the deepening international crisis, the same was not true of the radical pacifists who were his magazine's greatest fans. For MacDonald's thought and politics, see Wreszin, Michael, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight MacDonald (New York: Basic Books, 1994)Google Scholar.
67. Marion Coddington comments, “Proceedings of Second Pendle Hill Retreat,” series A-1, box 5, folder 13, FOR Records, SCPC.
68. Wittner, , Rebels against War, 154–56Google Scholar. See also Bennett, , Radical Pacifism, 145–48.Google Scholar
69. See “Proceedings of National Committee of Peacemakers,” Chicago, Illinois, December 28–30, 1948, Peacemakers Papers, SCPC.
70. Peacemakers discovered that those living in rural areas had a difficult time finding fellow radical pacifists with whom to form a cell.
71. Peacemakers pamphlet, dated 1949, Bromley Papers.
72. For Peacemakers disinterest in conventional political activity, see, for example, minutes of the “Continuation Committee of Chicago Conference,” Yellow Springs, Ohio, April 20–22, 1948, Peacemakers Papers, SCPC.
73. As George Houser put it, “The WRL wasn't as free as a Peacemakers group could be [since it] had been put together for the purpose of taking direct action and—in a rather uncompromising way. [Peacemakers] was established for that purpose.” Houser, interview by author. See also Bennett, Radical Pacifism, 145–60, and Wittner, , Rebels against War, 153 Google Scholar.
74. “Call for a Conference on Civil Disobedience to the Draft,” circa July 1948, Peacemakers Papers, SCPC.
75. See Dave Dellinger and Julius Eichel to the Attorney General, October 27, 1948, Peacemakers Papers, SCPC. Apparently, the government's policy was to single out some nonregistrants while leaving the larger group unmolested since only about forty of them had been arrested and sentenced to prison terms by July 1, 1949. Note that, in February 1947, radical pacifists—including Dellinger, MacDonald, Mayer, Houser, Rustin, Muste, Scott Nearing, Frank Olmstead, Larry Gara, Richard Gregg, Roy Finch, Robert Ludlow, James Peck, Theodore Walser, and George Yamada—either burned their draft cards or mailed them to President Truman as a way of protesting the likelihood of peacetime conscription. Of course, the burning of draft cards would become a popular way to express one's opposition to the Vietnam War in the 1960s. See George Houser memo, March 5, 1947, Bromley Papers.
76. There are numerous examples of pacifists citing Thoreau, the gospels, etc. as justifications for their civil disobedience. See, for example, Bromley, Ernest, “The Case for Tax Refusal,” Fellowship 13, no. 10 (November 1947)Google Scholar; News of Tax Refusal, January 28, 1950, Bromley Papers; Muste's statement to the Internal Revenue Service, Peacemaker 2, no. 9 (April 21, 1951): 3.
77. Ralph Templin made a bust of Hennacy, revealing the high regard with which the Christian anarchist was held by Peacemakers. 78. Ammon Hennacy's statement to the Internal Revenue Service was reprinted in the Peacemaker 1, no. 10 (January 30, 1950): 4.
79. Bayard Rustin to A. J. Muste, February 2, 1950, Bromley Papers (emphasis in original).
80. The Peacemaker 1, no. 12 (April 25, 1950): 1–2; Muste to members of FOR executive committee, February 27, 1950, series A-2, box 4, folder 11, FOR Records, SCPC; Call for Holy Week Fast issued by Peacemakers fast committee, box 1, series W-1, folder 5, Dorothy Day- Catholic Worker Collection, Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
81. Rustin, Bayard, quoted in the Peacemaker 1, no. 12 (April 25, 1950): 1–2 Google Scholar.
82. “Proceedings of National Committee of Peacemakers,” Chicago, Ill., December 28–30, 1948, and “Proceedings of National Conference of Peacemakers,” Chicago, Ill., April 1–3, 1949, Peacemakers Papers, SCPC.
83. Mt. Morris House cell discipline, Peacemakers Papers, SCPC.
84. The Peacemaker 1, no. 2 (June 28, 1949): 3.
85. The Peacemaker 3, no. 1 (June 8, 1951): 2.
86. The Peacemaker 2, no. 3 (July 26, 1950): 1. For more on Glen Gardner, see Dellinger, From Yale to Jail. The Templins, along with Ernest Bromley, Marion (Coddington) Bromley, Wally Nelson, and Juanita Nelson, set up a “mutual security plan” in their Yellow Springs, Ohio, cell to provide for the dependents of cell members should they end up in jail. See the Peacemaker 1, no. 3 (July 18, 1949): 2.
87. See Piehl, Mel, “Catholic Worker Pacifism in the Cold War Era,” in American Catholic Pacifism: The Influence of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, ed. Klejment, Anne and Roberts, Nancy L. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996)Google Scholar.
88. Piehl, “Catholic Worker Pacifism in the Cold War Era,” 87.
89. Ibid., 85.
90. Ibid., 82.
91. “Report of the Committee on General Directions to the Executive Committee of CNVA,” September 25, 1962, box 9, folder 150, Barbara Deming Collection, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Cambridge, Massachusetts. (hereafter Deming Collection).
92. CNVA leaflet, circa 1961, box 1, folder 2, Deming Collection. 93. Muste speech, untitled, 1947, series A-1, box 5, folder 3, FOR Records, SCPC.
94. Moorhead, “Apocalypticism in Mainstream Protestantism,” 482. See also Hudnut-Beumler, Looking for God in the Suburbs.
95. Craig, , Glimmer of a New Leviathan, 79 Google Scholar.
