At the peace conference in semi-wartime
Gaza. The word was whispered under all the words spoken at the Peace History conference last weekend. The month had begun with the beyond-brutal Hamas attack that butchered Israeli babies and took grandmothers hostage, but we’d all watched the Israeli response that killed thousands of children and families in an effort to “dismantle” the terrorist organization that ruled Gaza. We knew that the ground invasion was imminent, as was the peace organizing happening in real time. All of the latter, including the anti-Semitism lacing some of the protests, were matters for a future Peace History Society gathering. But you don’t write about this stuff untroubled by today’s wars.
When my wife told her mom I’d spoken at this conf, she reacted by talking about the war that has dominated the news. That war was indeed discussed in the “hallway conversations” I speculated about in my last post here, and in the framing statements of the panels I attended. It was a subtext/question that lurked through the event: Does peace activism, of the kind we spent 3 days documenting, even matter?
The conf was at Gwynnedd Mercy University on the outskirts of Philly, which meant I was even able to attend the first day in person. I showed up in time for a talk by Christian Peterson. the guy who recruited me for a chapter of The Oxford Handbook of Peace History. His panel was all about activism during the Cold War, another war that seemed incapable of addressing until it was.
Christian’s talk was about Joanne Landy, a Berkeley activist who created and maintained an org called the Campaign for Peace and Democracy—East and West. Peterson described CPW-EW’s “Transnational Struggle for a "Détente from Below," which promoted under-the-radar dialogues among activists on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Such dialogue may have helped that curtain fall, and it prepared its participants for the day after.
At the Q&A, someone asked if Landy’s org had lessons for how to promote peace in the Middle East. Peterson smiled and said we could learn from Landy’s core principle; “You have to build your movement from the bottom,” in one-on-one conversations between people not allied to you. What those conversations might look like, or how to start them, wasn’t part of that answer; I guess we need to look at Landy’s archives for more of the how. (Maybe the Obamas will fund a movie about her, like they did about Bayard Rustin.)
Then we were off to lunch, which I shared with Matt Meyer of WRI (mentioned in that prior post) and Renee Bricker, both coeditors of Peace and Change. They spent most of the time talking about the journal’s next issue and ensuring it reflects the diversity of today’s international peace movement. I lobbied both to come to my panel, but the time slot featured so much else that was competitive: I was sorry I’d miss Andrew Ross’ “Occupied Skies: US Military Tests and Indigenous Sovereignty in the Late 20th Century” and Roger Peace’s “From the Anti-Imperialist League to the Central America Movement.” I ended up losing Renee to Gail Presbey’s talk on Dorothy Day, but Matt pledged to come to mine and came through.
But first we all had to go to the plenary, A Peaceful Superpower: A Roundtable Conversation about the World’s Largest Antiwar Movement. The movement in question was that against the war in Iraq, which succeeded in mobilizing millions to march against the war, contact their reps in government, and make art against the war. The panelists included two of my main sources for Ain’t Marching: Jonathan Wesley Hutto, the Navy veteran who sparked the Appeal for Redress from The War in Iraq. and his mentor David Cortright, the Army veteran whose Soldiers in Revolt is still the most comprehensive portrait of the Vietnam-era GI movement. The panel’s title actually came from Cortright’s newest book, A Peaceful Superpower: Lessons from the World's Largest Antiwar Movement.
Cortright and other organizers then narrated their successful campaign and its results: a consensus that helped presidents Bush and Obama withdraw all troops from Iraq in 2011. (Yesterday’s headlines might make you doubt they were withdrawn, but they were.) Cortright founded Win Without War, and became a professor at Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute: he kind of is the Peace Establishment. But before all that, Cortright mentored Jon Hutto and met with other active-duty servicemembers against the war; he hooked them up with the Center for Conscience and War, whose director thought there was an unexplored potential in the Military Whistleblowers Protection Act. The result was the Appeal for Redress From the War in Iraq, which mobilized thousands of servicemembers to contact their members of Congress.
At the panel, Hutto read aloud the text of the Appeal: “As a patriotic American proud to serve the nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq. Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is time for U.S. troops to come home.” Then he described how the Appeal went national; printed flyers on multiple military bases, not trusting the Internet to carry the message; hours educating Congressional staff about servicemembers’ rights; an appearance on 60 Minutes in which group members emphasized that this was how they were serving their country and its ideals. That description complete, though, Hutto challenged all the other panel members to think about the next peace movement, and to do what Cortright did in 2007 — connect with the people most directly affected by the wars you oppose.
I thought of both that plenary, and of Peterson’s last comment re Joanne Landry, when the Washington Post called the ceasefire movement an example of “bottom-up leadership.” Perry Bacon writes: “ Like in 2002, when most leaders in both parties were backing the Iraq War, these protests anod activism are providing an important counterbalance to a Washington consensus.” The next PHS conference will chronicle the #CeasefireNow movement, but lemme finish up about last Friday.
After the plenary it was time to go upstairs, and head to my talk — part of Scott Bennett’s panel Conscription, Conscientious Objection, and Draft Resistance in American History. Bennett recruited me to talk about my book, along with two others with recent books: the contrast between those and mine felt a little bracing.
First was Jerry Ellmer’s history of U.S. draft resistance, a natural subject for the author of Felon For Peace: The Memoir of a Vietnam-Era Draft Resister. Ellmer’s talk covered earlier U.S. wars, crunching some Civil War-era numbers to show that Lincoln’s 1863 conscription had not met with eagerness but massive, albeit mostly silent, resistance and evasion. In his Q&A, I noted that I’d felt uncomfortable noting the same for my book, in which I wrote: “Not all of [them] are on record for refusing to fight against slavery, but the boards with the highest rate of non-reporters were in the bracelet of statecs just above the Mason-Dixon line and from high-immigration states like Pennsylvania and New York, which expressed its resistance via the July 1963 ‘draft riots.’ ” Ellmer agreed with my ambivalence and talked a little more about the draft riots, though he hadn’t mentioned that aspect before I did. He was much more comfortable linking the ways draft resisters supported one another across generations and wars, and their links to conscientious objection.
Speaking of CO, we next heard from Jane Kopecky, telling the story of the most hard-core COs of World War II: the “bad boys” who ended up in Germfask, Michigan, or what some called “America’s Siberia,” after washing out of the CPS camp system set up by the peace churches. She came with PowerPoint images of the skinny men in the freezing building, where their quirky behavior was studied by the authorities. The pictures and Kopecky’s infectious style made her talk riotously entertaining.
And now for something completely different, as Monty Python used to say. My talk, “Military Resistance is Conscience in Action” (text here on Medium), began by “telling a September 11 story” the way my book does, with Jacob Ritter’s CO moment at the Battle of Brandywine (as Sarah Vowell wrote in her Lafayette biography, “It says something about the ugliness of September 11, 1777 that this boy woke up a Lutheran and went to bed a Quaker.” So much a Quaker, I said, that when I asked the Friends Historical Library about Ritter, they at first didn’t remember he had been a soldier.al
My book starts with Ritter but it ends with a quote from Jon Hutto, of the plenary above. I told the panel that Hutto’s work with Cortright on the Appeal was “as pure an expression of conscience as I’ve ever seen. Antiwar soldiers and veterans are key to understanding what it means to be a citizen.” Then I took them on a tour of some of the book’s most memorable characters, from Ritter to William Apess to Jesse Macy, the drafted Quaker who in 1863 reinvented CO; from Lew Ayres, “Hollywood’s Conscientious Objector,” to Vietnam War G.I. organizer Susan Schnall, the Fort Hood Three and Stokely Carmichael; to Hutto and all the oether 21st-century military resisters. All of this in 13 minutes; I was told by Matt Meyer and others that it had gone well, though the panel wrapped up immediately afterward and I still wonder what they heard.
At dinner that night, Matt Meyer and I talked about everything: my talk, his piece about Gaza, our upcoming projects (his four books-in-progress, the two I’m slowly nurturing.)I also reminded Matt that he and I met 40 years ago, when we were both college students fighting against the draft registration imposed by President Jimmy Carter. That we’re both still at it signifies something, if only stubbornness.
That stubbornness is typical of peaceniks, as exemplified in Matt’s Saturday plenary, “War Resisters League, 1923-2023: A Century of Revolutionary Nonviolent Activism for Peace & Justice.” I missed because I was exhausted; I spent Saturday recovering, instead of seeing the panels on Ukraine, on Plowshares and Brian Mueller’s on VFP and Central America, “From Rambo to Gandhi.” I hope to find video links for it all, and to provide them here.
Also sorry I missed the Farewell Remarks, which came just after a talk called “This Place Have Been in a Mess”: Using Place-Based Sources to Teach about the History of Non-Violent Protests and Social Justice.” The farewell was where everyone must have acknowledged the mess we’re all in, and that peace history is occurring all around us.
(Photo: John Kerry as a soldier-dissenter. When he was briefly Secretary of State, Kerry tried to broker peace in Palestine; I wonder what this month has meant to him.)