War Against War ONE EVER WIDENING CIRCLES August 1914 to May 1915 "We must be impartial in thought as well as action, must put a curb upon our sentiments as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a preference of one party to the struggle before another." --President Woodrow Wilson, August 19141 "As women, we are called upon to start each generation onward toward a better humanity. We will no longer tolerate without determined opposition that denial of the sovereignty of reason and justice by which war and all that makes for war today render impotent the idealism of the race." --Woman''s Peace Party, January 19152 "The nation which stifles its martial spirit breeds a race of vassals. It has always been so. It always will be so." --Representative Augustus Gardner (R-Mass.), April 19153 "The people of the United States have arrived at the parting of the ways.
They will have to choose between embarking on an adventurous and exhausting policy of militarism or staking their future on a rigid determination to maintain peace and social progress." --Morris Hillquit, April 19154 WOMEN ON PARADE One cloudy afternoon at the end of August 1914, some fifteen hundred women strode two miles down Fifth Avenue in a silent protest against the growing war in Europe. Many dressed in black to symbolize mourning; muffled drums intensified the mood. Ten times as many New Yorkers massed five deep along both sides of the wide boulevard, their own silence reflecting the solemn tone of the occasion. "I was more than surprised at the reverential attitude of the spectators," remarked Fanny Garrison Villard, the sixty-nine-year-old leader of the Women''s Peace Parade. "It was only a feeble effort really, we have simply cast a pebble into the water. I hope there may be many ever widening circles that perhaps will make men realize what a crime it is to send thousands of husbands and fathers and sons to a useless slaughter."5 As the eldest daughter of the great abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, Villard embodied the history of several intertwined crusades on the American left.
Before 1914, she had agitated for suffrage and black rights, preaching, like her father, the gospel of absolute nonviolence--"a willingness to lose one''s life in a good cause, while refusing to take the life of another." As the widow of railroad baron Henry Villard, Fanny could also help finance her cherished causes.6 In taking to the streets on August 29, Villard and her fellow activists were employing a tactic the anti-war movement had never used before. A change seemed urgent. The outbreak of war in Europe had exposed the legal paternalism of the existing peace groups--to which few of these women belonged--as an utter failure. Their male officials who had scorned female moralism as "ineffectual" now could only sputter their dismay at the mounting bloodshed with earnest editorials and private letters. The onset of war so shocked Andrew Carnegie that, as his wife, Louise, recalled, the once vigorous philanthropist "became an old man overnight . his face became deeply indented"; he lost his "zest for mere existence.
" The prime benefactor and entrepreneur of the prewar peace movement withdrew abruptly from what now seemed a pointless struggle. For the duration of the conflict, his Endowment for Peace funded hardly any peace initiatives at all.7 The exclusion of women from the inner, now passive circle of the prewar movement freed them to assemble a new kind of coalition. It drew from the remarkable variety of progressive initiatives then blooming in New York City, where, at least in reform circles, gender equality was more advanced than anywhere else in the country. Notable members of the parade committee included the pioneering social worker Lillian Wald; Frances Perkins, the industrial safety expert (and future secretary of labor); prominent unionists Rose Schneiderman and Leonora O''Reilly; suffrage leaders Carrie Chapman Catt and Harriot Stanton Blatch; and the popular feminist authors Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Gertrude Atherton, and Mary Beard. Coverage of the women''s protest in the big city''s ardently competitive newspapers was lengthy and positive. The World, jewel in the crown of the Pulitzer empire, noticed everything from the couture of the participants to the sight of Villard, walking by herself, "a gray-haired little lady . whose step was as steady for the whole length of the march as that of any younger woman in the line.
" Its arch-rival, the Journal, owned by William Randolph Hearst, displayed large photographs of several attractive, and wealthy, young marchers. The Times described the small contingents of African-American, Indian, Chinese, and French women--most of the latter were refugees--walking "not as nations, but as sorrowing women together" and mentioned that the display of any national flag--including the Stars and Stripes--was prohibited. The Socialist Call featured a contingent of "women comrades" who pinned red ribbons to their black dresses and published a poem the German-American feminist Meta Stern had composed for the occasion. The last lines predicted: "For the cannon will be silenced / And the bloody banners furled, / When, to guide the fate of mankind, / Come the women of the world."8 The internationalism of the prewar movement had been fashioned by men of economic substance and political title--most elected, a few inherited. The ethnic and social diversity of the women''s parade revealed a bond of a more egalitarian kind. Villard''s hastily organized committee dissolved just weeks after the march down Fifth Avenue. But the vision of mothers and daughters as the vanguard of a peaceful world--the antithesis of "isolationism"--continued to gain new converts.
The following January it would take larger and more durable form as the Woman''s Peace Party. The feminist mode of activism developed alongside the more traditional style practiced by male politicians and dissidents on the left. While women like Fanny Villard spun visions of a more harmonious world in which mothers from every land would stop sons from killing other sons, their male counterparts fought over more immediate questions: whether to peddle munitions to belligerents and/or boost the size of the military. They proposed new laws to stop both actions and sought to win the battle for public opinion at home--while downplaying any desire they might have for a radical new order. In contrast, pacifist women, most of whom were still barred from voting, nurtured a community of idealists that spanned the Atlantic. Not until the middle of 1915 would exponents of the two ways of making war against war unite in a common endeavor, muting while never abandoning their differences. Together they mounted an impressive challenge to Americans--whether ordinary men and women or members of the political and economic elite--who wanted the United States to tilt toward one side or the other in the European conflict. Their words and actions also helped stiffen President Wilson''s resolve not to intervene.
A COMPROMISED NEUTRALITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS Behind the universal acclaim for the New York women''s parade lay widespread revulsion at the war itself. "This dreadful conflict . came to most of us like lightning out of a clear sky," North Carolina congressman Robert Newton Page wrote that fall to his brother Walter Hines Page, the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain. "The horror of it all kept me awake for weeks, nor has the awfulness of it all deserted me, but at first it seemed a horrid dream." By September, French and British forces had stopped the German advance well short of Paris. Meanwhile, Russians battled the armies of Germany and Austria-Hungary for control of the Polish plains.
On the Western Front, a bloody, exhausting stalemate set in, as the belligerents built opposing systems of trenches extending 475 miles from the North Sea to the Swiss border. The standoff--punctuated by spasmodic shelling and failed offensives that sacrificed tens of thousands of lives for a few kilometers of territory--would continue for nearly four more years.9 On August 19, Woodrow Wilson, who was mourning the death of his wife just two weeks earlier, released a short statement that expressed the sentiments of most of his fellow citizens. Recognizing that "the people of the United States are drawn from many nations, and chiefly from the nations now at war," the president urged them to stay "neutral in fact, as well as name." Otherwise, the "one great nation [still] at peace" would be unable to mediate the conflict--when and if it chose to do so. Two days later, Wilson wrote to Fanny Villard that he was "very glad" to support her parade, since it upheld the principle of impartiality. In New York City, most immigrants from the belligerent countries obeyed Mayor John Mitchel''s stern request to halt demonstrations of sympathy with their former homelands.10