War By Other Means
The Pacifists of the Greatest Generation Who Revolutionized Resistance
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
"Akst argues that the modern progressive movement, wide-ranging in its causes and narratives today, has origins in the pacifist response to American involvement in World War II... At its best, one gets the sense of generative force born from such intense intellectual, moral and religious pressure." -- The Washington Post
Pacifists who fought against the Second World War faced insurmountable odds—but their resistance, philosophy, and strategies fostered a tradition of activism that shaped America right up to the present day.
In this provocative and deeply researched work of history, Akst takes readers into the wild, heady, and uncertain times of America on the brink of a world war, following four fascinating resisters -- four figures who would subsequently become famous political thinkers and activists -- and their daring exploits: David Dellinger, Dorothy Day, Dwight MacDonald, and Bayard Rustin. The lives of these diverse anti-war advocates--a principled and passionate seminary student, a Catholic anarchist, a high-brow intellectual leftist, and an African-American pacifist and agitator--create the perfect prism through which to see World War II from a new angle, that of the opposition, as well as to show how great and lasting their achievements were.
The resisters did not stop the war, of course, but their impact would be felt for decades. Many of them went on to lead the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, the two most important social stands of the second half of the twentieth century. The various World War II resisters pioneered non-violent protest in America, popularized Gandhian principles, and desegregated the first prison mess halls. Theirs is a story that has never been told.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Akst (Temptation) focuses this deeply researched and wide-ranging study on the WWII-era pacifist movement. Framing resistance to war as a form of fighting itself, Akst spotlights four prominent pacifists—seminary student David Dellinger, Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, Partisan Review editor Dwight Macdonald, and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin—who "sought to ‘weaponize' nonviolence by translating moral authority into power." Resisters to the military draft, including Dellinger, often found themselves "held up as exemplars of unpatriotic villainy," and many were incarcerated in federal prisons. Yet the lessons these and other WWII pacifists learned were "carried forward... into their later nonviolent battles," including the Montgomery bus boycott and Vietnam War protests. Akst draws incisive comparisons and contrasts between the isolationist and pacifist movements and argues that while pacifists may have been wrong about the need to go to war, they called important attention to "the treatment of blacks at home, the internment of Japanese Americans, and the wrongness of bombing civilians in enemy cities." Though long-winded digressions slow things down, Akst convincingly places his protagonists in a lineage of antiauthoritarian activism that runs from Thoreau to the 1960s counterculture and beyond. This history casts the Greatest Generation in a new light.
