Opposition to War – ScheerPost

Textbooks. Photo from Flickr by Valorie Books on February 17. 2010.

By Jim Mamer / Original to ScheerPost

Breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth: as he hath caused a blemish in a man, so shall it be done to him again.

Leviticus 24:20 King James Version

An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.

Attributed to Mahatma Gandhi

I was lucky. I grew up believing that I had an obligation to stand against injustice.

It had something to do with my father who was born at some point in 1920 and grew-up in Jackson, Tennessee. He was born at home and never had a birth certificate. In 1934 he quit school to go to work. Then, when he joined the Army Air Corps in January 1942, he made up a birthday and invented having graduated from high school.

He never could talk about the war without coming close to crying, but it was clear that he was proud of America’s participation in the defeat of Nazi Germany. He was also clear about his  opposition to the racial segregation that defined his growing up and the overt racism that continued to dominate much of American politics. 

I remember his rants about the stupidity of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his anger at the images of white opposition to the Civil Rights movement emerging from the South.

When I was about five years old he took the family to visit his ailing mother in Tennessee. She was in some kind of care facility and appeared frighteningly old and almost toothless. It was the first time I had seen rural poverty, and it would be the only time I would see that grandmother.

My parents often watched the black and white nightly news where the occasional story would focus on Civil Rights. I remember that most of that coverage featured struggles in Mississippi and Alabama. I don’t think I understood everything, but I knew, from our visit, that Tennessee was next door. 

I was 8 eight years old when I first heard of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. When my parents explained it to me, I made a sincere suggestion that we could go and help out. Both of my parents seemed worried about what I had said, and they made it clear that I did not have a concrete understanding of what I was suggesting. 

As time went on, white opposition to Civil Rights marches got more and more violent. I remember news clips of very young demonstrators being confronted with fire hoses and police dogs. Years later, thanks to the documentary series Eyes on the Prize, those images became a regular part of the classes I taught in American history.

In 1964, when I was a high school sophomore, I saw a news clip of Mario Savio, leader of the Free Speech Movement, speaking in Sproul Plaza. I remember it as being very short, little more than, “There comes a time when you can’t take part …” but I was mesmerized by students protesting the restrictions placed on political activities on campus. I told my father that I wanted to go to college at Berkeley. 

He was not pleased and suggested it would be better if I went into the military. That was the first time I disagreed with him on something that could be called political. 

I had grown up seeing the usefulness of protest, and by the time I was 16, my mind was set. I had learned to see heroes in the civil rights and free speech movements. This inevitably led me to the movement against the American war in Vietnam.

Unfortunately, that turned out to be another subject of disagreement, but I realize now that my father’s focus had remained fixed on what he felt about the United States military during World War II. Nevertheless, I remain grateful to him for the anger he showed about segregation, his commitment to what he believed was justice and for his opposition to every aspect of McCarthyism.

Despite never being a religious kid, my 12 years of Catholic education taught me to think about justice. It led me, as a high school student, to volunteer occasionally with the Catholic Worker projects on skid row. It led me to admire the activities and writings of Philip and Daniel Berrigan and, by the time I was 18, it led me to find a new family in the anti-war movement. 

Growing up as I did allowed me, at the age of 26, to find profound meaning in teaching high school students American history, American government, and international relations. Those subjects were, and are, perfect vehicles to introduce questions of justice and ethics on a regular basis. 

It also motivated me, for the majority of my 35 years teaching, to sponsor groups aligned with Amnesty International, where I was privileged to work with students interested in advocating for universal recognition of basic human rights and committed to debating issues of peace and justice. 

As I said, I was lucky. I was lucky to grow up when racial injustice was impossible to ignore. I was lucky to grow up when students all over were demanding the right to be part of the conversation. And I was lucky to grow up when my father’s favorite newscaster, Walter Cronkite, spoke out against the Vietnam War.

Decades of War

I’m gonna lay down my sword and shield
Down by the riverside, down by the riverside
I’m gonna lay down my sword and shield
And study war no more

Traditional Spiritual

I first heard Down by the Riverside sung by Pete Seeger. I liked the song and I loved Pete Seeger, but I’m pretty sure that refusing to study war is not sufficient to end war.

The inescapable fact is that war has dominated much of U.S. history. According to Freakonometrics–statistician Arthur Charpentier, the United States has been at war 93% of the years since 1776. Nevertheless, as I have noted elsewhere, most of those wars are ignored by both textbooks and media.

Informed by experience as a teacher, I’m convinced that students need to study at least the most significant American wars. They need to study why and how those wars were fought, the debates that occurred at the time and why some supported war while others opposed it.

Unfortunately, when a war is included in history textbooks or discussed in classes, opposition to that war is generally ignored or misrepresented. Too often, instead of providing a serious examination of those opposed, there is silence. That silence comes at a price. At a minimum it discourages debate and inhibits participatory democracy.

War and Opposition to War

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems…. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

Rev. Martin Luther King 
Riverside Church April 4, 1967

After that speech Dr. King was immediately denounced by 168 newspapers across the country, including the New York Times. Senator Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican Party presidential nominee, said the speech “could border a bit on treason.” 

Civil Rights leader John Lewis, who was to be elected to Congress in 1986, was in the audience that day. He called the speech one of Dr. King’s best “a speech for all humanity—for the world community.”

There is no shortage of coverage of Martin Luther King in the history textbooks. In The Americans, for example, he is mentioned on 16 different pages and in History Alive! he is mentioned on 14. However, neither text even mentions the anti-war speech made at Riverside Church.

Perhaps the fact that Dr. King linked the peace and civil rights movement was inconceivable to those in support of the war. Perhaps his suggestion that the United States was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” remains unacceptable to state textbook commissions or textbook publishers. Either way, the omission of that speech is a massive betrayal of responsibility on the part of textbook publishers.

A Responsibility to Educate

My last contribution to the series on Missing Links in Textbook History was focused on how textbooks teach about war. Here I will focus on how textbooks and, by extension many teachers, teach about opposition to war. 

The essential question schools face is how to provide students the tools necessary to evaluate and critically engage with the world around them. When schools teach about a war, it is their responsibility to teach about the philosophical and moral reasons people opposed that war. 

In this essay, I have chosen to focus on the opposition to four of the wars that are consistently taught in American History courses: The American Revolution; The Mexican-American War; The Spanish-American War; and World War I. Those span the years 1776 to 1918.

I recognize that after  WW I, after 1918, there have been new wars and not enough opposition. Among those that I think merit analysis are: opposition to World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

There is also opposition to the current American financed war in Gaza. I can’t predict how that war, or the current opposition, will be covered in textbooks, but both should be covered. 

It is my hope that in looking at how opposition to each of the four older wars has been handled (or mishandled) in state-approved textbooks, readers will come to understand what is missing.

The American Revolution

This war is in all of the textbooks, but as a war it was very different from all other American wars in that there was no United States and thus no (non-colonial) independent government to protest against. 

It is important to remember that the revolution was not a revolt by the colonized, but a revolt by some of the colonists. It was led by British subjects against Great Britain and the British king. American Historian, Francis Jennings, put the Indigenous (who were, of course, the colonized) at the center of the Revolution, writing,. “it was Indian land everyone was fighting about.” 

It should be no surprise that this perspective is not even mentioned in any of the textbooks.

In simple terms, supporters of revolution were colonists whose interests would be best satisfied by an independent post-colonial government. For that reason, Carl Degler wrote, “no new social class came to power after the revolution because those who ran the revolt were already members of the colonial ruling class.” 

John Adams is often misquoted as writing that one-third of the colonial population supported the Revolution, one-third opposed it and about a third was neutral. While such equal division is clearly too simple, nonetheless, it set the standard and, in every textbook with which I have worked, there is some description of divisions similar to the thirds mentioned above. 
In the textbook, History Alive! the divisions are described in this way:

In 1776, most colonists belong to one of three groups, based on their opinions of British rule. The first group dubbed Loyalists staunchly supported the British government. The second group called Patriots opposed British rule and believed the colonists should separate from Britain immediately… The third group known as Moderates were unhappy with some aspects of British rule but wary of the possible effects of severing ties with Britain.

History Alive! Textbook

Of course, these descriptions leave out inconvenient groups. Women and children are not often included in any of the groups outlined above. For most Black people, what mattered was liberty and those who were enslaved sided with whichever side promised more freedom. The British actively recruited the enslaved to fight against the revolution.

Indigenous communities chose different strategies that reflected what seemed to best protect their homelands and ways of life. Some tried to remain neutral, others sided with the British and fewer sided with the revolutionaries. Their problem with the revolution came from a variety of issues;  one of the most important was the intention of the revolutionaries to do away with the Proclamation of 1763, which had prohibited colonists moving westward over the Appalachian Mountains to occupy Indigenous land.

In short, opposing sides during the American Revolution reflected the differences within the colonial population more than opposition to the war itself. 
However, an important exception is provided by the Quakers, who very often refused to participate in war by following the Society of Friends’ guidelines for pacifism. Unfortunately, in my experience, Quaker opposition to any American war is rarely given more than a single sentence in any textbook.

Opposition to the Mexican-American War

I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico. I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign.

Ulysses S Grant, 1879

There were a variety of groups and individuals who opposed the American war against Mexico and their reasoning should be covered in textbooks. In general, it is not.

As I’ve written elsewhere, the Mexican-American War was transparently about U.S. imperial expansion. Even at the time, some saw it for what it was, an act of aggression, not self-defense, yet, most Americans remained silent. 

Textbooks tend to ignore the moral reasoning behind opposition to the war. One sentence in History Alive! is typical, “While idealists worried that the war had been an unjust land-grab, realists cheered the results.” In The Americans, opposition is reduced to a milquetoast comment that, “Many Northerners opposed war.” Is it not obvious that students will learn very little from such ambivalent prose?

One of the most important groups opposed to the war were members of the Whig Party. Those who were led by Senator Charles Sumner – called Conscience Whigs – who believed that territorial expansion would lead to expansion of slave territory.
The most famous opponents of the war were often individuals. The formerly enslaved abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, condemned the war against Mexico in his newspaper, North Star. Here is an excerpt from one editorial:

“The present unholy war is not the accident of a day, but the result of long years of national transgression … We have given ourselves up to the blind spirit of mad ambition … Slavery, treachery and mad ambition, are at the head of the government, in the person of James K. Polk; and the means of checking them are naught.”

Frederick Douglass

Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison published anti-war essays in The Liberator, decrying, in his words, “ruffianism, perfidy, and every other feature of national depravity.” 

Henry David Thoreau was famously arrested for refusing to pay a poll tax that could be used for what he deemed an imperialist war. That experience helped inspire his famous essay, “Civil Disobedience.” 

Instead of printing excerpts from Sen. Sumner’s objections to the war, or what Frederick Douglass wrote in opposition to the war, or offering the students details of Congressman Abraham Lincoln’s demands that President Polk prove that U.S. forces had actually been killed within the territory of the United States, textbooks do very little. Instead, they report on the resulting territorial expansion in a way that appears to be an endorsement of mythic Manifest Destiny.

Teaching about opposition to the Mexican-American war would foster greater student appreciation of the debate over imperial expansion in the 19th century. After the war, in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo the United States claimed about 40% of Mexican land, including California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona, and parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming.  Texas was annexed separately and admitted as a state in 1845.

Opposition to the Spanish-American War

In the textbook History Alive! the section on the Spanish-American War begins with a simple question: Why did the United States go to war against Spain in 1898?

In History Alive! this begins with a description of “yellow journalism” between rival newspapers, the New York World and the New York Journal. Both papers, it is reported, “developed an exaggerated style of reporting,” in which, “Reporters and artists were encouraged to exaggerate the bravery of Cuban rebels and the horrors of Spanish rule.” 

What was then called “yellow journalism” is now called “fake news,” but no matter the name, it served its purpose: inflaming public opinion in favor of war and selling more papers. 

The Americans follows a similar line of reasoning but begins the section quoting a column from The New York World by James Creelman. In it he fabricates a dramatic story about the situation in Cuba.

No man’s life, no man’s property is safe. American citizens are imprisoned or slain without cause. American property is destroyed on all sides…. Blood on the road sides, blood in the fields, blood on the doorsteps, blood, blood, blood! Is there a not nation wise enough, brave enough, to aid this blood-smitten land?

James Creelman

The explosion and sinking of the USS Maine battleship and the killing of at least 260 sailors is described in all textbooks. At the time an assumption was usually made that Spain was at fault so the newspapers called “for vengeance.” 

So, the rhetorical question posed in History Alive! is quickly, and rather bizarrely, answered by begging the question. The United States went to war against Spain because the American people wanted war! No analysis necessary.

Newspapers Outside of New York City

Of course, the role played by news reports was important but news reports were more complex and more varied outside of New York City. In an article about the beginnings of the Spanish-American war, written by Piero Gleijeses, professor of International Studies at Johns Hopkins University,, there is an examination of relevant materials published in 41 American newspapers. He begins by explaining the historical context.

For more than a century, Americans had thought of Cuba as part of the U.S. sphere. Thomas Jefferson wrote in an 1823 letter to James Monroe, “I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States.” In his essay, Gleijeses quotes the Atlanta Constitution asserting that, “Geographically and commercially, the struggle in Cuba is on American soil.” In addition, the American people, as well as their government, “had long felt contempt and hostility toward Spain.”

Gleijeses also examined congressional records and found that while pro-war members of Congress spoke in favor of Cuban independence with “eloquence and detail,” those who opposed the war simply said that they “supported the president’s wise policy.” (This refers to when McKinley was reluctant to call for war against Spain.)

In examining multiple U.S. newspapers, both pro and antiwar, he found that eight of the newspapers advocated war before the Maine blew up and that this number increased to 20 after the Maine incident, meaning the division between pro and anti-war views was pretty even. “It is only in the press,” he writes, “that one finds a coherent, well-articulated and explicit explanation of the anti-war position.”

Anti-war advocates consistently warned that the conflict would exact a heavy toll in both money and lives, but the anti-war press was also steeped in racism. Here is an example from the anti-war New York Herald from January of 1898 which should illustrate the complexity of why some people take an anti-war position. “Cuba libre means another Black Republic. We don’t want one so near. Hayti [Haiti] is already too close.”

Pro-war advocates stressed how easy it would be to defeat Spain. According to the Chicago Inter Ocean, “Spain stands as an imbecile among the powers of Europe.” 
The pro-war Chicago Journal emphasized a history of distrust. “The history of the dealings of the United States with Spain has been a history of dignity and patience repaid by insult. Spain is our deadly enemy, treacherous, cruel, and unforgiving.”

The Anti-Imperialist League

Another source of opposition to the Spanish-American War was the American Anti-Imperialist League which is briefly mentioned in both History Alive! and The Americans. 

The League included a number of public figures including a former president of the United States, Grover Cleveland, who specifically opposed American actions in Hawaii; writer Mark Twain, Carl Schurz, former U.S. senator and minister to Spain under Lincoln and the conservative labor leader Samuel Gompers.

It eventually grew into a bipartisan mass movement of some 30,000 members. As one might expect from an organization that large, there were a variety of reasons for belonging.
A number of members opposed U.S. imperialism because they opposed conquering other people and they called the U.S. hypocritical for condemning European empires while pursuing one of its own. Others opposed imperialism for clearly racist reasons.

Carl Schurz, for example, warned that annexation would be the back door through which “Malays and other unspeakable Asiatics” would enter the United States. And Samuel Gompers as the leader of the American Federation of Labor, opposed immigration from Asia because “they represented an alien culture that could not be assimilated easily into that of the U.S.”

At the very least, students can learn from studying the opposition to this war that anti-war and anti-imperialist stances are not simple and can sometimes emerge from an intersection of morality, self-interest and racism.

World War I: The War and the Opposition

The Americans and History Alive! describe the roots of WW I in exactly the same way by listing a series of things that happened. Here are the major points: 

In the last years of the 19th century, many European nations and the United States, began to collect colonies and eventually, a mix of nationalism, imperialism and militarism partitioned much of the globe. 

Alliances were formed to provide a sense of mutual support, but when Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated in 1914, these imperial alliances led to WW I.

President Wilson declared U.S. neutrality. Nevertheless, since the U.S. was an industrial and imperial power, it felt pressures similar to those felt by similar powers in Europe. 

Neutral or not, pressures from German U-boats, and the fact that the United States had loaned a good deal of money to Britain and France, led Wilson to ask Congress for a declaration of war against Germany on April 2, 1917.

After the textbooks had devoted multiple chapters to emerging global conflicts and after describing the various wars in Cuba and the Philippines subsumed as, “The Spanish-American War,” these American history textbooks are still able to introduce WW I, as an unexpected incident. They often describe it with words that appear to have been taken from a PR firm hired to promote the war.

This is from History Alive!:

To many Americans in 1917, the nation’s entry into World War I was the commencement of a great adventure. Others viewed it as a heroic cause that presented the country an opportunity to demonstrate its courage. President Woodrow Wilson’s call to safeguard the world for democracy appealed to Americans’ sense of idealism. Many shared the president’s belief that this would be “the war to end all wars.”

History Alive! Textbook

The best explanation I have come across for this extraordinary ability to portray historical events as disconnected from other prominent historical events is from an interview with the American author Viet Thanh Nguyen: “As Americans we’re trained ‘to think of wars as episodic’ rather than as a continuous production of the American war machine and its long history.”

The truth is that World War I was part of a predictable process but it was different in scale from all previous wars. Ultimately, 65,000,000 soldiers from 30 countries fought. As a result, all the textbooks I’ve seen admit that in order to counter the emergence of a global opposition to this global war, allied governments promoted propaganda, most of which linked participation in the war to patriotism and “manly notions” of courage and duty. 

Immediately after war was declared Wilson created the Committee on Public Information (CPI). This committee’s purpose was to focus on promoting the war. Much of what the CPI did followed examples set by the British War Propaganda Bureau where, for example, more than 50 authors –including Arthur Conan Doyle and H. G. Wells – launched a flood of books, posters, pamphlets and films to promote war. Much of that propaganda found its way into the United States.

Propaganda employed negative depictions of the enemy to drive people into action and to strengthen national resolve. An official British government report promoted lies about German troops bayoneting babies, hacking off people’s hands and crucifying Belgian peasants. The poster of a gigantic German soldier with babies on his bayonet became infamous. 

Outside of these textbooks, World War I is often referred to as tragic and unnecessary, but the textbooks seem very reluctant to deal with it on those terms. Even when the focus switches to “The Home Front,” there is mostly discussion of patriotic fervor, liberty bonds and a “crackdown on dissent.”

In the United States that “crackdown” began with the Espionage and Sedition Acts. In History Alive! the section discussing these events is titled “Enforcing Loyalty Among All Americans.”  In The Americans, it is titled, “Attacks on Civil Liberty.” 

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