War by Other Means

October 17, 2022
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.

October 15, 2022
Study of conscientious objectors who made waves during World War II and helped pave the way for successors in Vietnam and other conflicts. When the draft went into effect in 1940, roughly 43,000 men "were granted conscientious objector status," writes journalist Akst, who breaks down that number: "Most were purely religious objectors, and some contributed to the war effort as combat medics or in other non-lethal roles." Some 12,000 were assigned to rural work camps in the U.S., continuing the work of the New Deal-era Civilian Conservation Corps and other infrastructure-building agencies. Of the 6,000 left, two-thirds were Jehovah's Witnesses, and there were "nearly two thousand absolute resisters." Those in the last category were imprisoned. Objecting to the war was politically fraught, and people such as David Dellinger, who, years later, became part of the Chicago Seven, had to wrestle with being decried traitors to honor their "radical antiauthoritarianism." In addition to Dellinger, the author describes the work of future civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, a brilliant tactician who later helped organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington; dissident journalist Dwight Macdonald; "Catholic firebrand" Dorothy Day; and a host of lesser-known characters in the struggle. Some were followers of Gandhi's satyagraha movement, which advocated nonviolent but by no means passive resistance; some were followers of Christian pacifism, such as the pastor Reinhold Niebuhr. A few, such as Dellinger's friend Don Benedict, decided while in prison that "it suddenly began to make a difference to me who won the war" and enlisted after all. Akst writes effectively of these pacifists and objectors, noting that many of them took important roles in later resistance against war and for advances in civil rights. "They saw themselves as revolutionaries," he writes, "and they were tough, having withstood violence, prison, poverty, and social opprobrium." A worthy exploration of a little-known episode in the history of American involvement in WWII.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.