Although most closely identified with war, propaganda has also been a staple of those either seeking peace or voicing opposition to a particular war, from the writings of the Dutch scholar Erasmus (1466-1536) against the brutality of the religious wars of his time to street demonstrations against the bombing of Afghanistan in 2001. Arguments for peace have been based on the horrors of war, religious feelings, and humanist philosophy derived from ancient Greek thought. Early depictions in art include the works of Jacques Callot (ca. 1592-1635) (in response to the Thirty Years’ War). The best-known sectarian preaching against war was that of the Religious Society of Friends or Quakers, founded by George Fox (1624-1691). Other sects preaching peace included the Mennonites and Brethren. In 1693 Quaker colonist William Penn (1644-1718) wrote “An Essay towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe, by the establishment of an European Diet, Parliament or Estates.” The same idea of a league of states to underwrite peace surfaced in the work of Charles Irenee Castel, Abbe de Saint-Pierre (1658-1743), who in 1713 published his Projet de la Paix Perpetuelle (Scheme for Perpetual Peace).
The Napoleonic Wars sparked artistic condemnation of the excesses of war in the works of Goya (1746-1828) and among non-sectarian peace organizations on both sides of the Atlantic. These groups founded newspapers such as the Herald of Peace (1819) in Britain and Friend of Peace (1821) in the United States. The idea of a “Congress of Nations” was popular with numerous state-level American peace organizations of the early nineteenth century, which came together in 1828 to form a national, nonsectarian American Peace Society (APS) under the leadership of William Ladd (1778-1841). Unfortunately the APS soon split over the issue of whether it was moral to fight a defensive war. William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879) believed that it was not and organized the breakaway New England Non-Resistance Society. This organization also split over the morality of the American Civil War, which Garrison, being an abolitionist, endorsed. In 1862 Garrison’s chief opponent on the issue, Alfred Henry Love (1830-1913), published An Appeal in Vindication of Peace Principles and Against Resistance by Force.Love argued: “Let us seek to convert rather than coerce.” In 1866 Love presided over the founding of the Universal Peace Union, which attracted many prominent female members. Although it matched the APS in its endorsement of an international organization, it extended its antiwar arguments to include war-inspired toys and violent sports.
The mid-nineteenth century saw the establishment of a series of international peace congresses, beginning in London in 1843 with the First Universal Peace Congress. The second (Brussels, 1848) combined arguments for an international organization with calls for disarmament. Prominent European pacifists in the era included the Frenchman Ferdinand Edouard Buisson (1841-1932), Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), and Austrian author Bertha von Suttner (1843-1914), best known for her internationally popular 1889 novel Die Waffen nieder (Lay Down Your Arms). Younger activists included Alfred Hermann Fried (1864-1921), founder of the Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft (German League for Peace). The major powers seemed responsive, attending the First International Peace Conference in 1899 and establishing an international tribunal at The Hague in Holland. These years also saw the founding of the Nobel Peace Prize. The emerging peace movement, however, could not prevent the coming of World War I. The latter provoked a lively antiwar movement variously led by liberal humanists, sectarian pacifists, and socialists. Leaders in Britain included Bertrand Russell (1872— 1970), who at war’s end was jailed for his views. The leading antiwar activist in the United States was the Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926), who was likewise imprisoned from 1918 to 1921. Those draftees in Britain and the United States who refused to bear arms were arrested as conscientious objectors (a term coined during the war). Groups supporting them included the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the American Union against Militarism, whose propaganda included the exhibition of a dinosaur as a warning against human extinction. Hollywood produced a number of feature films with a pacifist message, the most famous being Civilization (1916), directed by Thomas H. Ince (1882-1924). Jane Addams (18501935) helped found the Women’s International League for Peace in 1915, which four years later became the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Antiwar activity led to the founding (also with Addams’s help) of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 1920. Internationally the experience of the Great War energized the peace movement as never before.
The interwar peace movement had no shortage of remarkable polemical material, including novels such as All Quiet on the Western Front (1928) by Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970), in Germany (which was turned into a classic film in 1930), and A Farewell to Arms (1929) by Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). British fiction included plays like Journey’s End (1929) by R. C. Sherriff (1896-1975) and polemical essays by writers like Sir Norman Angell (1872-1967) and even A. A. Milne (1882-1956). The focus for much of this effort was the League of Nations Union, which was organized to support the international body established in 1919. As the hope of world peace crumbled with the rise of Hitler and Mussolini new polemical works appeared, among the most famous being Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937).
In the United States pressure from peace activists like Dorothy Detzer (1893-1981), who was a Washington lobbyist for WILPF, resulted in a congressional hearing on the arms industry. During these “Merchants of Death” hearings (1934 and 1935), Sen. Gerald P. Nye (1892-1971) exposed the willingness of arms manufacturers to exploit war to suit their own ends. These ideas became orthodoxy in pacifist films of the era, such as William A. Well-man’s The President Vanishes (1934), in which arms manufacturers kidnap the president and try to start a war. Similar views surfaced in 1938 in the first adventure of the comic book hero Superman. U.S. pacifism added additional weight to the preexisting isolationist trend in American politics, resulting in a complex web of neutrality acts passed between 1935 and 1939 to keep the United States out of future wars. Pacifist arguments remained central to U.S. isolationist politics and could be found in student movements, same-sex organizations (such as WILPF, or the National Women’s Committee to Keep the United States Out of War, led by Katherine Curtis), labor-based movements, and farmers. The National Council for the Prevention of War coordinated these disparate groups.
Eloquent antiwar novels included a graphic account of the suffering of a mutilated solider in Johnny Got His Gun (1939) by Dalton Trumbo (1905—1976), which was turned into a film in 1971. Propaganda against U.S. intervention in World War II included arguments that fell short of the high ideals of pacifism. The emotive radio broadcasts of Father Charles Coughlin (1891 — 1971) and later speeches by the aviator Charles Lindbergh (1902—1974) were not opposed to war per se but just a war against Hitler “on behalf” of Britain and “the Jews.” It is a mark of the success of the pacifists in the interwar years that World War II concluded with universal agreement on the need for an international organization. Doctrines first promulgated in pacifist and liberal international writing in the nineteenth century became aims in Allied wartime propaganda, leading to the establishment of the United Nations in 1945.
