A balanced look at WWII pacifists

In the 1930s, anti-war feeling was widespread. In 1936, about 500,000 students, almost half of the undergraduates in the U.S., participated in a strike against war and compulsory ROTC. During the decade, pacifism might have surpassed the Depression as the dominant social issue among American liberal Protestants.

With Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, isolationism and pacifism went out of fashion. Still, according to Daniel Akst, as it was pushed to the margins, pacifism became countercultural. Its much smaller “remnant” felt “liberated to move in new directions and develop new tactics.”

In “War by Other Means,” Akst focuses on four activists — David Dellinger, Bayard Rustin, Dorothy Day and Dwight MacDonald — to tell the little-known story of pacifist activism during World War II. Akst attempts a delicate balancing act. He celebrates these individuals for their idealism, integrity, courage and influence on the American left in the ensuing decades. And he dismisses pacifism for offering a mushy “hodgepodge of utopian ideas and crude absolutism” to counter the threats posed by the Nazis, including genocide.

Akst provides fascinating biographical sketches of his protagonists. Dellinger, we learn, was born to an affluent family and studied economics at Yale. Radicalized by the Depression and the New Testament, he turned away from basic comforts and rode the rails.

Mistaken, “of course,” Akst writes, about U.S. participation in World War II, for which they offered no realistic alternative, pacifists moved from conscientious objection to a substantially more wide-ranging reform agenda.

They pressed for change in prisons and mental hospitals; protested the forced evacuation to Japanese Americans to concentration camps; demanded the Roosevelt administration do more to save European Jews. They helped make nonviolent mass protest a foundational strategy for the civil rights movement.