War by Other Means: The Pacifists of the Greatest Generation Who Revolutionized Resistance

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. (Dec.)