Organizational history
Forerunners
The eruption of World War I in August 1914 saw its response in the United States of America with the emergence of a national peace movement. One of the pioneer American pacifist organizations was the Woman's Peace Party, initiated by Chicago social worker Jane Addams. In October 1914, the Minneapolis chapter of this organization passed a "Tentative Program for a Constructive Peace," which called for the convocation of an international conference of Neutral countries to bring an end to the European conflict. [1] The Woman's Peace Party organized a mass meeting in Chicago early in December 1914, from which emerged a December 19 session which brought together 21 delegates from various peace, labor, political, religious, and civic organizations. [1] This alliance of interested organizations constituted itself as the Chicago Emergency Peace Federation. [2]
The Emergency Peace Federation elected socialist Louis P. Lochner its executive secretary, with Jane Addams continuing to play a leading role in the organization as well. [2] The group issued a publication known as the Emergency Peace Federation Bulletin, and was the organizing force behind a national peace conference held in Chicago from February 27 to 28, 1915. [3]
Throughout 1915 and 1916, a coordinated campaign was conducted in the United States on behalf of military "Preparedness," culminating on July 22, 1916 with Preparedness Day. This campaign for increased military spending in the shadow of the European bloodbath drove American pacifists to action. One of the groups organized in an effort to staunch America's slide to war was the American Union Against Militarism, founded in January 1916 from an "Anti-Preparedness Committee" established the previous year. [4] In early 1917, the American Union Against Militarism were leading advocates for the idea of holding of a national referendum on the question of American entry into the European war, believing that those agitating for foreign intervention were a distinct minority of the population. [4]
A third pacifist organization emerged in February 1917, just as America appeared on the cusp of entering the European conflagration. This New York group, originally called the Emergency Peace Committee, dedicated itself to agitating for a continuation of the policy of American neutrality towards the World War combatants. [4] This group later emerged as the New York Emergency Peace Federation, and worked hand-in-glove with the Chicago organization of the same name.
The Emergency Peace Federation rallied a group of thousands to the United States Capital to oppose American entry into World War I on April 2, 1917. One member, Alexander Bannwart, got into a fistfight with U.S. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. [5] That day, President Woodrow Wilson delivered a speech to Congress calling for a declaration of war against Germany. As pro-war fervor swept the country, a new phase was entered by activists in the American peace movement — attempting to terminate Wilson's so-called "War to Make the World Safe for Democracy." In keeping with this new task, these three main pacifist organizations of America joined forces in a new organization, ultimately known as the People's Council of America for Democracy and Peace.
Establishment
On May 2, 1917, more than 40 members of the Emergency Peace Federation assembled at the Hotel Astor in New York City to consider the course for the peace movement in America. [6] Participants were split between radicals and pacifists who favored the peace conditions advanced by the Bolshevik government of Soviet Russia — including Morris Hillquit, Norman Thomas, and Roger Baldwin — and those who favored a more moderate and Americanized approach. [6] When this latter group, headed by Lillian Wald of the American Union Against Militarism, realized that it was in the minority, it walked out of the meeting in order to retain its independence from the forthcoming organization. [6]
Those remaining determined to establish a new peace organization, patterned loosely on the workingmen's councils of Russia. [7] Socialist leader Morris Hillqut was named the ceremonial Chairman of the organizing committee of the new group and Louis P. Lochner was tapped as Secretary, in charge of day-to-day activities. [6]
Lochner's attempt to build a broad-based organization ran into difficulty. Prominent liberals sympathetic to the Wilson administration, such as attorney Frank P. Walsh, refused to associate with the organization. [8] Radicals were more sympathetic, with a number of prominent members of the Socialist Party of America and left-wing members of the American Union Against Militarism joining the new group's ranks, as well as key members of the Emergency Peace Federation, such as rabbi Judah L. Magnes. [8]
A "Tentative Program" was circulated on May 7, in preparation for the gathering. [9] New York City's Madison Square Garden was booked for an organizational mass meeting. [10] Stanford University President David Starr Jordan, a leading public figure among the American peace movement, was sought as a keynote speaker. [10]
Lochner appealed to the American Federation of Labor to also lend its support to the new peace organization. [11] AFL President Samuel Gompers replied angrily in the negative, answering Lochner's cable with a terse declaration that "I prefer not to ally myself with the conscious or unconscious agents of the Kaiser in America." [12]
Despite Gompers' refusal, work on the new organization proceeded apace, with a program committee consisting of Hillquit, Lochner, Norman Thomas, Henry W. L. Dana of Columbia University, and peace activists Rebecca Shelly and Elisabeth Freeman named. [13] The committee decided to endorse a peace proposal calling for peace without annexations or indemnities and the self-determination of all peoples as a basis of its own demands and to cooperate closely with the staunchly anti-militarist Socialist Party. [13]
Leading academics were targeted by Lochner and brought into the new organization's fold during the initial preparatory period, including such worthies as economists Emily Green Balch and Scott Nearing. [14] Lochner envisioned an organization which was nationwide in scope and that would unite local peace organizations from around the United States. [15]
First American Conference for Democracy and Terms of Peace
At 10 am on May 30, 1917, the Madison Square Garden organizational meeting, called the First American Conference for Democracy and Terms of Peace, was gaveled to order by Judah Magnes. [16] The meeting was held amidst a strong presence by New York City police, who feared violence either by revolutionary participants or nationalist mobs intent on dispersing attendees. [17] Policemen carrying riot guns were posted on street corners surrounding Madison Square Garden, while police vehicles cruised the streets. [16] More than 400 policemen were detailed to the operation. [16]
Delegates began work on a preamble which called upon Americans to "aid our government in bringing to ourselves and the world a speedy, righteous, and lasting peace." [16] Magnes delivered the keynote address, later published as a pamphlet in an edition of 50,000 copies, in which he bitterly attacked Britain and France for pursuing a war which offered little of worth to the working class, and intimating that the United States was engaged in a war to preserve capitalism in Europe. [16]
Also addressing the gathering was Algernon Lee of the Socialist Party-affiliated Rand School of Social Science, who detailed ongoing efforts of the Zimmerwald movement to hold an international peace conference at Stockholm. [18] Lee read a statement written by Morris Hillquit detailing a concrete plan for the participation of the leading belligerents in such a gathering and the establishment of an international body to resolve future economic disagreements amongst the warring parties — proposals which met with strong approval from the assembled delegates. [18]
Afternoon speakers included Professor William I. Hull, a former college student of Woodrow Wilson's, who cautioned the President against making secret agreements with the Entente powers which might in the future commit the United States to participation in future wars. [18] Former Socialist Congressman Victor L. Berger also spoke, bitterly condemning the wartime profiteering of the American ruling class. [18]
An evening session on the labor movement was addressed by James Maurer, a Socialist Party activist who was the elected leader of the AFL in Pennsylvania. Maurer focused his rhetoric upon Samuel Gompers and the national leadership of the AFL, which he charged had sold out the interests of the working class to the interests of the capitalist class. [19] Maurer was followed at the rostrum by Scott Nearing, who emphasized the need of Americans to support an activist labor movement, without which American workers would be suppressed by the combined forces of big business and the government during the war. [19]
On the second day of the conference, sociologist Florence Kelley called on the Wilson administration to improve working conditions of American workers. [19] Numerous speakers followed calling for the repeal of military conscription and an endorsement of the policy of immediate peace without annexations or indemnities. [19]
In the afternoon a formal call was made by Rebecca Shelly for the establishment of a new national organization, the People's Council of America, composed of locals across the country organized through universal suffrage and national referendums. [20] Shelly called for a national convention to be held in the Midwest on September 1, for the establishment of a national office for the fledgling organization, and for the publication of a regular bulletin for national distribution. [21] These proposals were approved by the assembled delegates, and the People's Council of America for Democracy and Peace was formally born. [21]
The People's Council maintained its national headquarters in New York City in an office located at 2 West 13th Street. [22]
Repression
The People's Council frequently saw its gatherings banned or disbanded. On August 24, 1917, a meeting of the organization in Philadelphia was disrupted and shut down by a mob of soldiers and sailors. [23] That same day, city authorities in Memphis denied the group use of a public hall for its meeting. [23] On August 28, a People's Council gathering in Fargo, North Dakota, was quashed by the coordinated mass singing of "The Star-Spangled Banner." [23]
On August 30, 1917, a mob of 1,000 gathered in Hudson, WI and held a night rally in front of the armory protesting the attempt by the People's Council to hold a conference in the city's prizefighting arena. The crowd then moved on the four organizers in the lobby of their hotel and threatened to hang them. Only after the pleadings of county attorney N. O. Varnum were the four allowed to leave town at once and unharmed. [24]
Effort was made to hold a national conference in Minneapolis on September 1, but the organization was denied use of a hall in the city. When the alternative of meeting in a circus tent was advanced, [23] With less than a week remaining before the start of its scheduled national convention, Minnesota Governor Joseph Burquist of Minnesota intervened to ban the People's Council from gathering anywhere in the state on the grounds that it would give aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States. [25]
The People's Council scrambled and attempted to hold its convention in Chicago, but the event was broken up by the police. [26] When Chicago Mayor "Big Bill" Thompson attempted to reverse this action, on the grounds that "pacifists are law-abiding citizens" and that he would not "have it spread broadcast that Chicago denies free speech to anyone," Illinois Governor Frank Lowden responded by mobiling the Illinois National Guard, sending four companies of troops to Chicago the next day to make sure that the People's Council could not gather. [26]
The People's Council sought to make Stanford University President David Starr Jordan its delegate to a proposed September 9, 1917, peace meeting in Stockholm, but political pressure seems to have forced Jordan to decline the appointment and sever all relations with the organization as its treasurer effective September 1 of that year. [23]
Publications
Beginning August 7, 1917, the People's Council published a tabloid-sized monthly (later semi-monthly) newspaper called The Bulletin of the People's Council of America. [27] The publication was terminated effective with the issue of January 1919. [27] A run of the publication exists on microfilm as reel 2 of the Swarthmore College Peace Collection's People's Council of America papers. [28]
The organization also issued a plethora of pamphlets, including material written by Max Eastman, Judah Magnes, Scott Nearing, and Alexander Trachtenberg.
Dissolution and legacy
The People's Council was succeeded in the post-war period by the People's Freedom Union, which operated from the same New York headquarters and carried forward the People's Council's publishing imprint, "The People's Print." This new incarnation of the People's Council dedicated itself to the fight to free political prisoners, to stop the spread of militarism, and to halt military intervention in Mexico and Soviet Russia.
An archive of papers relating to the People's Council of America may be found at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. The bulk of the collection has been filmed on two reels of microfilm, both of which are available through inter-library loan. [28]
Papers related to the People's Council of America as well as the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy may be found in the Frank Leslie Grubbs collection, housed at the Hoover Institution archives at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. [29] The collection includes one folder of material and ten reels of microfilm gathering correspondence, minutes, and printed publications. [29]
The Socialist Party of America (SPA) was a socialist political party in the United States formed in 1901 by a merger between the three-year-old Social Democratic Party of America and disaffected elements of the Socialist Labor Party of America who had split from the main organization in 1899.
Norman Mattoon Thomas was an American Presbyterian minister who achieved fame as a socialist, pacifist, and six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America.
Samuel Gompers was a British-born American cigar maker, labor union leader and a key figure in American labor history. Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and served as the organization's president from 1886 to 1894, and from 1895 until his death in 1924. He promoted harmony among the different craft unions that comprised the AFL, trying to minimize jurisdictional battles. He promoted thorough organization and collective bargaining in order to secure shorter hours and higher wages, which he considered the essential first steps to emancipating labor.
The American Federation of Labor (AFL) was a national federation of labor unions in the United States that continues today as the AFL-CIO. It was founded in Columbus, Ohio, in 1886 by an alliance of craft unions eager to provide mutual support and disappointed in the Knights of Labor. Samuel Gompers was elected the full-time president at its founding convention and reelected every year, except one, until his death in 1924. He became the major spokesperson for the union movement.
Morris Hillquit was a founder and leader of the Socialist Party of America and prominent labor lawyer in New York City's Lower East Side. Together with Eugene V. Debs and Congressman Victor L. Berger, Hillquit was one of the leading public faces of American socialism during the first two decades of the 20th century.
The American Peace Mobilization (APM) was a peace group established in 1940 to oppose American aid to the Allies in World War II before the United States entered the war. It was officially cited in 1947 by United States Attorney General Tom C. Clark on the Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations for 1948, as directed by President Harry S. Truman's Executive Order 9835.
John Spargo was a Cornishman who came to New York in 1901 and became a political writer and late in life an expert in the history and crafts of Vermont. At first Spargo was active in the Socialist Party of America. A Methodist preacher he tried to meld the Protestant Social Gospel with Marxist socialism in Marxian Socialism and Religion: A Study of the Relation of the Marxian Theories to the Fundamental Principles of Religion (1915). He also founded a settlement house in Yonkers, N.Y. Spargo moved steadily to the right after 1917 when he supported American intervention in World War I. With AFL leader Samuel Gompers he organized the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy in 1917. Spargo helped draft the Colby Note that formalised the Wilson administration's anti-communist policies. He strongly denounced the Bolshevik Revolution in Bolshevism: The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy (1919). He opposed the foreign policy of the New Deal, especially its recognition of the USSR in 1933. He supported the House Un-American Activities Committee in the late 1930s and Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s. He endorsed Barry Goldwater In the 1964 Elections.
The American Union Against Militarism (AUAM) was an American pacifist organization established in response to World War I. The organization attempted to keep the United States out of the European conflict through mass demonstrations, public lectures, and the printed word. Failing in that effort with American entry into the war in April 1917, the Union battled against conscription, action which subjected it to state repression, and military intervention. The organization was eventually dissolved after the war in 1922.
Ludwig "Louis" Paul Lochner was an American political activist, journalist, and author. During World War I, Lochner was a leading figure in the American and the international anti-war movement. Later, he served for many years as head of the Berlin bureau of Associated Press and was best remembered for his work there as a foreign correspondent. Lochner was awarded the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for correspondence for his wartime reporting from Nazi Germany. In December 1941, Lochner was interned by the Nazis but was later released in a prisoner exchange.
The Woman's Peace Party (WPP) was an American pacifist and feminist organization formally established in January 1915 in response to World War I. The organization is remembered as the first American peace organization to make use of direct action tactics such as public demonstration. The Woman's Peace Party became the American section of an international organization known as the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace later in 1915, a group which later changed its name to the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.
James Hudson Maurer was a prominent American trade unionist who twice ran for the office of Vice President of the United States on the ticket of the Socialist Party of America.
Frank Bohn was an advocate of industrial unionism who was a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World. From 1906 to 1908 he was the National Secretary of the Socialist Labor Party of America, before leaving to join forces with the rival Socialist Party of America. After World War I his politics became increasingly nationalistic and he left the labor movement altogether.
Jessie Wallace Hughan was an American educator, a socialist activist, and a radical pacifist. During her college days she was one of four co-founders of Alpha Omicron Pi, a national fraternity for university women. She also was a founder and the first Secretary of the War Resisters League, established in 1923. For over two decades, she was a perennial candidate for political office on the ticket of the Socialist Party of America in her home state of New York.
The American Student Union (ASU) was a national left-wing organization of college students of the 1930s, best remembered for its protest activities against militarism. Founded by a 1935 merger of Communist and Socialist student organizations, the ASU was affiliated with the American Youth Congress. The group was investigated by the Dies Committee of the United States House of Representatives in 1939 over its connections to the Communist Party USA. With the group's Communist-dominated leadership consistently supportive of the twists and turns of Soviet foreign policy, the Socialist minority split from the group in 1939. The organization was terminated in 1941.
Clarence Ollson Senior (1903–1974) was an American socialist political activist best remembered as the National Executive Secretary of the Socialist Party of America during the 1930s. Originally a protégé of Presidential candidate Norman Thomas, during the inner-party fight of the 1930s, Senior became an active supporter of the so-called "Militant" faction. After resigning his post late in 1936, Senior returned to graduate school, becoming a widely published academic specializing on the affairs of Puerto Rico and other nations of the Caribbean.
The American Alliance for Labor and Democracy was an American political organization established in September 1917 through the initiative of the American Federation of Labor and making use of the resources of the United States government's Committee on Public Information. The group was dedicated to building support among American workers for that nation's participation in World War I in Europe. Following the victory of the Entente powers over the empires of Germany and Austria-Hungary the organization lost its raison d'être. It was finally terminated in November 1919 due to a lack of funding.
The Social Democratic League of America (SDL) was a short-lived social-democratic political party established in 1917 by electorally-oriented socialists who favored the participation of the United States in World War I. Led by such intellectuals as John Spargo, Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, and Williceam English Walling, the SDL maintained effective control over the venerable American socialist newspaper The Appeal to Reason during 1918, the year of the group's greatest public influence.
The International Working People's Association (IWPA), sometimes known as the "Black International," was an international anarchist political organization established in 1881 at a convention held in London, England. In America the group is best remembered as the political organization uniting Albert Parsons, August Spies, and other anarchist leaders prosecuted in the wake of the 1886 Haymarket bombing in Chicago.
Devere Allen (1891–1955) was an American socialist and pacifist political activist and journalist. Allen is best remembered as the main editor of The World Tomorrow following the departure of Norman Thomas from the magazine in 1922. Allen was the author of more than 20 books and pamphlets and was active in the leadership of a number of political organizations, including the League for Independent Political Action (1928–1932) and the Socialist Party of America.
The America First Association of Minnesota (AFA) was a patriotic propaganda organization established in the state of Minnesota in November 1917 with a view to assisting the efforts of the United States of America in World War I. The organization was based in the city of St. Paul and was constituted on a county-by-county basis throughout the state. The AFA was one of the leading non-partisan political organizations in that state during wartime.