REVOLUTIONARY PACIFISM AND WAR RESISTANCE Jessie Wallace Hughan's “War against War”

This am’cle discusses the antiwar work and pacifist writings of the founder of the War Resisters Lmague. Jessie Wallace Hugh. The intertwining of the biographical and organizational narrative approach to writing history permits the author to explore the interplay of the personal andpolitical in the life of Jessie Hughan. The author argues that H u g h played a central role in the new pacifist movement of the post- World War I era. This view of Hugh is contextualized in terms of what scholars are now discovering about the interconnections among progressive and left-wing politics, feminism, andpacifism in the era that spans World War I and World War II.

REVOLUTIONARY PACIFISM AND WAR RESISTANCE Jessie Wallace Hughsn’s ‘War against War”

by Frances H. Early

This article provides an introduction to the antiwar work and pacifist writings of Jessie Wallace Hughan. Few know about Jessie Hughan; therefore, what I offer here is part biographical sketch, part peace movement narrative history. The intertwining of these two approaches permits us to gain insight into the process by which Jessie Hughan became a pacifist activist and theoretician. It also allows us to bring into our historical understanding an appreciation of her central role in the new pacifist movement of the post-World War I era. I have tried to contextualize Jessie Hughan’s story in terms of what scholars are now discovering about the interconnections among progressive and left-wing politics, feminism, and pacifism in this era.

AUTHORS NOTE: A grant from he Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada facilitated the research for this project. I appreciate the critical comments made by Margaret Rockwell Finch, Julie Finch. Abe and Ida Kaufman. Barbara Steinson, Haniet Alonso, and members of the Halifax Women’s History Reading Group on an earlier draft of this article.

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When war broke out in Europe in August of 1914, Jessie Wallace Hughan, a high school English teacher and a published poet and scholar, was vacationing at a seaside cottage in Hyannis, Massa- chusetts, with her mother and elder sister, with whom she shared a home in Brooklyn, New York. She relished her long summers that permitted her to read extensively and to write at leisure. Hughan was an inveterate diarist, but the relaxed tone of her July entries had faded by early August. Hughan’s laconic remarks about the war indicate that a sense of incredulity was soon replaced with a mounting unease. She hated the amorality and futility of war and in 1914 was already a pacifist. Fearful of future U.S. participation in the war, Hughan began exploring possible avenues for militant peace work as soon as she returned to Brooklyn in the fall.

Other troubled people shared Jessie Hughan’s conviction that war must not engulf America. By the summer of 1914, a multifac- eted social democratic reform movement was in full swing in the United States with an ambitious agenda that included expanding democracy and economic opportunity, rationalizing and regulating big business, and cleaning up the cities. These were large goals that required a national commitment and massive resource mobiliza- tion; reform would almost certainly be derailed if the United States went to war. Thus progressive reformers across a broad spectrum of political and economic life reacted with repugnance and alarm at the possibility of U.S. involvement in overseas conflict. Reform leaders soon began organizing a peace campaign dedicated to pro- tecting their domestic achievements and discouraging militarism.

Jessie Hughan had come to maturity in the idealistic atmosphere of the Progressive Era and, as a privileged, well-educated, inde- pendent White woman, readily identified with the middle-class reformer’s faith in the democratic promise of America. But liberal reformism, although necessary, was not enough. Hughan since 1907 had been a member of the Socialist Party, which by 1914 was strongly identified with the antiwar movement. By 1914 she was also a pacifist: in her mind the socialist cooperative commonwealth and the elimination of war went hand in hand.

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Jessie Hughan was thirty-eight years old in 1914. ANew Woman with one foot in the Victorian Age, she was a brilliant analytic thinker, a resourceful and inspiring teacher, a poet of distinction, and a center of strength in a family, which although genteel was often impecunious. From an early age, Hughan’s sharp wit and engagement in the world of discussion and debate was recognized and admired by members of her close-knit, female-bonded family. (She had two sisters and numerous aunts and female cousins; the men were outnumbered in the Hughan clan.) One family story recounts Hughan’s penchant, while still a child, for insisting on stating her opinions if she thought she was right, regardless of consequences. She earned the ire of one school principal who, repeatedly challenged in the classroom, would finally admonish: “Jessie, sit down.” Still standing, Hughan would invariably reply, “Yes, but Mr. MacDonald.”’

Jessie Hughan’s parents were strong-minded individuals in their own right. They influenced Jessie and her two sisters, Evelyn and Marjorie, to question social mores and traditional forms of authority. Samuel Hughan had emigrated to America from Scotland as a young man. Gentle, impractical, and intellectual-Evelyn Hughan once likened to him to Bronson Alcott, the transcendental philoso- pher and father of Louisa May Alcott-he was a Swedenborgian, a vegetarian, and a follower of Henry George and the Single Tax movement. Maggie West Hughan, Jessie Hughan’s adored mother, was a composer and poet and a Single Taxer like her husband; her joy in living and generosity of spirit affected each of her daughters profoundly. Maggie Hughan was also an enthusiastic suffragist, converted to the cause by her broad-minded husband. She hated physical violence and rejected corporal punishment as a child- rearing practice. A childhood memory of her mother running into the street to break up a fight between two peddlers remained with Jessie Hughan as an adult. Her mother actively opposed all war after the Spanish-American War and was, in her daughter’s words, “perhaps the strongest pacifist influence in my childhood.”*

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Despite financial constraints on the family budget, Hughan was educated at the “best” schools. As a teenager she attended the prestigious Northfield Academy for girls in Massachusetts. After graduating from high school as class valedictorian, Hughan attended Barnard College in Manhattan on a scholarship. She distinguished herself as a superior liberal arts student, and her literary talents blossomed. The community of female students encouraged the formation of close friendships. The woman-centered lifestyle at Barnard, with its finely meshed Victorian and New Womanhood behavior patterns and values, struck a responsive cord in Jessie H ~ g h a n . ~ She and three friends founded a sorority (called “frater- nity”) on campus, and although membership was exclusive, by invitation only, social service was at the heart of the society’s purpose. (Hughan grew away from the sorority as she moved through life, but she always remained actively committed to prose- lytizing the peace cause among alumnae.) During her undergradu- ate years, Hughan considered herself a conservative in political and social out10ok.~

On graduation from Barnard, Hughan became an English teacher and after several temporary jobs was hired on a permanent basis by the Brooklyn school system. But she soon began work on a master’s degree in political economy at Columbia, which she completed during her off hours. Her thesis, “The Place of Henry George in Economics,” was well received, but as a woman she was not permitted to teach economics. An English teacher she remained. In 1905, Hughan entered the Ph.D. program at Columbia’s School of Political Science. Her dissertation, under the guidance of E. R. A. Seligman, a leading proponent of classical economics at the school, was entitled “The Present Status of Socialism in America.” To research her study Hughan had to attend meetings, correspond with and meet socialist leaders, and read socialist literature. She feared contacts with the “wild radicals” at first (she thought that they “threw bombs”), but before long Hughan found herself in agree- ment with socialist economic theory and political goals. In 1907, she joined the Socialist Party and the Fabian group, the Intercolle- giate Socialist League (renamed the League for Industrial Democ- racy in 1921). Hughan was elected to the executive of the latter

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group in her first year of membership and served on its governing body consistently until 1950. From this date, she was a loyal member of the Socialist Party, running often for office, making numerous speeches, and writing many articles for the socialist and nonsocialist press. In 19 10, Hughan successfully defended her dissertation, which was published the following year as American Socialism of the Present Day.’

Hughan was ambitious, and after earning her doctorate, she hoped for an academic career. Seligman, however, scotched this plan when he made it clear that, although he would recommend Hughan for research jobs and thought highly of her scholarly abilities, he would block her candidacy for any university appoint- ment. In this era, membership in the Socialist Party precluded the possibility of an academic position. Hughan then attempted to become a high school economics teacher. Here, too, she encoun- tered closed doors. Although placing first in an examination for economics teachers, she was passed over. Her politics worked against her, as did her gender: women, even with the Ph.D., were not considered appropriate teachers of high school economics .6

Hughan’s diaries and letters for this period reveal that she was beginning to recognize in herself a need to become a more public person. A sense of civic responsibility appears to wrestle with a desire to keep apart from or above the crowd. An enthusiastic proponent of eugenics (Jessie helped one of the leading eugenics scholars of the day, Roswell Johnson, research his first book), Jessie Hughan was proud of, rather than self-conscious about, her elevated status in society and was somewhat loath to mingle with people she believed to be in some ways beneath her. Aspirit of noblesse oblige, a generous heart (acquired from her mother), and an abiding faith in social democracy dampened her class biases but did not eliminate them. An excerpt from a 1906 letter to her younger sister Marjorie is revealing:

Perhaps we-all but Mamma and Papa, are a little too squeamish about getting mixed up with twaddle. It is lots more fun to grin at Mrs. Talbot-Perkins and listen to Jack London than it is to get down into the melee and do our share with the cranks, but I really think it is up to us to run the risk of a little twaddle and jump into the fight.

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With all our radicalism in so many directions I am afraid the recording angel cannot credit us with many joggles of the existing order of things. As a result of such cogitation I wrote a letter to the Times [italics added] on Saturday, not on W[oman] S[uffrage] but correcting the misquotations of London’s speech. It was certainly fiery enough, but there’s no use putting in extra blood and thunder, so I merely filled out a few qualifying statements and trust it will be published?

During this period Hughan began to think seriously about pacifism. In 1909, on the occasion of the Hudson-Fulton celebration in New York Harbor, she penned her first “mildly pacifist poem,” leading her to recognize that “I had then begun to think on the subject.**

“The Gray Ships” The sun shines clear on the Hudson tide, And the flags are streaming bright On the Dutch and the Germans side by side In their peaceful garb of white; “For we come in a festal cause,” they say, “And there glooms no war between us today, So it’s well to be brothers while we may, Till the time shall come to fight.”

But the French and the Briton are darkly drest In somber and grim array, And America’s ships receive their guest In a threatening suit of gray; “For paint means money and time to spend, And the readiest foeman wins in the end, So best be prepared to fight our friend, Though he comes in peace today.”

So we’re lifting the veil from the god of war, As he marshals his gallant throng, And we know what the glittering guns are for, And the welded armor strong; “For war is killing,” the gray ship saith; “We bring to the nations despair and death, And the curse of the world is our cannon’s breath.” How long, 0 Lord, how long!’


Hughan continued to teach English, and she persevered in scholarly research during the period when she was beginning by degrees to consider herself a pacifist. In 1913, her book The Facts of Socialism was published. Her activism on behalf of socialism became more pronounced. Evelyn Hughan, a career woman like Jessie, was employed in an administrative position by the Ginn Publishing Company in its foreign department. A socialist too, she prodded Jessie to keep active on behalf of suffrage. Their mother remained politically involved, and regular reports of suffrage activities appear in family letters and the journals kept by both sisters.

But it was pacifism that increasingly drew Jessie Hughan’s attention. She and Evelyn and her mother had attended the Second Unitarian Church in Brooklyn since Hughan’s Barnard days. Jessie found herself pondering the peace question within the context of New Testament Christianity. She became convinced that war was not only amoral but also un-Christian. Diary entries and memoran- dums in this period and through the war years indicate that for Hughan spiritual growth and commitment to the “cause” could not be separated. Religion was a wellspring of strength and hope for her.

In the spring of 1914, President Wilson sent an American expe- ditionary force to Vera Cruz, Mexico, highlighting the tenuous diplomatic relations between the two countries. In response to this provocative act, Hughan participated in her first pacifist action, distributing buttons marked “Anti-War” among the boys whom she taught. Then, when World War I began, Hughan, recalling this time from the vantage point of the 1920s, remarked, “My mother, sisters and myself immediately revolted against the whole thing, and antagonized some of our friends as early as the summer of 1914 by maintaining that war was always wrong, and that the U.S. ought never to enter it.”’

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Hughan was determined to find a meaningful way to register her opposition to the war when she returned from her summer holidays. But the fall of 1914 did not appear to be a propitious time for the

314 PEACE& CHANGE/ July 1995

kind of militant antiwar work that Jessie envisioned. It was clear that the prewar male-dominated peace movement, composed for the most part of lawyers, politicians, and businessmen who sought to establish a legally sanctioned, warless liberal-capitalist global system, had lost its bearings by 1914.’’ On the surface of things, peace reform seemed a fading force in American society. As Hughan commented in a letter to her sister Marjorie in October, “So few people, even Socialists, are uncompromisingly against war that we shall have to wait some time for peace.””

Nevertheless, even as Jessie Hughan recorded this gloomy pre- diction, a new kind of peace movement was being born. Progressive reformers (especially settlement house workers), pacifist feminists, some members of the Socialist Party, social gospel and Christian socialist representatives of the clergy, and dissident academics began to organize for peace in their respective circles almost immediately after the guns opened fire in Europe. In the fall of 1914, settlement house pioneers Lillian Wald and Jane Addams, in conjunction with other prominent social reformers who were living for the most part in New York City, organized the Henry Street Settlement House Anti-Preparedness Committee (renamed later the American Union against Militarism with chapters across the country). In January 1915, the feminist-inspired Woman’s Peace Party was launched in Washington, D.C., under the direction of Jane Addams and Carrie Chapman Catt, the leader of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance and, from 1915, the president of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association. Inspired in large part by the social feminist ideals of the international woman’s rights movement, Woman’s Peace Party chapters sprang up across the country. Although the Socialist Party remained lukewarm to close collaboration with liberal peace groups because doctrinally it was not opposed to war as such, its leaders criticized World War I as a capitalist-imperialist conflict. Further, individual branches networked with peace groups and participated in antiwar work. In New York City and environs, Socialist Party locals tended to work fairly closely with the larger peace coalition as it developed. In November 1915, the Fellowship of Reconciliation came into exis- tence, with the aim of drawing into one group all Christians com-


mitted to the personal renunciation of war. The Intercollegiate Socialist Society sponsored antimilitarism talks and conducted study groups on pacifist themes for its academic and intellectual membership. A more youth-oriented, culturally radical group of antiwar professors and students, the Collegiate Anti-Militarism League, was also formed in this period.12

Hughan welcomed the development of the broad-based liberal- progressive peace coalition in 1915 and 1916. She enthusiastically supported, for example, the antipreparedness campaign of the American Union and the plan devised by the Woman’s Peace Party for continuous mediation between the belligerents. But for Hughan this did not suffice. She was convinced that an absolute pacifist stand on the part of an uncompromising minority was an urgent necessity. Hughan has left us with her own version of her response to the crisis of war: “During that winter [ 1914- 151 I visited the heads of the various peace societies in New York trying to find out some aggressive peace action on the part of some existing group. Meeting with discouragement from all, I decided to do what I could myself, and planned an Anti-Enlistment League, which should line up all men and women who should promise never to enlist voluntarily or to give approval to such enlistment on the part of other^.'"^

Hughan began to take a public stand on the need for an anti- enlistment league in the spring of 1915. While speaking at an antiwar rally at the 14th Street Labor Temple, she made the acquaintance of two earnest young pacifist women, Fannie May Witherspoon and Tracy Mygatt; like Jessie Hughan, they were members of the Socialist Party and the Woman’s Peace Party.I4 In conjunction with the eloquent pacifist Unitarian minister John Haynes Holmes (also a member of the American Union and a charter member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation), Witherspoon and Mygatt assisted Hughan in setting up the Anti-Enlistment League.” The league functioned out of Jessie and Evelyn Hughan’s home in Brooklyn. Jessie Hughan’s diary for 1915 and 1916 reveals that, as secretary, she carried the brunt of the work. She wrote letters for the league on a daily basis and by the winter of 1916 had received signed enlistment forms from 3,500 individuals in various areas of the country.I6 The statement each person signed read: “I, being over

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eighteen years of age, hereby pledge myself against enlistment as a volunteer for any military or naval service in international war, and against giving my approval to such enlistment on the part of others.”” The league was not intended to serve as a peace group and engaged in no propaganda. It represented instead “the banding together in a personal policy of those whose opposition to war has become unconditional.”’* Women, as well as men, were encouraged to join.

Despite its small following, the league received newspaper coverage from time to time and, although most of the records have been lost, a small amount of correspondence has survived, some thirty 1ette~s.l~ Almost all of the extant letters were written in glowing support of the league, but the few that were negative are instructive as signposts to what lay ahead for pacifists like Jessie Hughan once the United States was officially in the war. For instance, a Mrs. Edwin M. Luckenbach, of Philadelphia, labeled the league a “treacherous movement” and lauded her war-decorated father and military husband. Another wrote more harshly and personally to Hughan. The anonymous writer, who had had “personal contact” with the league’s secretary, reviled Hughan and her female peace workers as “disappointed old maids and married women who haven’t anything else to do but make damn fools of themselves, and stir up more trouble than they want to settle.” The correspondent demanded: “Kindly stop making such damn fools of yourself [sic] and others, as to stop young men from joining the militia. You should raise children to help defend their country in time of need.” The letter was signed, “From one who has no respect for damn fool Pacifists.”*’

Intolerance for “damn fool Pacifists” grew apace as the war in Europe progressed and as the debate over American preparedness gathered steam and gained national political importance. In early 1916 the Anti-Enlistment League won a kind of national notoriety when former President Teddy Roosevelt, a fervent proponent of preparedness, denounced the “pacifists and poltroons” who associated themselves with the league’s aims. In a letter read at a meeting of the Women’s Section of the Navy League, Roosevelt suggested contemptuously, “Any man who signs a

Early / REVOLUTIONARY PACIFISM 317

pledge . . . should be promptly disenfranchised and then sent to the front to dig kitchen sinks, bury dead horses and do other jobs which would relieve brave men of the unpleasant but necessary hard work of a campaign.”” Hughan’s rejoinder, published in the New York newspapers shortly after Roosevelt’s letter was made public, was pithy and blunt: “You may think it odd, Mr. Roosevelt, but there are a few of us who have so far outgrown the soldierly ambitions of our childhood as really to find more agreeable the task of burying a dead horse than of bayonetting a live man.””

As war fever mounted in the United States in the months leading up to Congress’s war declaration in April 1917, Hughan and her coworkers in the antiwar movement were ridiculed and harassed in countless ways for their beliefs and peace activities. Hughan had left behind her squeamishness to mount the soap box as early as the spring of 1915 and, true to character, she continued to speak out forcefully against war up until the U.S. intervention. Once war was a reality, she almost lost her teaching position because she stead- fastly refused to stop speaking publicly as a pacifist or to sign a loyalty oath required of all school board employees.23 However, Hughan did disband the Anti-Enlistment League after the United States became a belligerent and conscription became law.

Soon after the war commenced, Hughan attempted to convince pacifist leaders like John Haynes Holmes and Norman Thomas to found a No Conscription Fellowship similar to that in Great Britain. She was attracted to this group’s antimilitarist propaganda efforts and its commitment to unite men and women in a refusal to support war. However, Hughan’s suggestion met with resistance and some hostility from the mainly male pacifist leadership. Instead of the “aggressive organization” advocated by Hughan, the “defensive” strategy of Roger Baldwin, director of the newly formed Civil Liberties Bureau, won the day. After several hurried conferences it was decided that pacifist men of military age would be advised to register as conscientious objectors (COs). Civil liberties groups were organized across the country to defend the legal rights of COs and others who came into conflict with state or military authority during the war.24

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Jessie Hughan was disappointed at the refusal of pacifist leaders to support an activist movement on the British model. Nonetheless, she refused to become really discouraged. Despite the ever-present danger of dismissal from her teaching post on the grounds of “disloyalty,” her diary entries and letters to sympathetic family members reveal that Hughan devoted much of her nonteaching time to work for the socialist-oriented, strongly feminist New York City branch of the Woman’s Peace Party. She was also active in the antiwar wing of the Socialist Party and the Fellowship of Recon- ciliation. In 1917, Hughan ran for the New York Assembly and, in 1918, for secretary of state of New York, both times on the socialist ticket.

The war era was difficult for peace workers in the now very reduced pacifist movement. They were ridiculed and harassed in countless ways by people who, as President Woodrow Wilson had foretold, had become “brutal and Many ran afoul of wartime sedition and espionage laws. A state of “legal terror” ensued, and political and cultural dissidents, COs, immigrants, and labor leaders had to pay a high price for their convictions and activities in the form of intimidation, physical violence, loss of employment, prison sentences, and sometimes even death.26 People like Jessie Hughan felt isolated and occasionally despondent during this period. But they also experienced feelings of exhilaration and empowerment as an esprit de corps developed among movement people. Participants called each other “comrade”; they believed that their pacifist stand was important, and they had faith in the future. Together they could remake the world.

In her diary, Hughan recorded the excitement she felt living and working on the edge of events as a radical pacifist: “Exciting time to be alive-almost too ~tirnulating.”~’ In “The Challenge of Mars” (1916), Hughan’s voice was confident:

Thine is the lightning flame And the power of the past. Ours be the stainless name And the Cause that shall last. There is death in thy bolts arrayed, But we challenge thee undismayed,


Unarmored and unafraid,- We defy thee, 0 Mars!’*

The optimism and tenacity of people like Jessie Hughan helped them to remain faithful to their ideals in the bleak landscape of the politically reactionary postwar years. With other like-minded people, she helped to create a vibrant and dynamic new pacifist- oriented peace movement out of the ashes of war.” It was in what we now call the interwar period that Jessie Hughan’s talents as a movement-builder and as a theorist revealed themselves most fully. She was poised for launching her “war against war.”

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Hughan was convinced of the need to establish an “out-and-out” pacifist movement “to fight against all war” by 1919.30 She recognized the importance of the Fellowship of Reconciliation but it was limited to Christians. The Woman’s Peace Party had been reconsti- tuted as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and, although pacifist in spirit and intent, rejected the absolute pacifist creed. That fall, Hughan, along with a number of other WILPF members, decided to organize a new separatist absolute pacifist group, the Women’s Peace Society. Headed by the redoubtable senior peace activist Fanny Garrison Villard, this association was built around the principle that human life was sacred under all circumstances. Its members asserted that women, as creators and preservers of life, had a keener sense than men of their duty to protest against war. Its all-female membership pledged “never to aid in or sanction war, offensive or defensive, international or civil, in any Tbo years later, perceiving the need to move beyond educational goals toward political work, some members met with a group of Canadian women in Niagara Falls; together they formed the Women’s Peace Union of the Western Hemi~phere.~’ Also absolutist, members signed a pledge similar to that of the parent society but soon determined to work concretely for a warless world by lobbying for a constitutional amendment to outlaw war.33


Hughan welcomed the establishment of the Women’s Peace Society and the Women’s Peace Union and served on their respective executive committees in the immediate postwar period. In an article she wrote for the socialist newspaper, The Cull, entitled “Women Pacifists in 1920,” Hughan extolled the efforts of the Women’s Peace Society. Women were, she averred, closer to life from biological necessity. Arguing from a maternal or social feminist position, she insisted that women had a special responsibility “to inspire” men and be leaders in the fight against war.34

The article in The Cull was an expansion of an earlier unpublished essay entitled, “The Outlook for Aggressive Pacifism.” Fitting these two writings together reveals that at this time Hughan’s main goal was not the establishment of separatist women’s peace groups, despite her support for absolutist organizations such as the Women’s Peace Society and the Women’s Peace Union. Her ulti- mate objective was the establishment of a broad-based, gender- inclusive radical pacifist movement that would fight war “by direct attack.” Referring to absolute pacifists as “revolutionaries,” she urged immediate action: “If the fight is ever to be made, is not now the time, before our energies are permanently diverted to non- pacifist channels, as the energies of reformers have always been before our time. We were stopped in 1917. Why not resume Hughan also criticized socialists for their preoccupation with “the economic problem,” insisting that it was naive to trust “that Social- ism can permanently arrive in the midst of a militarist world, and that workingmen who have killed one another for their rulers’ sakes will unite over a fallen ~apitalism.”~~

Hughan’s concept of revolutionary pacifism was a difficult one for many socialists to accept. Most socialists were selective, not absolute, pacifists: they judged wars (or revolutions) to be just or unjust according to the perceived class interests of the players. Even pacifist socialists like Norman Thomas tended to see an achieved “social revolution” as the necessary precondition for ending war. Hughan understood this. Although she needled her socialist comrades to shoulder the work of “aggressive pacifism,” she also took every opportunity to urge the members of the Fellowship of Rec- onciliation, as absolute pacifists, to broaden their mandate for


membership. In 1922, following Jessie’s recommendation, the annual conference of the Fellowship of Reconciliation authorized her to set up a Committee for Enrollment against War. In 1923 she convinced the fellowship’s executive to bring together representatives of its own group, the Women’s Peace Society, and the Women’s Peace Union to form an enrollment organization separate from the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Then in 1924 this group became the War Resisters League; it soon affiliated with the newly established War Resisters’ International, which had its roots in the British No Conscription Fellowship of the war years.37

The War Resisters League became a functioning body in the spring of 1925 in a series of meetings attended by representatives for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Women’s Peace Society, the Women’s Peace Union, and a number of smaller pacifist groups. Members agreed that “war is a crime against humanity” and signed a declaration of nonparticipation in war. Several early versions of the War Resisters League statement were written in 1924 and 1925. By the late twenties the league declaration read: “War is a crime against humanity. I therefore am determined not to support any kind of war, international or civil, and to strive for the removal of all the causes of war.”38

Key Fellowship of Reconciliation members like John Haynes Holmes and Kathleen W. Sayre supported Hughan’s desire for a pacifist enrollment group for women and men who were not com- fortable with religious pacifism. But the War Resisters League would not have come into being without Hughan’s persistence and leadership. It was she who made it possible to link up the radical pacifist women’s groups with the fellowship. Once established, the War Resisters League provided a much needed home for dedicated World War I COs whose wartime prison experiences fueled the aggressive radical pacifist impulse Hughan was seeking for the postwar peace m~vement.~’

During the time that Hughan was maneuvering to establish the league, despite her full-time teaching position, she continued her research and writing. She published in 1923 a well-received scholarly work, A Study of International Government. This work, which became a standard college text, included an analysis of the complex


causes of war. In popular writings, such as “Direct Attack Upon War,” Hughan praised both liberal and radical efforts to eradicate war but found their solutions wanting: “We may study plans of world government; we may work for the social revolution; yet we need not delay for a moment our direct attack upon war. As long as one country contains resources denied to another, economic quar- rels may arise, and as long as armies consent to fight, ambitious governments will choose battle rather than arbitration.yy40 For Hughan and for the other League members, the strategy for radicals had to be the creation of a “determined minority” who would refuse their services in wartime:

Wars cannot be fought . . . unless men enlist in armies, unless women contribute their savings, unless workers manufacture and transport munitions. We have learned, in a way we are not likely to forget, that a modern government cannot carry on war without a support approximating 100% from men, women, and even children. It is evident, therefore, that whenever there exists, in any great industrial nation, a fairly large minority of persons who are reso- lutely determined to refuse all support to war, the campaigns of that nation must stop. Moreover, if this minority succeed in effecting such a firm organization in time of peace as to convince the government in advance of its refusal, that government will not dare to be led into a declaration of war.41

As Hughan’s ideas developed into a coherent body of thought, her aim became the establishment of a revolutionary pacifist antiwar movement based on the Gandhian theory and practice of nonviolent noncooperation.“ To this end, she wrote essays, pamphlets, and leaflets; gave speeches (often in the street, on a soap- box); organized No More War parades; corresponded with, and influenced, leading pacifists in both liberal and radical circles; maintained organizational ties with the Fellowship of Reconcili- ation, the Women’s Peace Society, and the Women’s Peace Union; and distributed innumerable enrollment forms. Until the 1930s, her home served as War Resisters League headquarters. In 1928, when Abraham Kaufman, a former pupil, was hired as part-time secretary, she and Evelyn Hughan paid his salary of $10 per ~ e e k . 4 ~

In the 1930s the War Resisters League was institutionalized with officers, an executive committee, and a national committee. Its


active dues-paying membership grew tenfold in less than a decade, from 98 persons in 1929 to 1,100 in 1937.44 Jessie Hughan continued to represent the heart of the War Resisters League, but, in accor- dance with her view that men would be disinclined to join a group headed by a woman, she insisted that men hold the positions of chair and vice-chair?’ Thus, in the 1930s, John Haynes Holmes served as chair and Devere Allen, editor of the fellowship’s journal, The World Tomorrow, as vice-chair. Hughan retained the position of secretary. Members of the executive and national committees ro- tated, but a rough parity between men and women was maintained.

Hughan, unlike many pacifists, did not allow herself to be diverted from the “war against war.” In fact, she maintained that periods between wars were the ideal times to work for peace. As fascism spread in Europe and the shadow of world war again hovered on the horizon in the 1930s, Hughan facilitated cooperative efforts between the War Resisters League and liberal as well as radical pacifist associations. The league’s executive committee undertook projects with other groups when its principles were not endangered. The War Resisters League was able to participate effectively in activities sponsored by the Emergency Peace Cam- paign, the National Peace Conference, and the Keep America Out of War Congress. It played an important part in the formation of the communist-front American League Against War and Fascism.46 The War Resisters League frequently cosponsored activities with the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Women’s Peace Union and worked closely with WILPF, notably in helping to organize the United Pacifist Conferences in the late 1930s. Many league members were also members of these other organizations.

Hughan’s single-minded commitment to create an uncompromising pacifist minority within the United States after World War I was complemented by her equally strong resolve to develop revolutionary pacifist theory. It was in the interwar period that Hughan developed a clearly reasoned theory of nonviolent resistance to war. Her most original contribution among a number of thoughtful essays was written as a pamphlet in 1939 under the title, I f We Should Be Invaded. It was reissued in 1942 as Pacifism and Invasion and represents an imaginative and cogent case for mass


noncooperation in the event of the military invasion of one country by another:’

The conviction of Jessie Wallace Hughan and the leaders of the War Resisters League that individual witness against war could be transformed into a mass social movement against war was not realized during World War II. However, by its support of all conscientious objectors to war, including those who were imprisoned or who accepted alternative civilian service, the War Resisters League encouraged the development of a new radical pacifist sensibility. Work on behalf of COs led to an enlarged league membership. A significant number of young war resisters began to argue that the league’s nonviolent theory and practice had to be revised to accom- modate the needs of a broader movement for social justice.“* By 1945 the War Resisters League’s active membership stood at 2,300, over double that of 1937. Its annual income rose dramatically too, from less than $5,000 in 1939 to $20,000 in 1945.” Although the idea that “wars will cease when men refuse to fight” lost much of its appeal in the immediate postwar atomic age, it regained persua- sive power in radical circles in the draft resistance movement of the 1960~.~O

After the Second World War, Hughan retired from school teaching. She accepted the position of honorary chair of the War Resisters League and kept on working on behalf of revolutionary pacifism and socialism until her death in 1955. Three months before she died, Hughan wrote a circular letter for the War Resisters League, asking members to take stock of their time and finances and then “do what you can to make 1955 the beginning of another 30 years of revolutionary pacifism.” Hughan was, as always, resolute: “Two world wars and the subsequent armament race have proved not only the futility of war, but the absolute necessity of doing away with it altogether if civilization and humanity are to sur~ive.”~’

* * *

Jessie Wallace Hughan, in common with others of her generation and social background who became radical social critics of their society, possessed an inclusive vision of an equitable, socially just,


warless world. She was prepared to work hard and to make personal and professional sacrifices for the pacifist movement. Like other progressive and left-wing reformers of her time, she believed that people could direct their futures. An idealist, she was also apractical person who appreciated the value of grass-roots organizing and coalition-building. Jessie Hughan was doggedly determined in her efforts to build a strong pacifist movement, which irritated some pacifist comrades. But her ability to assist individuals and groups to find common ground resulted in an enduring achievement for modem pacifism, the formation of the War Resisters League. An intellectual, Hughan was committed to rigorous theory-building. She was also a New Woman feminist who believed passionately in full citizenship and a public identity for women. Hughan came to maturity in the 1890s, a golden age for White, middle-class women with talent and pertinacity. As a contemporary of Hughan’s, labor journalist Mary Heaton Vorse once remarked, “We had the feeling that we were important civic factors who could put in a thumb almost anywhere and pull out a plum.”52 Hughan’s coworker and friend, Nobel Peace Prize recipient (1946) Emily Greene Balch, felt similarly that the desire “to study and better conditions . . . [was] interesting not as the development of one young woman but as characteristic of my generati~n.”’~

What I have uncovered about Jessie Wallace Hughan and the circle of politically astute, left-wing pacifists and feminists with whom she associated convinces me of the need to integrate, in new ways, our narratives and analyses of people’s live^.'^ For too long, scholars of progressivism, socialism (and political radicalism), pacifism, and feminism have neglected the interconnectedness of these movements and the manner in which individuals, the historical actors, have attempted in the midst of daily living to sort out their commitments and to build toward wholeness of outlook and purpo~e.~’ Thinking and writing about “cause” people like Jessie Wallace Hughan help us observe this process at close range. This scholarly project also challenges us to develop a new framework for integrating the revolutionary pacifist legacy of our past into the somewhat more established history of America’s broader liberal- radical social-reform tradition.


NOTES

1. Marjorie H. Rockwell, “Hughan Saga” typescript, 11 pp. This document and other papers of Jessie Wallace Hughan are in the custody of Margaret Rockwell Finch, her niece, and are hereafter cited as Hughan Private Papers.

2. “Autobiography of Jessie Wallace Hughan” (a questionnaire for Mr. A. V. Wood, November 21,1926). Hughan Private Papers.

3. My view of Jessie Hughan as a person between two generations of New Women (thus possessing qualities from each New Woman generation) intersects with the interpretations of other women’s history scholars who have identified New Womanhood as a phenomenon that spanned several generations of privileged White women. See particularly Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Discourses of Sexuality and Subjectivity: The New Woman, 1870-1936,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay & ksb ian Past, ed. Martin B. Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr. (New York New American Library, 1989). 264-80. These essays need to be read in conjunction with Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual,”Signs 1, no. 1 (Autumn 1975): 1-30.

4. Wilma Smith Leland, “Jessie Wallace Hughan: Woman of Courage,” unpublished manuscript, Hughan Private Papers.

5 . “Autobiography” and Annie Ridley Crane Finch, “Resister for Peace: ALife of Jessie Wallace Hughan,” unfinished biography, Jessie Wallace Hughan Papers, Swarthmore Col- lege Peace Collection (hereafter cited as SCPC).

6. Interviews with Jessie Wallace Hughan conducted by Mercedes M. Randall, Mercedes M. Randall Papers, SCPC.

7. Letter of Jessie Hughan to Marjorie Hughan, December 6,1906, Hughan Private Papers.

8. Jessie Wallace Hughan, “The Gray Ships” (1909). Hughan Private Papers. 9. “Autobiography.” This was probably the D’Espard family, whose daughter, Adele,

had been Marjorie Hughan’s best friend from the age of six. Jessie Hughan records that they visited the summer cottage in Hyannis in late August after war had been declared in Europe and that some heated discussion between the Hughans and their guests on the merits of the war had taken place.

10. David Patterson, “An Interpretation of the American Peace Movement, 1898-1914,” in Peace Movements in America, ed. Charles Chatfield (New York: Schocken, 1973), 20-38.

11. Letter of Jessie Hughan to Marjorie Hughan Rockwell, October 25, 1914, Hughan Private Papers.

12. Some of these Collegiate Anti-Militarism League members joined with other “under forty” antiwar activists to found the Young Democracy in 1918. Older activists like Jessie H u g h crossed generational and lifestyle boundaries to work closely with youthful radicals. When war drew close and new, left-oriented and largely youth-led groups like the Emergency Peace Federation were formed, Hughan joined up.

13. “Autobiography.” 14. Fannie May Witherspoon headed an important civil liberties group, the Bureau of

Legal Advice, during the war years. See my article, “Feminism, Peace and Civil Liberties: Women’s Role in the Origins of the World War I Civil Liberties Movement,” Women’s Studies: An interdisciplinary Journal 18, nos. 2-3 (1990): 95-1 15.

15. Anti-Enlistment League Papers, SCPC.


16. Jessie Wallace Hughan’s Diary, 1916-20, and “Autobiography,” H u g h Private Papers. 17. Anti-Enlistment League enrollment card, Hughan Private Papers. 18. Anti-Enlistment League Statement, Hughan Private Papers. 19. The Bureau of Investigation impounded the League records just after the United

States entered the war and never returned them. They must have been destroyed because they are not on file in the Bureau of Investigation records in the National Archives in Washington, DC.

20. Anti-Enlistment League letter [n.d.. anonymous], H u g h Private Papers. 21. New YorkAmerican, clipping, n.d., Hughan Private Papers. 22. Newspaper clipping, n.d., Hughan Private Papers. 23. Hughan actually signed the oath but then added, ‘This obedience being qualified

always by dictates of conscience.” 24. Jessie Wallace Hughan, The Beginnings of War Resistance [1937], 9-11, pamphlet

series, SCPC. 25. Woodrow Wilson, quoted in Mercedes M. Randall, Improper Bostonian: Emily

Greene Balch (New Yo* Tivayne, 1964). 232. 26. See, for instance, H. C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War; 1917-1918

(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957); Joan M. Jensen, The Price of Vigilance (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1968); and Julian F. JafTe, Crusade against Radicalism: New York during the Red Scare, 1914-1924 (Port Washington, NY Kennikat Press, 1972).

27. Jessie Wallace Hughan Diary, 1916-20, general entry for month of February 1917, Hughan Private Papers.

28. A selection of Jessie Hughan’s poems, many of which had already been published previously, was published privately in 1932 under the title The Chaflenge of Mars and Other Verses. Hughan was a poet of great talent, and some of her verses appeared in anthologies. She might have distinguished herself in this field if the “cause” had not absorbed so much of her time and creative energy.

29. See especially Charles Chattield, For Peace and Justice: Pacifism in America, 1914-1941 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1971), and Harriet Alonso, The Women’s Peace Union and the Outlawry of War; 1921-1942 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990). John Whiteclay Chambers 11 provides an excellent historiographic essay on the nature of the American peace movement from 1900 to 1922 in the invaluable second edition of The Eagle and the Dove: The American Peace Movement and United States Foreign Policy, 1900-1922 (Syracuse, N Y Syracuse University Press, 1992).

30. Letter of Jessie Wallace Hughan to Lola Maverick Lloyd, September 1, 1919, Lola Maverick Lloyd Papers, New York Public Library.

31. Minutes, September 30, 1919, and October 4, 1919; [History of] the Women’s Peace Society [1920]; and “Let Us Be Christians Again!” [leaflet, 19191, Women’s Peace Society Papers, SCPC.

32. “Report on Conference Held by the Women’s Peace Society, at Niagara Falls, Ontario, August 1921,” Women’s Peace Society Papers, SCPC.

33. See Alonso, Women’s Peace Union. 34. “Women Pacifists in 1920,” The Call [1920], Jessie Wallace Hughan Papers, SCPC. 35. “The Outlook for Aggressive Pacifism,” Jessie Wallace Hughan Papers, SCPC. This

36. Ibid. 37. Hughan, Beginnings uf War Resistance, 12-13, pamphlet series, SCPC. 38. For a careful reconstruction of the War Resisters League’s founding, see Michael

David Young, “ ‘Wars Will Cease When Men Refuse to Fight’: The War Resisters League

typewritten piece is interwoven, in its entirety, into the article “Women Pacifists in 1920.”


1925-1950” (Honors essay, Brown University, 1975). esp. 20-26. Quotation on p. 26. See also History and Founding; Minutes and Reports; Pamphlets, War Resisters League Papers, Series A, SCPC.

39. See Young, “War Resisters League,” 14, regarding the “new radical impulse” of World War I conscientious objectors who joined the league.

40. Jessie Wallace Hughan, “Direct Attack upon War,” The Social Preparation [1923], 12, Jessie Wallace Hughan Papers, SCPC.

41. hid., 13. 42. An insightful discussion of Gandhi’s theory and his influence in the Indian inde-

pendence movement is contained in Jessie Hughan’s book, A Study of International Govern- ment (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1923).

43. Taped interview with Abraham Kaufman, May 29, 1986, Port Charlotte, Florida. From 1932, Abe Kaufman was the full-time executive secretary of the War Resisters League; by this time, additional funds were available for his salary.

44. Minutes and Reports, 1929-37, War Resisters League Papers, Series A, SCPC. Enrolled membership (signers of declaration) was much higher-l,100 in 1929 and 13,000 in 1937.

45. Abe Kaufman interview. 46. Abe Kaufman represented the War Resisters League on the arrangements committee

for the United States Congress against War, which became the American League against War and Fascism; written communication from Abe Kaufman to Frances Early, April 3, 1991. See also War Resisters League Papers, Series A, Minutes, Press Releases, 1930-41, SCPC.

47. Jessie Wallace Hughan, “Pacifism and Invusion” und “On Duelling” (New York: A. J. Muste Memorial Institute Essay Series, n.d.). Other important contributions to pacifist theory include What About Spain [I9371 and New Leagues for Old: Blueprints or Founda- tions? [ 19451; Jessie Wallace Hughan Papers, SCPC.

48. Young, “War Resisters League,” esp. chap. 5, 158-89. 49. Chatfield, For Peace and Justice, 327-28. The Fellowship of Reconciliation also

expanded its concerns, particularly in response to the emerging Civil Rights and anti-civil defense movements.

50. Young, “War Resisters League,’’ 186. 51. Circular letter of Jessie Wallace Hughan to War Resisters League supporters, January

21,1955, Mercedes M. Randall Papers, SCPC. 52. Mary Heaton Vorse quoted in Dee Garrison, Mary Heaton Vorse: The Life of M

Americun Insurgent (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). 45. 53. Emily Greene Balch, quoted in Carrie A. Foster-Hayes, ‘The Women and the

Warriors: Dorothy Detzer and the WILPF’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Denver, 1984). 37. 54. Apathbreaking study that addresses this integration theme is Blanche Wiesen Cook’s

“Female Support Networks and Political Activism: Lillian Wald, Crystal Eastman, Emma Goldman,” in A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women, ed. Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979). 412-44. See also Mary Jo Buhle, Women und American Socialism, 1870-1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981); Judith Schwarz, Radical Feminists of Heterodoxy: Greenwich Village, 1912-1940 (Lebanon, NH: Victoria Publishers, 1982); Garrison, Mary Heaton Vorse; and Kathleen Kennedy, “ ‘We Mourn for Liberty in America’: Socialist Women, Anti- Militarism, and State Repression, 1914-1922”(Ph.D. diss., University of California at Irvine, 1992).

55. I address this theme in my article “Feminism, Peace and Civil Liberties.”

Documents

REVOLUTIONARY PACIFISM AND WAR RESISTANCE Jessie Wallace Hughan's “War against War”