The Search for Negotiated Peace

Women's Activism and Citizen Diplomacy in World War I

David S. Patterson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135898601
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The First World War was an epic event of huge proportions that lasted over four years and involved the armies of more than twenty nations, resulting in 30 million casualties, including more than 8 million killed. Set against the backdrop of this massive carnage, The Search for Negotiated Peace is the gripping story of the events that moved high profile American and European citizens, particularly women, into the international peace movement. This small, transatlantic network put forth proposals for changing the international system of negotiation. They supported non-annexationist war aims and attempted to discredit nations' secret diplomacy, militarism and narrowly nationalistic practices. Instead, they wanted to develop a 'new diplomacy.'

David Patterson skillfully develops the interactions of many of the notable leaders of the movement, including Jane Addams, Aletta Jacobs, and Rosika Schwimmer, into an absorbing narrative that brings together the various strands of women's history, international diplomatic history, and peace history for the first time. The Search for Negotiated Peace is an essential read for anyone interested in the social history of World War I and the foundations of citizen activism today.

1

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First Efforts

During the 32-month period of American neutrality in the First World War, advocates of peace devised several plans for bringing the belligerents to the conference table, but all were variations of two central proposals: independent mediation by the United States or a European neutral or joint mediation by two or more neutral nations. The idea of mediation by nonbelligerent third parties was nothing new in 1914. Neutral states had offered their good offices to mediate between hostile powers going back to ancient times, and they had frequently made mediation offers to try to resolve international conflicts and end wars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. President Theodore Roosevelt had served as mediator in ending the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, and Article 3 of the conventions of the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907 had stated: “Powers, strangers to the dispute, have the right to offer good offices or mediation, even during the course of hostilities. The exercise of this right can never be regarded by one or the other parties in conflict as an unfriendly act.”¹ Most immediately, the United States and Mexico had accepted the good offices of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile (ABC) to mediate their contentious dispute following President Woodrow Wilson's impulsive decision, in response to a slight to the nation's honor, to send U.S. marines ashore at Vera Cruz, Mexico, in April 1914. The incursion had cost lives on both sides, but the ABC powers had successfully mediated the issues and defused the situation.

President Wilson had been aware of the intense national rivalries in Europe, and his chief aide, Colonel Edward M. House, had visited its major capitals in the spring and early summer months of 1914 to see whether the Wilson administration could serve as an honest broker in bringing about a reduction in interstate tensions. In reports to Wilson of his talks with leading statesmen, House confessed that he was making little headway, at one point writing presciently, “The situation is extraordinary. It is jingoism run stark mad. Unless someone acting for you can bring about an understanding, there is some day to be an awful cataclysm.” The assassination of the Austrian archduke occurred a month later, but House, Wilson, and Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan did not focus on the approaching “awful cataclysm.” During the final week of July, House was shipboard on the Atlantic en route to his Massachusetts retreat, while Wilson was increasingly preoccupied with the rapidly deteriorating health of his wife, Ellen. Her illness, which led to her death on August 6, kept him close to the White House where he could keep abreast of the rapidly changing European situation, but it also distracted him from close attention to public affairs. When the guns of the first few days of August commenced in Europe, Wilson had not proposed any démarche to the European powers and still refrained from any public comment on the diplomatic situation.² On August 4, he finally wired House, asking whether he should offer his good offices of mediation. By the time House advised the same evening “doing nothing for the moment, ” Wilson had already cabled the belligerent leaders offering his mediation. His message specifically cited Article 3 of the Hague conventions as justification for his offer of August 4, 1914 of his nation's good offices, “either now or at any other time that might be thought more suitable, ” to the European belligerents.³

The President explained to House the next day: “Events moved so fast yesterday” that he felt he had to act. He did not elaborate, but a Senate resolution on August 4 declaring that body's judgment that the President should offer mediation may have prompted his message. Earlier press and individual inquiries asking whether he would offer his good offices or suggesting that he do so probably influenced him too. Whether Wilson saw the cables from the Constance church conference or the International Peace Bureau appealing for his mediation is unclear; in any event, the American President never acknowledged their existence.⁴

—

Wilson's very belated mediation offer of course had no impact on the Great War, which had already begun in Europe, but many peace workers still wanted to believe that a way might be found to end the bloodshed. Those individuals who had actively participated in the peace movement before the outbreak of the European war recalled the legal sanction given mediation under the Hague conventions as well as previous examples of neutral peace efforts. Some of the most concerted American citizens’ appeals for mediation in the first few months of the European hostilities came from a small group of social justice advocates who, with a few exceptions, had shown only a secondary interest in the American peace movement before 1914, although many of them understood and supported its aims and specific policies. These reformers believed that a prolonged war would undermine Christian values, disrupt the social fabric that had previously facilitated human progress, and endanger all efforts for social reform. Like the prewar peace seekers, they were unprepared emotionally for a major war and were shocked by the outbreak of the European conflagration. They were already somewhat discouraged by the limited success of their domestic reform efforts, and the war added to their demoralization. War is a “demon of destruction and a hideous wrong – murder devastating home and happiness, ” Lillian Wald, the head of the Henry Street Settlement in New York, lamented. It was “the doom of all that it has taken years of peace to build up.”⁵ Jane Addams, who had shown more interest in the peace cause before 1914, now questioned her previous struggle for domestic reform. Compared with the wholesale slaughter and human suffering of the belligerent peoples, her own efforts for human betterment seemed insignificant:

When a million men are suffering in trenches wet and cold and wounded, what are a few children suffering under hard conditions in the factories? Take old age pensions, upon which England, France, and Germany have been working. With widows and fatherless children numbered by the thousands in each of those countries, what are a few old people more or less? It will take years before these things are taken up again. The whole social fabric is tortured and twisted.⁶

But if they remained somewhat discouraged, they were also activists temperamentally unsuited to overlook any major social problem. As Wald's and Addams’ remarks attested, they perceived from the onset of the conflict that war had social consequences reaching far beyond the battlefield. They clung to their interests in domestic reform, but the continuing bloodshed increasingly diverted their energies into the area of international reform. They projected their social concerns from the national arena onto the international stage.

In some ways, Jane Addams was fairly typical of the American women who became actively involved in the peace movement during the war. Like Addams, most came of age in the late nineteenth century when young women began to attend college in much greater numbers. Like her, too, most of these college-educated women pursued professional careers and were unmarried or, if married, had supportive husbands and no small children. Compared with men with family responsibilities, these professional women, as one of them, Emily Balch, much later wrote, “were far freer in general to risk their jobs for the sake of unpopular principles and tabooed forms of activity.”

A commitment to peace was one of these “unpopular principles.” Many of the American women in this generation also thought a challenge was involved. They had, Balch continued, “a quite special spur in the desire to prove incorrect the general belief that they were congenitally incapable. They found a tingling zest in discovering that it is not true, as woman had been brought up to believe, that she was necessarily weaker and more cowardly, incapable of disinterested curiosity, unable to meet life on her own merits.”⁷ These qualities help to explain why many women were prepared to take an active part in the peace effort.

Two other observations can be added to Balch's account. One was the direct experience of many of them, as reformers and social workers in urban slums and settlement houses, in helping poor people, unassimilated immigrants, and disadvantaged people generally. In resisting the military demands of the state and broadening their humanitarian concerns for domestic social concord, they extended their commitment to social justice issues to include international peace. A second involves religion. Although some of the women attracted to the peace cause were non-believers or Jewish, the great majority grew up in Christian households. Religious influences existed, but in most cases were not so much doctrinal as a stimulus to do good works. A historian of British humanitarian reformers in this era, including 40 of the leading pacifists and internationalists, writes that the Christians among them “were not great, practising humanitarians because of their Christianity, but rather that their Christianity was a religious manifestation of their humaneness.”⁸ While private religious beliefs are not easily discerned, enough is known about the women peace leaders to apply this rough generalization to most of the European and American women pacifists.

Jane Addams fits this social profile. But she was also an exceptional person, and she would quickly become the acknowledged leader of the mediation cause—or at least of the women involved in it. By 1914 she was the best-known woman in America and was widely respected, even idolized throughout the nation. To many, she was “Saint Jane.” She was also highly respected in Europe, especially among women reformers and social workers. It is not easy to explain her appeal. Slight of stature at five feet three inches tall, always dressed modestly in matronly attire, and not a charismatic orator, she did not appear at first glance to be a commanding presence at meetings. Indeed, as many commented at the time, her demeanor conveyed a profound sadness and humility. Behind her reserved and soft-spoken manner, however, lay a resolute determination to help immigrants and the working poor.

One of her greatest assets was her long-term experience in making Hull House, the settlement house she cofounded on Chicago's West Side in 1889, a haven for immigrants. Through her active involvement in Chicago's urban–industrial problems, she developed a network of loyal liberal friends, including intellectuals and some politicians, who came to admire her dedication and her vision of a participatory democratic order. This vision was another asset. In some ways, Addams was more important as an innovative social theorist than as an activist. At best, some historians downplay her ideas, saying she should be remembered for her “administrative talent, ” “shrewd business sense, ” and “genius for compromise and conciliation” and her contributions as a social worker. She surely possessed these qualities and accomplishments in abundance. These historians also argue that she was more important as an articulate speaker and publicist than as a careful thinker, ⁹ and at worst some have distorted her ideas.¹⁰ Her ideas were often original and insightful, however, and always serious. Her career in the peace movement would display the fine tension between her bedrock beliefs and her more practical role in trying to harmonize and reconcile the views and strategies of the growing numbers of activist feminists who joined the peace cause.

Though a nominal Presbyterian, Addams distrusted religious dogma as well as political doctrines (including socialism) as too rigid, and she derived her pacifism, which crystallized over several decades before the war, from her practical experiences. These included her father's idealistic internationalism and her small-town upbringing where a sense of community and self-government prevailed. Her own mediation of familial disputes as a young adult may also have nourished her later interest in the resolution of disputes in the wider world. Other influential experiences were her wide reading of the writings of well-known European communitarian, democratic, and feminist thinkers. These authors reinforced Addams’ ideas on reform, her belief that she could break out of the societal stereotype restricting women to the home, and her strong sense of social justice. Most important for her maturing pacifism was Leo Tolstoy. She read his pacifist writings and had a personal meeting with him, although she rejected his non-resistant lifestyle. The American imperial takeover of the Philippines and the forceful suppression of its people at the turn of the century, which she condemned, further nourished her interest in peace.

Addams fully articulated her insights on this subject in her Newer Ideals of Peace (1907). As a social evolutionist, she argued that “military ideals” and presumed virtues of war were giving way in an industrial age and would gradually disappear. In Addams’ view, just as the serious conflicts between inner-city immigrant groups would erode and lead to a new cosmopolitanism, so would nation-states eventually find ways to interact peacefully. A key word in her lexicon was “fellowship.” The neighborliness and fellowship at Hull House represented a successful experiment that could have a wider significance. What she had in mind was a projection of fellowship and community at the city level, which involved respect for diversity, to cooperation among peoples internationally. It can be argued that Americans’ individualism and restless mobility, both vertical and horizontal, rather than a sense of fellowship and community, have been the defining traits of the American character, and her thinking on these matters was surely overly sanguine. She was nonetheless correct in emphasizing the key importance of intimate local communities as important, if not indispensable, elements in nourishing social stability and the peaceful resolution of conflicts.

Another element in her developing pacifism was her belief in the importance of “experts.” Like many progressive reformers, she supported the reliance on highly knowledgeable citizens, usually in the form of nonpartisan commissions, who, divorced from political pressures and class biases, devised rational and workable solutions to complex domestic problems; she would perceive the same mediatory role for “experts” in the international sphere.

Women's increasing involvement in public life, Addams also believed, would push militarism into further decline and nourish and sustain a new social morality. Women's right to vote was part of this process. Her writings pointed out that the industrial city had undermined women's control over their traditional roles of child-bearing, child-rearing, education, and family health and forced working women into a new, dehumanized environment of factory labor where they suffered industrial diseases and had no control over hours or wages. Women should have the suffrage because of the new conditions and because they were different from—more gentle and nurturing—not similar to men.¹¹

1.1 Jane Addams, about 1915. (Swarthmore College Peace Collection)

As the human slaughter escalated in Europe after August 1914, her views seemed increasingly irrelevant, but somehow her hopes and actions for a resolution of the conflict short of a victory by one side or the other sustained her. Her intellectual acumen, long experience with social problems, and organizational talents would serve her well in the neutral mediation campaign, which would become her and her supporters’ most immediately important goal—at least until her own nation entered the war in April 1917.

The movement for mediation of the European war developed slowly. Still unsure of their bearings, those most disturbed by the violence and suffering at first only demonstrated against the war. One of the first to take action was Fanny Garrison Villard. Married to the wealthy railroad magnate Henry Villard and living in Manhattan, Mrs Villard participated in the city's philanthropic activities and the social whirl of parties and receptions. She was, however, mainly a crusading reformer. She had imbibed from her father, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, not only his liberal racial views, but also his non-resistant pacifism and feminism. A committed pacifist, she had joined the newly founded New York Peace Society in 1906, but soon found that male establishment figures dominated it while women's voices were ignored. Convinced that the society's masculine leaders “certainly do not know what peace is, ” she took more comfort in her suffrage work. Like many feminists of that era, she assumed that women were a real force for peace. “Men can protest at the ballot-box against the fearful waste of war-powers, ” Villard said in 1911, “but only in a few states can women do so.” She and other like-minded New York women had formed a woman's antiwar committee to protest the Wilson administration's military incursion into Mexico in April–May 1914, which provided a foretaste of her activism during the European conflict.¹²

Although nearly 70 years old at the onset of the conflict, Fanny Villard soon joined Lillian Wald and other New York women in forming a Peace Parade Committee. Chaired by Villard, the committee quickly enlisted the support of well-established left-leaning feminist networks of suffragists, social reformers, trade unionists, and socialists, and on August 29 Villard, Wald, and her liberal friends at the Henry Street Settlement in New York led more than 1, 200 women, dressed in black or in white clothes with black arm bands, to the beat of muffled drums in an otherwise silent march down Fifth Avenue as a moral protest against the European maelstrom. This antiwar demonstration, however, offered no positive proposal for ending the bloodbath. Indeed,...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• The Search for Negotiated Peace
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• PROLOGUE
• 1 FIRST EFFORTS
• 2 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE
• 3 PRIVATE DIPLOMACY IN EUROPE
• 4 PEACE WORKERS AND THE WILSON ADMINISTRATION
• 5 MORE MOMENTUM AND NEW DIRECTIONS
• 6 CLIMAX AND ANTICLIMAX
• 7 TWO DISCOMFITING EPISODES
• 8 REAPPRAISALS AND POLITICAL REALITIES
• 9 PEACE FEELERS IN EUROPE
• 10 WOODROW WILSON’S INDEPENDENT MEDIATION
• 11 AFTERMATH
• CONCLUSION
• Appendix: Profiles of Pacifistic-Internationalist British Women
• Notes
• A Note on the Sources
• Bibliography
• Index