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“Military resistance is conscience in action”

Below is the talk I gave at PHS2023, a gathering of the Peace History Society. You can learn more about my time at the conference at my Substack, Everywhere is War?

When Scott first contacted me about this panel, my first response was to thank him. His work, especially Radical Pacifism, was great help for m work on the Oxford Handbook of Peace History. I’m honored to be here, among so many scholars whose work has inspired me.

Now, I want to start by telling you a September 11 story. Not the one you’re thinking of: the one in 1777.

Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, was beautiful that day. Its succession of wooded hills made for a steep climb, both for the British and for the insurgents, also known as the Continental Army. In between hills, level ground allowed for fierce fighting. A young militiaman named Jacob Ritter watched the casualties. He wrote later, “The bombshells and shot fell round me like hail, cutting down my comrades on every side, and tearing off the limbs of the trees.” By nightfall, hundreds were dead on both sides.

Ritter adds that his unit was then “ordered to march forward to the charge. Our way was over the dead and dying.” Some of his platoon-mates fired into the distance. Ritter did not fire; he had already decided, without telling anyone, that to do so would be wrong.

] As he stood still amid mortars at Chadds Ford, “I supplemented ] the Almighty that if he would be pleased to deliver me from shedding the blood of my fellow-creatures that day, I would never fight again.” His prayer was answered, and the rest of Jacob Ritter’s life was shaped by that moment of conscientious objection to war.

Historians tend to see Ritter’s battlefield pacifism as yet another casualty of war. Sarah Vowell writes, “It says something about the ugliness of September 11, 1777 that this boy woke up a Lutheran and went to bed a Quaker.” It also says a lot about the country that was busy being born, with young Ritter no one’s subject but a citizen.

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Those words open my book, [raise] which grew out of my years on staff at the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors. When I got there, CCCO had recently co-founded the G.I. Rights Hotline. They’d learned that to members of the so-called “All Volunteer Force” still needed them, and were as disempowered and vulnerable as the draftees they’d once served.

I learned that those calling the hotline were not that much different than I was; we both wanted to be part of something bigger than ourselves — except in their case, what they’d joined was the U.S. military. I learned a lot from them, and from the volunteers I’d recruited to to help with the calls.

Most of the latter were Vietnam veterans, and by the time I left that job I was saying, “If we want a revolution, it’s gonna be led by anti-war veterans.” Those who’ve experienced the military from the inside have been key to any sort of progressive change. I think they’re key to peace, too.

All 4 branches of the U.S. military talk about their “values,” things like “selfless service,” “integrity in all we do.” I’d hear all those phrases echoed by troops on the Hotline, or when I interviewed dissenting servicemembers as a journalist — just as they described the moments they saw those codes violated by their own commands, or by the country itself. Each is what courts have called a “crystallization moment,” often when a servicemember becomes a CO after enlisting.

Each of their stories becomes a part of peace history. At the plenary just now some of you saw Jon Hutto, who doesn’t identify as a conscientious objector; he’s still one of the stars of my book’s final chapter. The book actually ends with Jon telling me “The struggle is eternal,” a quote from Kwame Ture (also known as Stokely Carmichael). Jon’s work in 2007 with David Cortright, on the Appeal for Redress from the Iraq War, was as pure an expression of conscience as I’ve ever seen. Antiwar soldiers and veterans are key to understanding what it means to be a citizen.

In between Jacob Ritter and Jon Hutto, I included just a few others — all of whom, I argue, were acting out of conscience. Their dissent has marked every single U.S. war, declared or undeclared. In their stories, we can see conscience evolving in real time.

Some themes, in loosely chronological order:

Show me the money. Servicemembers are workers:the word “soldier” derives from the French word soldat, or coin. New American citizens revolted against commands that neither fed nor clothed them, or when it ordered ordered them somewhere they didn’t belong. Sometimes they voted with their feet, deserting en masse in 1754 during the so-called French and Indian War; On July 4, 1776, troops based near the Canadian border did the same thing, deserting rather than obey orders that involved not fighting the British but guarding absentee landholders’ property. In 1779, after Congress ignored six months of quieter civic action about troops deprived of food and clothing, the First Artillery of Philadelphia confronted the moneymakers head on during the “Fort Wilson Riot.” And after the war, former captain Daniel Shays and other veterans rose up against bankers in Massachusetts, calling themselves “The Regulators” and prompting a new constitution to prevent another “Shays’ Rebellion.”

Conscientious objection itself has class implications. The first written mention of CO, in 1846, comes from Britain’s Chartist movement, which pursued working- class organizing for political reform. The Chartists organized an “Anti-Militia Association,” which called for “the protection of those who have a conscientious objection to the service and who will not pay others to do for them what they object to themselves.” That last phrase is key: “paying others” refers to the time-honored practice of paying someone to go fight in your place, usually someone with fewer options.

In 1863, when young Quaker Jesse Macy was drafted, an agreement between the Lincoln Administration and the traditional peace churches meant that he could get a sub for about $300 (almost $10,000 in 2021 dollars). But Macy was also an abolitionist excited by the Emancipation Proclamation. He reported for duty instead, determined to serve without carrying a weapon. After half a year of tussling with commands who never heard of noncombatant service, Macy eventually redefined what that service meant, finding his way into a medical unit. He ended the war at a South Carolina military hospital, where he helped with Reconstruction by ensuring that the hospital’s Black staff and patients weren’t left without care or homes.

Mavericks and original sins. As we all know, the United States was being born with two original sins: the slave economy and the genocide of indigenous Americans. Which meant that the main job of the military was to fight people of color. About the “Indians”Thomas Jefferson told one of his generals, “we need only close our hand to crush them.” Precious few service members saw anything wrong with the latter, especially since many received “land grants” for their service. They were new citizens, after all. s But a few, who I’m tagging as “mavericks,” did have a problem with it: as the nation evolved, the question was, who gets to be a citizen?

Army recruit William Apess, whose father was Pequot, wondered why he was fighting in the War of 1812 against those who’d despoiled his ancestors. “I could not think why I should risk my life, my limbs, in fighting for the white man, who had cheated my a people out of their land,” he wrote. When that war ended in 1815, the Brits exacted a promise not to mess with the Indians, a promise broken as it was being spoken.

Ethan Allen Hitchcock, an instructor at West Point, called the country’s expansionist policies “a blight upon the Indian.” William Apess resurfaced as a Methodist “Indian preacher” who dissented via storytelling, as he fought for the rights of Native Americans in the still-new nation. In 1864 Silas Soule refused orders to kill Arapaho during the 1864 Sand Hill Massacre.

Silas Soule had fought beside Captain John Brown in Kansas before volunteering for Lincoln’s war against slavery. Often, those mavericks were also abolitionists, rebels against the other original sin.

Also lining up to end slavery were Ambrose Bierce of the 9th Indiana, whose uncle Lucius had broken laws to supply John Brown with weapons, and Harriet Tubman, a Union spy whose leadership in the raid at the Combahee freed 700 people from slavery. Tubman wasn’t waiting for Lincoln to recruit Black soldiers. But when that happened, Frederick Douglass’ sons would be among the very first volunteers, while George Garrison, sun of the iconic William Lloyd Garrison, was among the white officers commanding those troops. All were engaged in something intrinsically radical even when working for the President, fighting what everyone called the Slave Power.

Some of those mavericks took the next step and became prominent antiwar voices in the next wars. When the Spanish-American and Philippine wars came along, dissenters included Frederick Douglass’ son Lewis; Ambrose Bierce, now a journalist so skeptical of war that William Randolph Hearst feared sending him the Philippines; and the Civil War vets in the Anti-Imperialist League, most famously Mark Twain. The League helped expose that the Army was waterboarding Philippine prisoners in 1902; Twain’s antiwar poem “The War Prayer” and Bierce’s short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” are still quoted now, by those looking for a soldier’s story that rang true.

From “nostalgia” to “shell shock” and beyond. Speaking of Ambrose Bierce, one of his most-published columns ended, “I will willingly surrender another life than the one that I should have thrown away at Shiloh.” He meant 1862 Battle of Shiloh, after which hundreds of soldiers of both sides broke down, carried onto hospital ships with a case of what doctors called “nostalgia.” Commanders and military doctors changed that to that “soldiers’ heart,” as if battle stress damaged the heart muscle — eerily close to what we know now about the complex hormonal and developmental re-wiring that comes with combat trauma.

After “soldier’s heart came “shell shock,” and many dissented like Bierce — turning trauma into art. In 1930 World War I vet Lewis Milestone directed All Quiet on the Western Front, whose protagonist tells a group of schoolchildren: “We sleep and eat with death. And we’re done for, because you can’t live that way and keep anything inside you.”

16 years later John Huston made the documentary Let There Be Light, filmed in a Long Island hospital full of new veterans suffering what was now called “battle fatigue.”

That movie was immediately suppressed by the Pentagon, for 30 years. It took nearly 30 years for that truth to come out — which meant when Vietnam veterans started experiencing something similar, they had to work hard to know what was going on. The process of getting those truths near-permanently exposed, and their treatment mandated, has required a fair amount of dissent, from Huston’s movie to the “PVS KILLS!” posters on barracks walls.

Stand up for your beliefs, brother. From the Revolution on, non-dissenting soldiers often took note of what we’d now call “peaceniks” not with horror but with solidarity. Jesse Macy writes that active-duty peers, when commanders who ordered him to carry a gun, told him “Macy, don’t you draw a gun. Stand by your principles.”

75 years later, actor Lew Ayes, who’d starred in All Quiet on the Western Front, spent years in the Philippines as a CO medic — some of it under the command of Major William Kunstler. Years later, Kunstler remembered Ayres as he became the peace movement’s go-to lawyer, representing COs as recently as the Gulf War. Before then, Kunstler was also a civil rights attorney, where he met another WWII CO, Bayard Rustin.

Unlike Ayres Rustin had spent the war in prison, like fellow CO and antiwar hero David Dellinger. After the war, he went to India to learn “Gandhian” principles, and infused those principles into his organizing for racial justice, including his work with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Rustin also mentored Stokely Carmichael, who in 1966 helped three Army enlisted soldiers announce that they would refuse deployment to Vietnam. The Fort Hood Three, as they were known, made that announcement at the venerable New York Community Church introduced by the great Staughton Lynd, who’d been a Korean War conscientious objector and civil rights activist. In a photo of that day, twenty-six-year-old Private Dennis Mora sits next to his Bronx High School of Science classmate, Stokely Standiford Churchill Carmichael, along with Lynd and antiwar icon A.J. Muste. As soldiers and veterans increasingly became involved in the evolving peace movement, the learning was mutual.

One is for fighting, one is for fun. As better scholars than I have noted, the U.S. military has long been identified with a certain kind uof exaggerated masculinity, in ways that have actually increased as those other walls kept crumbling. But gender-dissent is real.

There have always been servicemembers who didn’t conform , from the women who “passed” in the pre-20th century wars to the gays who did the same (e.g. Walt Whitman’s lover Peter Doyle).

Cynthia Enloe notes in her new book, Twelve Feminist Lessons From War, that all wars occur as women’s organizing evolves, since women never stop organizing. That includes Susan Schnall, a Navy nurse during the Vietnam War who’s famous for her October 1968 action, when she flew over the Bay Area bombarding military bases with anti-war posters. It also includes Jennifer Hogg, a co-founder of Iraq Veterans Against War, who also co-founded Service Women’s Action Network in response to the escalating problem of military sexual trauma. Joining Hogg was Margaret Stevens, now a professor at Essex County College, who told me the group “was very radical in its beginning. We would sit with maps of every US base in the world, making plans to mobilize.” SWAN has since renounced its radical roots, but the link with anti-militarist organizing continues. Courage to Resist, founded by Gulf War resister Jeff Paterson, jump-started the movement in support of Chelsea Manning, whose very public transition as a trans woman taught many of us the meaning of bravery.

Everything old is new again. The 21st century has thrown up a series of new and old surprises on all the paths above, along with some new ones enabled by technology and globalization. We saw young people expose the drone war, many at the cost of imprisonment and/or their own mental health; we watched as Reality Winner, the Air Force intelligence analyst who leaked information about exposing Russian interference in the 201b elections, was prosecuted and persecuted by the Trump administration.

What unites them all is conscience, and their willingness to stand up to the military machine. The other common denominator is hope.

Whether one defines hope as an emotion, an action or a muscle, people resist in order create a better future. Let’s keep that hope in mind during these times.