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On
the outbreak of the First World War a group
of women pacifists in the United States
began talking about the need to form an organization to help bring
it to an end. On the 10th January, 1915, over 3,000 women attended
a meeting in the ballroom of the New Willard Hotel in Washington and
formed the Woman's Peace Party. Jane Addams
was elected chairman and other women involved in the organization
included Mary McDowell, Florence
Kelley, Alice Hamilton, Anna
Howard Shaw, Belle La Follette,
Fanny Garrison Villard, Mary
Heaton Vorse, Emily Balch, Jeanette
Rankin, Lillian Wald, Edith
Abbott, Grace Abbott, Crystal
Eastman, Carrie Chapman Catt, Emily
Bach, and Sophonisba Breckinridge.
In April 1915, Aletta Jacobs, a suffragist
in Holland, invited members of the Woman's Peace Party to an International
Congress of Women in the Hague. Jane
Addams was asked to chair the meeting and Mary
Heaton Vorse, Alice Hamilton, Grace
Abbott, Julia Lathrop, Leonora
O'Reilly, Sophonisba Breckinridge
and Emily Bach went as delegates from the
United States. Others who went to the Hague included Emmeline
Pethick-Lawrence, Emily Hobhouse,
(England); Chrystal Macmillan (Scotland)
and Rosika Schwimmer (Hungary). Afterwards,
Jacobs, Addams, Macmillan, Schwimmer and Balch went to London, Berlin,
Vienna, Budapest, Rome, Berne and Paris to speak with members of the
various governments in Europe.
The women were attacked in the press by Theodore
Roosevelt who described them as "hysterical pacifists"
and called their proposals "both silly and base". Jane
Addams was selected for particular criticism. One man wrote in
the Rochester Herald, "In the true sense of the word,
she is apparently without education. She knows no more of the discipline
and methods of modern warfare than she does of its meaning. If the
woman conceded by her sisters to be the ablest of her sex, is so readily
duped, so little informed, men wonder what degree of intelligence
is to be secured by adding the female vote to the electorate."
By 1917 the Woman's Peace Party had 40,000 members. However, after
the United States entered the war the party fragmented. The Espionage
Act, passed by Congress in 1917, prescribed a $10,000 fine and
20 years' imprisonment for interfering with the recruiting of troops
or the disclosure of information dealing with national defence. Additional
penalties were included for the refusal to perform military duty.
Criticised as unconstitutional, the act resulted in the imprisonment
of many of the anti-war movement. This included Rose Pastor Stokes
who was sentenced to ten years in prison for saying, in a letter to
the Kansas City Star, that "no government which is for
the profiteers can also be for the people, and I am for the people
while the government is for the profiteers."
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Members
of the Women's Peace Party in 1915
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(1)
Statement issued by the Women's Peace Party (10th January, 1915)
We women of the United States, assembled in behalf of World Peace,
grateful for the security of our own country, but sorrowing for the
misery of all involved in the present struggle among warring nations,
do hereby band ourselves together to demand that war be abolished.
As women, we are particularly charged with the future of childhood
and with the care of the helpless and the unfortunate. We will no
longer endure without protest that added burden of maimed and invalided
men and poverty-stricken widows and orphans which was placed upon
us. We demand that women be given a share in deciding between war
and peace in all the courts of high debate - within the home, the
school, the church, the industrial order and the state. So protesting
and so demanding, we hereby form ourselves into a national organization
to be called the Woman's Peace Party.
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(2)
Chicago Daily News (12th April, 1915)
These women (members of the Woman's Peace Party) had embarked because
the cry from the women of Europe was too pitiful to be ignored, and
because it is feminine nature to respond impulsively and completely.
It was a serious-minded group, where the women flocked around Miss
Addams, there generally was laughter. But there could scarcely be
hilarity, for the women bore in their memories the awful tidings they
had received from their sisters abroad, tidings of sexual horrors,
of naked children, of ruined generations, of racial peril.
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(3)
Emily Bach was one of the women who attended
the International Peace Conference in the Hague. In her journal she
recorded her impression of Jane Addams
(April, 1915)
Miss Addams shines, so respectful of everyone's views, so eager to
understand and sympathize, so patient of anarchy and even ego, yet
always there, strong, wise and in the lead. No 'managing', no keeping
dark and bringing things subtly to pass, just a radiating wisdom and
power of judgement.
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(4)
New York Times
(6th July, 1915)
Everyone will be glad to welcome Miss
Jane Addams back and this includes those of her admirers who were
sorry to see her go. Those will hope that the next time there is to
be a demonstration of the folly of those who think peace can be brought
by stopping a war it will fall to the lot of someone less generally
respected than she is to make it. For Miss Addams is a citizen too
highly valued for any one to see her engaged in such melancholy enterprises
without a feeling of pain.
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(5)
Jane Addams, speech at Carnegie Hall (9th
July, 1915)
The first thing which was striking is this, that the same causes and
reasons for the war were heard everywhere. Each warring nation solemnly
assured you it is fighting under the impulse of self-defense.
Another thing which we found very striking was that in practically
all of the foreign offices the men said that a nation at war cannot
make negotiations and that a nation at war cannot even express willingness
to receive negotiations, for if it does either, the enemy will at
once construe it as a symptom of weakness.
Generally speaking, we heard everywhere that this war was an old man's
war; that the young men who were dying, the young men who were doing
the fighting, were not the men who wanted the war, and were not the
men who believed in the war; that someone in church and state, somewhere
in the high places of society, the elderly people, the middle-aged
people, had established themselves and had convinced themselves that
this was a righteous war, that this war must be fought out, and the
young men must do the fighting.
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(6)
In her speech at Carnegie Hall Jane Addams
claimed that soldiers were provided with alcohol before making bayonet
charges. The journalist, Richard Harding Davis,
wrote a letter of complaint about her speech to the New
York Times (13th July, 1915)
In this war the French or English soldier
who had been killed in a bayonet charge gave his life to protect his
home and country. For his supreme exit he had prepared himself by
months of discipline. Through the winter in the trenches he had endured
shells, disease, snow and ice. For months he had been separated from
his wife, children, friends - all those he most loved. When the order
to charge came it was for them he gave his life, that against those
who destroyed Belgium they might preserve their home, might live to
enjoy peace.
Miss Addams denies him the credit of his sacrifice. She strips him
of honor and courage. She tells his children, "Your father did
not die for France, or for England, or for you; he died because he
was drunk."
In my opinion, since the war began, no statement has been so unworthy
or so untrue and ridiculous. The contempt it shows for the memory
of the dead is appalling; the crudity and ignorance it displays are
inconceivable.
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(7)
Pittsfield Journal (3rd July, 1915)
The time was when Miss Jane Addams of Hull House, Chicago held a warm
place in the hearts of the American people but she is vast losing
the esteem, with her earlier efforts seem to merit. Her dabbling in
politics, her suffrage activity and her ill-advised methods of working
for peace have very materially lowered her in the esteem of hundreds
of former admirers.
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(8)
Rochester Herald (15th July, 1915)
In the true sense of the word, she (Jane Addams) is apparently without
education. She knows no more of the discipline and methods of modern
warfare than she does of its meaning. If the woman conceded by her
sisters to be the ablest of her sex, is so readily duped, so little
informed, men wonder what degree of intelligence is to be secured
by adding the female vote to the electorate.
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(9)
Mary
Heaton Vorse,
A Footnote to Folly (1935)
The women�s
rising tide of protest against the war came to a point on February
12, 1915. On that date a great peace meeting was held in Washington
by the women of America. On the same date, in Holland, an International
Congress of Women, to be held in Amsterdam, was called by Dr. Aletta
Jacobs, a famous Dutch suffragist.
The American
delegation, the largest which attended the Congress, was headed by
Jane Addams. It included such people as Grace Abbott, Julia Lathrop,
Sophonisba Breckinridge, Dr. Alice Grace Hamilton, Miss Kittredge,
Mrs. W. I. Thomas, who, with her husband, was so bitterly persecuted
during the war for her pacifism, Fannie Fern Andrews, Mary Chamberlain,
from the Survey, and Marian Cothren. At my table were Mary
Chamberlain and the Pethwick Lawrences.
Besides
many of the most forward - looking women of America, the group also
included cranks, women with nostrums for ending war, and women who
had come for the ride. New Thought cranks with Christian Science smiles
and blue ribbons in their hair, hard - working Hull House women, little
half-baked enthusiasts, elderly war horses of peace, riding furious
hobbies.
As a background
was Jane Addams, unassertive, contemplative and sensitive. All the
way over we discussed our program. All the way over, that great woman,
Miss Addams, listened with as much patience to the suggestions of
the worst crank among us as she did to such trained minds as Miss
Breckinridge. I have never known anyone who had a greater intellectual
hospitality or courtesy. When I spoke of this to her one day, she
said quietly, �I have never met anyone from whom I could not
learn.� We were held up for four days in the English Channel,
off Dover, and arrived late, just in time for the opening meeting
on the 27th of April.
The women
who attended this Congress were for the most part well-to-do women
of the middle class. It was an everyday audience, plain people, just
folks, the kind you see walking out to church any Sunday morning.
Labor was unrepresented except for Leonora O�Reilly, of the Woman�s
Trade Union League, and Annie Molloy, the president of the Telephone
Operators Union. It was an audience composed of women full of inhibitions,
not of a radical habit of thought, unaccustomed for the most part
to self-expression, women who had walked decorously all their days,
hedged in by the �thou shalt nots� of middle-class life.
This meeting of these women seemed all the more remarkable on that
account, much more significant than the famous Ford Peace Ship.
The Congress
was held in a great hall, called the �Dierentuin,� in the
Zoological Gardens. In front of the gardens on a wide field, soldiers
were perpetually drilling. One saw them move off more like automata
than men. One saw them go through various maneuvers. They were perpetually
there, a living example of the awful madness of war. A Dutchwoman
said to me, as we walked past them: �It is only since the war
that I have realized that they do this to learn how to kill other
men and to offer themselves to be killed. My head has always known
this, but my heart only since the war!�
Counting
visitors, there were between 1,200 and 1,500 in the audience. There
were delegates from twelve countries. But no delegates from France,
Serbia or Russia. Not even the Socialist women would send a delegate
while the enemy was on French soil.
On the
proscenium sat some of the most famous women in Europe, almost all
internationally known; Miss Jane Addams and Miss Fannie Fern Andrews,
from America; Dr. Aletta Jacobs and Dr. Boissevain, from Holland;
Miss MacMillan and Miss Courtenay, form Great Britain. One wonders
where those old feminists are now, Dr. Augsburg and Fraulein von Heymann
of Germany, Frau Kruthgar or Frau Hofrath von Lecher of Austria. What
has become of those able fighters of twenty years ago from Central
Europe?
Of the
two hundred English who had planned to come, only two had been allowed
visas. And only one Italian delegate had got through, but there were
delegates from Poland, from South Africa and from Canada.
For the
first time in all the history of the world, women of warring nations
and women of neutral nations had come together to lift up their voices
in protest against war, through which the women and the workers gain
nothing and lose all.
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(10)
Freda
Kirchwey,
obituary of Crystal
Eastman in The
Nation (8th August, 1928)
As
a pacifist Crystal Eastman was also a militant. She was the
vigorous leader of the Woman's Peace Party in New York State during
the early years of the Great War, piloting that organization through
stormy days when it was denounced as pro-German and when some of its
members dropped off to support the war or to roll bandages. She turned
the energies of this women's society into dramatic, vigorous protest
and caught the attention of a country already sliding into the fatal
whirlpool. With equal vigor she shared the labors of the editor of
The Nation and other pacifists who founded the American Union
Against Militarism, a body which stood firm even when the war itself
trampled their protest under iron feet.
But pacifism
had failed to save the world. In 1917 Crystal Eastman joined her brother
Max on the staff of The Liberator, successor to The Masses.
For two years they fought against war and in behalf of social change.
They hailed the Soviet Revolution in Russia as the embodiment of their
dreams. They watched with high hope the tide of revolutionary sentiment
rise in Central Europe, as famine and the devastation of war and the
truckling of the peace makers made the workers more and more desperate
and conscious of their plight.
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