I’ve always thought it useful to understand the philosophers of conflict. So I have long been keen to consider the famous maxim of Clausewitz — that war is simply politics by other means — and its reverse, popularized by Michel Foucault: that politics might indeed be war by other means. Author Daniel Akst takes this premise to its widest stretch. He proposes that the U.S. pacifist movements of the mid-to-late 20th century revolutionized the very nature of resistance by waging battle against war itself by means of uniquely creative but fundamentally conflictual methods.
Akst’s “War by Other Means: The Pacifists of the Greatest Generation Who Revolutionized Resistance” spotlights four figures well known to any student of the U.S. peace movement, weaving an interesting and well-written narrative about the way they influenced movements for social change in their own times and the ones that followed. Examining the lives, thoughts and works of Bayard Rustin, Dave Dellinger, Dorothy Day, and Dwight Macdonald, Akst asks us to understand that these four “heterodox dissidents” were to shape the “contours and concerns of the American left” for decades to come.
This review comes in two parts. First, the positives. Warm sentiments always accompany the surfacing of any new reflection on iconic figures whom one has long admired. As a young student activist in New York City in the early 1980s, I was fortunate enough to encounter, befriend and learn from Rustin and Dellinger at a time when Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker followers — and especially Plowshares and Catholic Left adherents — were ever-present, even in secular nonviolence organizations. Their steadfast activism and life-long commitment to anti-capitalist personal simplicity, anti-militarist political militancy, and practical direct-action coalition-building inspired us all. Although author/editor Macdonald, notable for his work at Partisan Review and other more mainstream magazines, and for his Vietnam-era work with RESIST, was less well-known to most of my generation, he was still someone whom we understood was worth reading.
Akst’s histories on these figures and those around them are, for the most part, not new. Even those unfamiliar with the individuals or their organizations could, if interested, find richer and more closely attuned accounts. Scott H. Bennett is but one peace historian with many works (including “Radical Pacifism,” in 2003) which more adeptly and carefully treats these same figures; Academy and Emmy-nominated filmmaker Judy Ehrlich’s “The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It” (2002) drew similar conclusions with more engaged and engaging connections to the personalities in Akst’s book. Nevertheless, for those who are new to this period, or those who will read everything on these key peace leaders, Akst covers the work from a more mainstream but essentially sympathetic perspective.
On the more negative side, it is hard to ignore the fact that major, influential groups and discussions of the period are wholly omitted from this book. Though Akst seeks to prove that resistance was revolutionized by the collective influence of these four, he neglects to mention the Committee on Nonviolent Revolution (CNVR), in which at least three of them played a role (Dellinger a central role). The realization that radical thought was then experiencing an upsurge which would necessarily influence U.S. critical thinkers — especially in the years following the Russian Revolution, in the midst of growing Communist influence in Korea, China, Vietnam and elsewhere, during widespread decolonizing radicalism in India and throughout Africa — was at the core of the CNVR conversations and is absent from the considerations of this book.
Additionally, the very premise that the four figures of Rustin, Dellinger, Day, and Macdonald were so different and distinct is a bit hard to accept. Two of them, after all, were imprisoned conscientious objectors, all were New York-based intellectuals, and all were radicals long before the advent of ideas such as “the greatest generation” or the onset of World War II.
If, as it hopes, “War by Other Means” does help to popularize these too often forgotten figures more widely, then this book will have contributed a great service to our field. But if, as is more likely, it mainly becomes an additional library volume on one sector of leftist thought, it is not the one this reviewer would suggest as a first read. Akst certainly deserves an “E” for effort, but — as we know from our studies of this history and its legacies — we will need more than good intentions to end war and the causes of war.