WAR BY OTHER MEANS

Study of conscientious objectors who made waves during World War II and helped pave the way for successors in Vietnam and other conflicts.

When the draft went into effect in 1940, roughly 43,000 men “were granted conscientious objector status,” writes journalist Akst, who breaks down that number: “Most were purely religious objectors, and some contributed to the war effort as combat medics or in other non-lethal roles.” Some 12,000 were assigned to rural work camps in the U.S., continuing the work of the New Deal–era Civilian Conservation Corps and other infrastructure-building agencies. Of the 6,000 left, two-thirds were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and there were “nearly two thousand absolute resisters.” Those in the last category were imprisoned. Objecting to the war was politically fraught, and people such as David Dellinger, who, years later, became part of the Chicago Seven, had to wrestle with being decried traitors to honor their “radical antiauthoritarianism.” In addition to Dellinger, the author describes the work of future civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, a brilliant tactician who later helped organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington; dissident journalist Dwight Macdonald; “Catholic firebrand” Dorothy Day; and a host of lesser-known characters in the struggle. Some were followers of Gandhi’s satyagraha movement, which advocated nonviolent but by no means passive resistance; some were followers of Christian pacifism, such as the pastor Reinhold Niebuhr. A few, such as Dellinger’s friend Don Benedict, decided while in prison that “it suddenly began to make a difference to me who won the war” and enlisted after all. Akst writes effectively of these pacifists and objectors, noting that many of them took important roles in later resistance against war and for advances in civil rights. “They saw themselves as revolutionaries,” he writes, “and they were tough, having withstood violence, prison, poverty, and social opprobrium.”

A worthy exploration of a little-known episode in the history of American involvement in WWII.