Pacifism

Pacifism is presented not as a single doctrine or a sheltered refusal to engage with public life, but as a dissenting position tested by war, censorship, economic power, and state pressure. Its advocates challenge the claim that military service necessarily serves democracy; some oppose war as a matter of conscience, while others connect it to class conflict and the interests of financiers. The novel gives this dissent concrete social locations: magazines that risk publishing antiwar writing, conversations among radical journalists, an ambulance worker’s dispute with military authorities, and labor gatherings constrained by police and federal surveillance.

Dissent in the Press and Public Debate

Randolph Bourne’s opposition becomes costly when he resigns from The New Republic and finds that only The Seven Arts will publish his articles against the war. The magazine’s financial backers withdraw their support, friends avoid being seen with him, and his father asks him not to bring disgrace on the family name. Liberal acquaintances urge him to align himself with Woodrow Wilson’s administration. The collapse of Bourne’s hopes for a reformed democracy is therefore social as well as political: dissent isolates him from the people and institutions that had seemed to share his reforming outlook.

Don Stevens offers a more radical version of antiwar argument. A journalist from South Dakota who had worked as a harvest hand and taken part in Industrial Workers of the World conflicts, he arrives in New York with a red membership card, writes for The Call and other periodicals, and speaks at antiwar meetings. He regards the press as controlled and expects the United States to enter the war. In his analysis, the prospect of working-class revolt in Europe, the Russian Revolution, and the financial interests of bankers are inseparable from the pressure toward intervention. His pacifism is thus not simply a plea for private abstention: it is an attempt to explain war through class power and to warn that public opinion is being managed.

Conscience at the Front

Richard Ellsworth Savage’s experience shows how antiwar conviction can coexist with service that is not itself combat. In France, he identifies as a pacifist and says he supports any course that could stop the fighting. His opposition takes shape among ambulance workers and soldiers who encounter the war’s daily costs, and it is reinforced by a discussion of revolution with French soldiers. In a ruined village near Verdun, the traffic carrying men and munitions passes through the surrounding countryside; Richard watches French soldiers heading toward the attack and hears their rejection of both war and the promised victory. The episode makes pacifism a response to observed conditions, not an abstraction detached from them.

Richard also tries to explain his position to the Thurlow family in a letter responding to Hilda Thurlow’s enthusiasm for the war as a means of ending war. He argues that urging young men into military service undermines the Christian principles Edwin Thurlow professes. He describes the conflict as a dishonest undertaking by governments and politicians, and notes that censorship prevents him from communicating everything he has seen. His letter links moral argument to the limits imposed on wartime speech; the private exchange is one of the few spaces where he can make that case directly.

In Paris, Richard seeks to continue his Red Cross work and explain his views, but army and intelligence officials treat his pacifism as evidence of disloyalty. They insist that private opinions must yield to wartime duty and threaten to send him back to the United States, barring him from returning in any capacity with the American Expeditionary Forces. He gives up the effort to remain with the service and receives passage home. Before leaving, however, he volunteers as a stretcher-bearer at an American hospital, carrying wounded men from the pavements into the building and working outside the operating room. The contrast matters: the authorities exclude him for his beliefs, yet his final days in Paris are spent in practical care for those harmed by the war.

Pacifism, Revolution, and Labor

The novel places antiwar feeling alongside organized labor without treating the two as identical. At a textile strike in New Jersey, Webb Cruthers and Ben Compton encounter police and special deputies around the mills, and a crowd of workers is kept from a meeting hall. Compton speaks to the people outside and is taken away by police. Later, Daughter joins Webb on the picket line, where she sees the police break up the line and witnesses an assault on a fallen striker before she is arrested. These episodes show a public order in which labor organizing is restricted and force is used against workers. They deepen the political setting of pacifism: opposition to war appears in a society already marked by coercion at home, though participation in a strike does not by itself establish that every striker is a pacifist.

Ben Compton’s antiwar politics are more explicitly revolutionary. At a meeting at the Empire Casino called to send greetings to Russia’s workers’ government, federal agents take notes, police control access, and soldiers and sailors watch from the gallery. Compton argues that capitalist governments send workers to fight a war that benefits bankers and munitions makers, and predicts that workers will eventually turn the knowledge and weapons of war against the profiteers. The meeting ends with arrests; men of conscription age must show their registration cards before leaving. This is antiwar speech, but it also looks beyond the end of hostilities toward a transformation of the system that produces them.

After his arrest, Ben is offered release if he will report for military training. He refuses to promise that he will stop opposing the war, and is released on bail under an assurance that he will not agitate before trial. The episode makes the conflict between conscience and compulsory service explicit: the state offers a conditional route out of detention, but the condition would require political silence. Ben’s case also shows the limits of pacifism as a protected right when opposition is treated as a threat to wartime discipline.

War, Power, and the Limits of Idealism

Not every character who believes in a war’s stated aims remains convinced by the conduct of the conflict. Paxton Hibben believes in the Fourteen Points and in the promise of a war to end war, even while the novel contrasts that ideal with the perceived hypocrisy of wartime life in New York. His position marks a distinction between opposition to war as actually conducted and hope that a conflict might produce a more durable peace. The contrast also prevents pacifism from appearing as a simple divide between those who care about democracy and those who do not: characters may share democratic hopes while disagreeing sharply over whether war can realize them.

The novel’s accounts of finance and resources further complicate the language of peace. It records the House of Morgan’s extensive control across banks, insurance companies, railroads, and shipping, and notes that by 1917 the Allies had borrowed $1.9 billion through that financial network. In Paris, discussion of oil concessions and competing British and American interests presents postwar policy as a struggle over resources and influence, even when it is framed in terms of mandates and self-determination. Read beside the antiwar arguments of Bourne, Stevens, Richard, and Ben, these details give pacifism a material dimension: dissent asks not only who is ordered to fight, but whose power and interests the fighting and its settlement serve. The novel’s recurring tension is between the promise that force will secure democracy and the evidence that war, censorship, and economic competition can narrow the very freedoms invoked to justify it.