The highest hurdle remained, namely the U.S. Senate. The peace movement buried it in letters, petitions, resolutions, and lobbying visits. Supportive senators read the petitions into the congressional record. President Coolidge persuaded Vice President Dawes to whip every senator in support of the Pact. The Federal Council of Churches brought the White House a petition with 180,000 signatures. In mid-January 1929, a thousand women peace leaders from around the country lobbied their respective senators in Washington, delivering thousands of petitions. Carrie Chapman Catt, who led this effort, suffered a heart attack during it. The vote was 85 to 1. The Wisconsin state legislature censured its U.S. senator who had voted No. Other senators who had expressed concerns all voted Yes. One explained his Yes vote by saying he did not want to be burned in effigy back in his state.
It would take me another hour to begin to cover the hypocrisies, weaknesses, and shortcomings of this accomplishment. I'll limit myself here to claiming that it was an accomplishment. It was not just a second-rate effort after the League of Nations failed, nor just a pretense or a fraud. The Kellogg-Briand Pact established the practice of not recognizing territorial claims gained through war, and its revival by another crusading lawyer during World War II (the Pact having been largely forgotten by then) created prosecutions of the crime of aggression -- ironically so, in that the Pact had been created precisely in order to avoid creating a crime called aggression. Victors' justice is not full justice, but punishing leaders following World War II worked out a whole lot better than punishing an entire nation after World War I had.
A new and more faithful revival of Outlawry might again serve us well. The Kellogg-Briand Pact, which has never been repealed, makes a stronger case against wars like Afghanistan and Iraq than does the U.N. Charter. To comply with Kellogg-Briand, wars need not be defensive or U.N.-authorized. Rather, wars need to simply not exist.
Outlawry also removes a major reason why young men and women join the military, namely to make war as a means to achieving peace. If there is no way to peace other than peace, if war cannot have a noble cause, if war has been -- as it formally has been -- renounced as an instrument of policy, then idealistic militarism goes away from recruiting offices, and the propaganda of humanitarian war suffers as well.
We may also have something to learn from the activism that promoted Outlawry. It was principled, non-partisan, cross-ideological, and unrelenting. More internationalist and more principled anti-imperialist or disarmament proposals, and the proposal to create a public referendum power to block wars, helped to make Outlawry mainstream by comparison. The campaign was built over a period of years through both education and the cultivation of powerful supporters. It was not overly distracted by elections. Its analysis included cold cost-benefit calculations, but front and center was always the morality of the cause of ending war. This campaign worked internationally, nationally, and locally. And its members did not believe victory would come in their lifetimes. But neither were they so self-focused as to imagine that this somehow made eventual victory impossible.
There is one thing that we can say with certainty, and I will close with this: if Outlawry does not win, humanity will lose.
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