Forbes Magazine – Engaging Peace

Review of Soldiers of Peace: Civil War Pacifism and the Postwar Radical Peace Movement, by Thomas F. Curran (228 p, Fordham, 2003).

Review by Edward Agro

I’d long been anxious to read Soldiers of Peace, hoping it might shed light on successes as well as missteps in the current-day antiwar movement. And so it has.

The main character in Soldiers of Peace is Alfred H. Love, who was possessed of the idée fixe that the only way to peace before, during, and after the Civil War was to rebuild government and civil society on a Biblical model.

Reading the story of Love and the Universal Peace Union (UPU) he founded leads to an understanding of several strands of American civic culture and activism of 150 and more years ago that contribute substantially to perspectives we bring to peace and social change work today.

Curran’s evidence persuasively shows how doctrinal rigidity within the UPU and its secular twin, the American Peace Society, most likely lessened the positive things both groups could have accomplished. On the other hand, enough people, including Love as he aged, were able to get far enough ahead of their preconceptions to lay the groundwork for many of the progressive campaigns and organizations of the 20th century.

This review doesn’t do justice to Curran’s contribution to the untangling of the many threads that led to present-day activist consciousness, or his evidence regarding the practice of war tax refusal.

I don’t want to oversell the book; it probably won’t be much help to activists on the barricades on behalf of one or another immediate campaign. But for those whose street-fighting days are perhaps over, who have the luxury of trying to understand where we come from and where we might be going, it’s a treasure.

Ed Agro is a long-time peace activist whose autobiographical statement was published in Forbes.

[Note from Kathie Malley-Morrison: We have shared the stories of a number of controversial figures on our site—e.g., Howard Zinn, Rachel Corrie, Dalit Yassour-Borochowitz, Dahlia Wasfi, and Ross Caputi. We recently invited a guest author to submit an essay on Golda Meir, which generated considerable valuable controversy.

Today we introduce another long-time peace activist, Ed Agro, who describes his anti-war activism. To learn more about Ed, read his autobiographical statement, as published in Forbes Magazine.]

Long ago, America’s war of the moment (Vietnam) was so flagrantly wrong, criminal, and inexcusable to anyone with a moral sensibility this side of Satan’s that a good part of the population was in an uproar. What with all the protesting and resisting, no one could get on with a normal life.

More in a fit of righteous pique than anything else, I totaled up the hours I was spending on various attempts to overthrow the State, assigned myself 10 bucks an hour, and on the year’s tax return claimed a business expense for the aggravation. That year my tax liability was respectable, and at the time the refusal seemed bold and dangerous. (Not so neither, it’s turned out.)

Maybe that particular act of war tax refusal was the one that brought a functionary to my door asking why I was not in compliance, so I told him. That’s how it went in those days. (When I mentioned to him that he may as well throw phone-tax refusal into the liabilities he was complaining about, he was mystified, but a levy notice awhile later indicated that I’d encouraged him to do his homework.)

That war finally ended, in part because of suchlike exertions of the community of war tax refusers. Since I had conceived of WTR as a tactic to end that war, I abandoned refusal with the coming of the more-or-less peace.

Worries over legal repercussions and disapprobation by my neighbors lessened as the functionaries lost interest in me and my neighbors lost interest in wars that became less burdensome.

But abstinence didn’t last long as new enemies were invented and war has followed war.

Historical strands of peace activism

A bold and dangerous refusal (Don’t wanna pay for war no more, Part 1)