The United States Threat to Peace

Alexander Tecumseh Duffy

Professor Shaw

20^th Century Political Movements

April 5^th, 2013

 The United States Threat to Peace

            Throughout the history of American the United States government has made significant efforts to hinder, slander, and in any way they can ruin women’s peace movements.  The reasons behind their attempts, which have varying levels of success, is the fear that they experience from the movements calls for peace.  The peace movements are in direct opposition of the colonial and militaristic nature of the post World War Two United States.  However, this Blog will not focus on the nature of the United States government.  Instead, it is intended to highlight the issues that the Women Strike for Peace movement, and its predecessors, addressed that caused friction between them and the United States government.

            The original women’s peace movment mentioned in Amy Swerdlows Women Strike for Peace stemmed from the 1836 request sent out by William Ladd, founder of the American Peace Society, to mothers urging them to push for the vote.  Ladd’s reasoning was that the responsibility of women to place their values in with those of the men running the country.  While Swerdlow makes no mention as to how Ladd’s call to arms affected women’s suffrage, or the United States government’s response, we know from the initial book of the semester, Southern Horrors, what the general feelings were.  Among Southern men, the fear was that since black men were already given the right to vote, having women’s suffrage would only intensify their fear of black equality.

            This small movement was a predecessor to the outbreak of movements such as the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War in Interwar America.  Since the end of bloody slaughter called WW1, peace groups were sprouting up all across the nation.  The military wanted to put a stop to these groups in order to maintain the hold that they had over the nation and to stop the women from raising children who were unlikely to fight, not matter how isolationist the United States claimed to be.  The slander used in this case was a spider chart created by the head of the Chemical Warfare Service: General Amos A. Fries.  This chart warned citizens of the supposed links that women’s peace groups had to Communism and how they were attempting to subvert the power of the United States and capitalism. 

            After the nation was forced to witness the destruction and horror of World War 2, the peace groups that had barely survived the gung-ho attitude of Americans during the war began to flourish in the post-war years.  Movements like Women Strike for Peace that sprang up out of the fears of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War, and the path that the United States had taken towards giving into the military-industrial complex stood in opposition to one another.  The United States government would not stand for anyone to combat their efforts of building up a massive nuclear arsenal, and so the response their was to subject peace groups to the HUAC.  The McCarthy era witch hunt known as the Red Scare cast its gaze towards many peace groups, and attempted to label them communist as a way of discrediting them. 

            The book, Women Strike for Peace, informed us as to how the HUACs attempt at slander played out with the well-played reversal by WSP.  However, even though the HUACs plan was foiled, why precisely would they want to stop the WSPers?  Just as President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in his Farewell Address, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influenced, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” (D. Eisenhower “Farewell Address”)  Eisenhower’s warning came all too true for the WSP movement.  Since they wanted to put an end to above ground nuclear testing due to the signs that the dangerous isotope Strontium 90 was getting into humans in higher doses.  While there was proof for the WSPs fears from a study called the Baby Tooth Survey which found that children born in 1963 had 50 times higher levels of Strontium 90 in their teeth and those born in the 1950’s.  The military, well aware of the ill affects of their testing were at the peak of the arms race with the Soviet Union, and in their eyes could not afford to give up the tests that were being conducted in order to further research as well as flex their nuclear muscle. 

            While the battle between the military and the WSP for nuclear testing ended in 1963 with President Kennedy’s signing the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty the war had just begun.  Throughout the rest of the century, the WSP and military would continue to butt heads, and while it would never reach as near a point to shutting down the WSP under the guise of communism the women and planet still do not have the peace we need.