Radical Pacifism in Modern America tells a story of contradictions. Its subject, the members of the American radical pacifist movement from World War II through the Vietnam War era, is the militant activists who were committed to countercultural revolt but nonetheless mired in mainstream social and cultural values. These organizers and grassroots leaders preached the gospel of open-mindedness in their political pursuits; at the same time, they remained profoundly closed to self-criticism and change in their political practice and personal lives. Ardently egalitarian idealists, they nevertheless replicated many of the hierarchies of power they explicitly sought to undermine. Although they...

It started off simply enough. Tired of complying with regulations that mandated racial segregation in the dining halls, eighteen white prisoners at the Federal Correctional Institute in Danbury, Connecticut, all pacifists incarcerated for resisting the draft, went out on strike. Calling their protest “A Witness for Interracial Brotherhood,” the men argued for the right of prison inmates to dine at tables of their own choosing, regardless of race. Officials immediately rewarded the protesters’ refusal to work by placing the group in an isolated facility. There, under extremely punitive conditions and separated from the general prison population, the men managed to...

By 1952, white pacifist Marion Coddington Bromley was well on her way to realizing the revolutionary vision outlined by radical activists five years before. Her marriage four years earlier to the Rev. Ernest Bromley, a former Fellowship of Reconciliation staffer and Journey of Reconciliation team member, had given her personal life a decidedly political tinge. Marion’s married life revolved around activist pursuits, and so did the communal household that she and her husband formed with another young activist couple, black pacifists Juanita Morrow and Wally Nelson. With the support of her husband and her housemates, Bromley found ways to engage...

The centrality of family concerns to the peace movement became evident in the late 1950s when radical pacifists embarked on a focused campaign against nuclear weapons and atmospheric testing. Choosing the Nevada Test Site as the launching ground for a new experiment in nonviolent resistance, thirty-three activists, many of them self-identified parents and grandparents, gathered together on the twelfth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. In the rugged desert, under the scorching sun, the group conducted a prayerful vigil at the entrance to the testing grounds and then, in small groups of two and three, eleven of the protesters proceeded to...

Marj Swann had hoped that the Committee for Nonviolent Action’s 1960 Hiroshima Day commemoration would bear strong resemblances to the vigil she had organized one year earlier in Omaha, Nebraska. “Join Us,” the flier she and others distributed proclaimed; “Say Yes to Your Child’s Future, ... Say No to Violence and War.” The planned vigil was part of a broad series of protests organized by CNVA as part of a new, long-term campaign against the Polaris nuclear-missile-carrying submarine centered in southeastern Connecticut. As one of many activities organized by the newly created Polaris Action project, the Hiroshima Day event had...

Radical pacifists reveled in the vitality and commitment that their young recruits brought to the movement in the early 1960s, especially as they contemplated the possibility of waging the nonviolent struggle on multiple fronts. By early 1963, the threat of nuclear war had never felt more immediate. The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, which brought the world literally to the brink of annihilation, reminded antiwar leaders just how much was at stake in their work for peace. Activists agreed that the campaign for disarmament needed to continue at full strength. At the same time, the struggle for racial justice...

For radical pacifists like twenty-two-year-old Gene Keyes, protesting against the draft was a courageous and exemplary act. American military operations in Vietnam challenged the most basic convictions of activists who held both a principled pacifist stance and a radical critique of U.S. Cold War policies. From their perspective, the conflict in Vietnam was an unjust and misguided attempt to maintain a corrupt anti-Communist regime and suppress a legitimate struggle for national liberation. Conscription for this war also posed dangers to liberty at home, especially for the young men who were targeted by the draft. Radical pacifists—the new generation of...

From 1940 to 1970, activists within the radical pacifist movement had numerous opportunities to learn from their experiences and change the racialized and gendered dynamics that repeatedly defined, distorted, and undermined this vanguard movement for social and political change. Theirs was not a history of social learning, however, but of recurring missteps and missed opportunities. The white activists who dominated decision making in early CORE and CNVA clearly grasped the power that working for civil rights and engaging in nonviolent direct action for racial justice could bring to their efforts to achieve disarmament and world peace. The men of the...