The Civil War still stands as America’s darkest hour. One in five Confederate men of fighting age died, probably as many from disease and broken hearts as from bullets. If defeat wasn’t bad enough, Sherman’s scorched earth March to the Sea assured dreadful poverty and social disruption ensued for years to come.
There could only be two responses by southerners; bitterness toward the north at the loss of property, culture and a way of life or a determination to join the efforts to rebuild a newly re-United States of America. It pitted the Old South against the New South.
In the wake of such a war, the idea that mankind needed to find a better way to settle disputes gained traction. Organizations espousing pacifism sprang into existence. Political, business and religious leaders supported the idea that mankind was not naturally given to self-annihilation, but rather to a fraternity of brotherhood and peaceful coexistence. The Nobel Peace Prize and the League of Nations, precursor of the United Nations, birthed during this time.
Woodrow Wilson, elected president in 1913, came of age in the aftermath of the Civil War. Born to a Presbyterian minister in Virginia, he first served as a professor in Columbia, South Carolina, a city still recovering from being torched during the war. While starting his scholarly and political career as a conservative Democrat, as Governor of New Jersey he changed course and became known for his progressive social agenda. From 1913 to 1917 he refused to get involved with the war building in Europe. He was re-elected to a second term on the slogan, “he kept us out of war.” To many, he seemed to have pacifistic leanings.
But Wilson was secretly reconsidering his antiwar stance. Coming into the presidency he tried to appoint a pacifist to the Secretary of War post. His first choice was former Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, a Quaker, who declined. Lawyer Lindley M. Garrison was next in line; an impatient, individualistic and tactless man, far from the pacifistic idealist Wilson preferred, he once told the Secretary of the Navy, “I am glad if anybody can convince me that I am wrong, but I am damn sure that nobody lives who can do it.” Garrison lasted only two years.
Next Wilson tapped a 44 year-old Cleveland lawyer, Newton Baker, a fellow new southerner from Martinsburg, West Virginia. Shortly after taking office, Baker told the Reserve Officers Association that:
“I am a pacifist. I am a pacifist in my hope; I am a pacifist in my prayers; I am a pacifist in my belief that God made man for better things than that a civilization should always be under the blight of this increasingly deadly destruction which war leaves us.”
By 1917 Wilson concluded that America’s might was needed to squelch the German threat overtaking Europe. Baker quickly shelved his pacifism to do his part in preparing the country for war, a war to “make the world safe for democracy.” The impending war was to be the war to end all wars. Explaining the incongruity of a pacifist in charge of the military, Baker said, “I’m so much a pacifist, I’m willing to fight for it.”
Baker clandestinely went about setting up a nationwide selective service system. Only one newspaper discovered the initiative. When President Wilson announced to the nation that America was declaring war on Germany, the system to feed young men into General John Pershing’s American Expeditionary Forces was already in place, down to the county level.
One of Baker’s biographers surmises that Baker was so much a pacifist that he had little confidence that he could fill General Pershing’s manpower requirements without capturing what he believed to be a glut of young pacifists who would refuse military service. To ensure that his manpower needs were met, he demanded that all pacifists report to military camps. There they would be inducted into the military to serve mostly non-combatant roles, freeing up those willing to bear arms for active duty. As it turned out, he needn’t have worried about America’s young men’s willingness to go war. An able administrator, Baker oversaw the sudden increase of the army from a force of 200,000 to more than 4 million men in just eighteen months.
World War I caught Mennonites off guard. Being at war with Germany made Mennonites, who were still in love with their German culture and language, easy targets for ultra-patriots who saw their duty as pushing Mennonites into the military. Mennonite refusal to participate in any form of military activity was sorely tested when young men were forced to show up at military camps for processing and required to don military uniforms. After assurances from Secretary of War Baker that they would not be required to take up arms, the church, going against centuries of tradition, decided to accommodate the new Selective Service law requiring all draft age men to report to military camps.
Secretary of War Baker conveyed to military camp commanders who were in charge of Mennonite draftees that they should do nothing to violate the consciences of their pacifist charges. It soon became apparent, though, that the purpose of bringing conscientious objectors to the camps was to force them to join the services by whatever means necessary. For many young Mennonites, the act of putting on a military uniform crossed into forbidden territory. Baker made no exceptions. Stories abound of the harassment and mistreatment of Mennonite young men at the hands of other recruits. Two Hutterite men, along with 15 others refusing a uniform, died as a result of such abuse.
By the time Baker discovered he didn’t need pacifists to meet the manpower needs of Pershing’s forces, he was so deeply embroiled in his own pacifist controversies that anything resembling special treatment to pacifists was politically impossible. The North American Review editor George Harvey was especially explicit in his denouncement of a pacifistic Secretary of War. He wrote that the country needed “a butcher, not a baker” and noted that transposing the letters of Baker’s name gave BRAKE, a force he had applied from the beginning in executing the war. Harvey described Baker as “a lamb-like little gentlemen, serene in his certitude of the triumph of morality, (who)sat like a monk in his cell, unvexed by gross passions, ruminating on the Golden Rule” while the world was experiencing “murder, rapine and sudden death, horror piled on horror.” Baker was heavily influenced by public sentiment that saw German pacifists as slackers and cowards. While setting policies accommodating conscientious objectors that went beyond the directives of the Selective Service Act, the policies were never enforced. He was too damaged by his own pacifistic controversies to take effective control of a military system that delighted in forcing pacifists to change their ways.
WWI proved a watershed for religious conscientious objectors. With few options available, many young men entered military service. Many more acquiesced to non-combatant service in military uniform. Those that refused were often given excessive prison sentences that were later commuted by Wilson after the war ended. A few were quietly granted full exemptions by a special task force assembled by the Wilson administration.
Mennonite young men found themselves in the company of Quakers, a few Methodists, Jehovah Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists and a mixture of non-religious objectors all thrown together in a variety of military camps across the nation where harassment tested their historic refusal to accept military duty. This alone was an eye-opening experience to those Mennonites just emerging from the isolation of their rural, insular communities. For the first time, Mennonites in the New World experienced full militarization of society. Historian and author James Juhnke notes that it also forged a new relationship between Mennonites and their adopted country. “Despite harassment and even some persecution,” notes Juhnke, “in the end the war left most of them with both a stronger sense of being separate and a new appreciation for America as a home for nonconformists.”
Tina Siemens
Calvin King
Bob Gerber