War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861-1914
by Cynthia Wachtell
Don’t buy my book. It is only about dead writers and dead wars. It offers no revelations of state secrets or saucy details about the sex lives of Hollywood starlets.
War No More will not make you richer or healthier. It will not help you get rid of those puffy bags under your eyes. It will not burn the cellulite off your thighs. It most definitely will not cure erectile dysfunction.
Don’t buy it unless, that is, you are interested in contemplating the morality of war, while in the company of some of America’s most revered—yet unrecognized—antiwar writers.
War No More uncovers the antiwar works of Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman, among others. More broadly, it illuminates the beginnings of a truly distinctive American voice of opposition to war.
Americans, as War No More reveals, have long grappled with the moral issues of war. And in the antiwar and anti-imperialist writings from the Civil War to the eve of World War I, we can recognize many parallels to modern protests against America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and also against such new innovations as predator drones).
Beginning with three very different renderings of the chaotic Battle of Chickamauga—a diary entry by a northern infantry officer, a poem romanticizing war by a young southerner, and a horrific story penned by the veteran Ambrose Bierce—the first half of War No More traces the gradual shift in the late nineteenth century away from highly idealized depictions of the Civil War.
In its second half, War No More links America's war literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with Americans' struggle to come to terms not only with imperialism (the Spanish-American War in Cuba and the Philippine-American War) but also with the modernization of battle.
The late nineteenth century witnessed rapid innovations in warfare. And as early as 1862, Henry Adams had predicted, “Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world.” The advent of rapid fire machine guns, dynamite torpedoes, and other of what Theodore Roosevelt called “formidable engines of destruction” convinced many observers that battle was becoming ever more anonymous, mechanized, and deadly. Ironically, antiwar literature and pacifism were never more popular in America than on the eve of World War I.
The book concludes by tracing the development of antiwar literature from World War I to the present, thus offering the first comprehensive overview of one hundred and fifty years of American antiwar writing.
So how did War No More come about?
It was mid-way through a steamy summer in Washington DC, and I was happy to be in a cool room at the Library of Congress doing research for my planned book on American antiwar writing. The pages from Whitman’s journal from late 1862 lay open in front of me, and I loved the fact that I was looking at Whitman’s own handwriting. I felt I was witnessing, in some sense, Whitman’s shocked reaction to the reality of war.
I knew that Whitman had rushed to Virginia from his home in Brooklyn, New York as soon as word arrived that his brother George had been wounded in the Battle of Fredericksburg. Luckily, Whitman found his brother still alive, recovering smoothly from a gash in the cheek. But the intense suffering Whitman witnessed in the field hospitals and the lurid sights that he encountered profoundly shocked him. He saw “a heap of feet, legs, arms, and human fragments, cut, bloody, black and blue, swelled and sickening” under a tree in front of an improvised hospital. He saw discolored and bloated corpses of soldiers left, as yet, unburied.
So, there the words were on the page of Whitman’s private journal— “O the hideous horrid hell of war”—appearing near the end of the draft of a poem he had titled “A Battle.” Those were the words that Whitman first wrote, but I saw he had made a change. He had drawn a line through “horrid,” a thick line that looked more determined and darker than anything else on the page. And above it Whitman had written a new word. That word was “damned.”
“War is hell,” General Sherman is famous for proclaiming to Civil War veterans. But Walt Whitman acknowledged it first. At least he acknowledged it in the privacy of his Civil War diary. “O the hideous damned hell of war.”
Originally, I set out to study all of American antiwar literature. I looked at works ranging from early Quaker texts from the seventeenth century to poetry and memoirs of the Gulf Wars. But the more I read, the more I became fascinated with the period stretching from the start of the Civil War to the start of World War I.
During the Civil War years and the decades that immediately followed, the war was written about in a highly conventionalized and sentimentalized way. Men fearlessly breasted battle’s waves. They died as heroes on the battlefield. They were promptly buried in tidy graves. That, at least, is how things were presented on the pages of popular literature.
There was little tolerance for writers who challenged this highly romantic and sanitized way of writing about war. Yet within their private and public writings, certain authors did dare to question the morality of war and to record their horror and dissent.
Walt Whitman is only one of America’s famous authors from the period who expressed their abhorrence to war. For example, Nathaniel Hawthorne observed, “Set men face to face, with weapons in their hands, and they are as ready to slaughter one another now … as in the rudest ages.” And Herman Melville darkly commented, “The whole matter of war … smites common sense and Christianity in the face.”
These writers, among others, wrestled with the issue of war and morality during a period in which combat itself was becoming ever more mechanized, modernized, and deadly. As the nineteenth century wore on and the implications of modern warfare became increasingly evident, antiwar writing gained in popularity. Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Ambrose Bierce wrote their share of unsettling antiwar works. Twain, for instance, equated war with murder and boldly observed, “All war must be … the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity.” America’s turn-of-the-century wars in Cuba and the Philippines invited even more dissent.
War No More presents a hidden history of patriotic pacifism. It uncovers a strong antiwar tradition that existed long before Hemingway and others denounced the horrors of World War I.
War No More reintroduces us to some of our nation’s most famous authors and forcefully challenges our understanding of what it means to be a “great” American war writer.
But don’t buy it. Save your money for something else.
Cynthia Wachtell is the director of the S. Daniel Abraham Honors Program and an assistant professor of English at Yeshiva University. War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861-1914 is her first book.