Peace Leaders

...With tears streaming down his face, Debs turned and stretched out his arms to the tumultuous prisoners...

...Obviously choices had to be made, and DeBenedetti's are not bad ones...

...When Debs left prison, we learn that "an emotional rumbling burst from the assembled inmates" and "a great roar of love and pain shook the prison...

...We learn also that Debs fell in love with a "strong, intelligent, good-natured suffragist," Mabel Curry, though both were married, and that they maintained a long (we aren't told how intimate) relationship...

...The collection provides an intriguing variety of "peace heroes," each described by a different—and in each case knowledgeable-writer...

...In his introduction, DeBenedetti provides historical background...

...Muste, Norman Cousins, Martin Luther King Jr., and Daniel and Philip Ber-rigan—only one is a woman and only one is black...

...Muste...

...Editor Charles DeBenedetti, a historian at the University of Toledo, has performed a noble service in pulling together in a readable volume, Peace Heroes in Twentieth-Century America, biographical sketches of Americans who have helped shape the peace and social-justice movements of this century...

...Ad-dams and Muste, and later King, sought peace more through organizational pressures and mass actions...

...In fact, heroes seemed to be less needed now that science had given human hands and minds the power to shape events and, in some eyes, destiny itself...

...This country desperately needs peace heroes, especially now that the Rambo mentality is rampant among movie makers and their imitators in the White House...

...The three great issues confronting citizen peacemakers, he says, were identified by Addams and Thomas as "the phenomenon of modern total war waged by science, industry, and mass-mobilized societies...

...Thus, serious peacemakers were inevitably confronted not only with the political problems of peace negotiations and BOOKS mediating systems, but with the necessity for change in economic and social structures...

...Those whose opposition to all war was less equivocal are the ones who were imprisoned...

...Yet when small personal glimpses are given, the "heroes" suddenly become much more human...

...In a comprehensive afterword, "Peace Leaders and the American Heroic Tradition," historian Merle Curti strengthens, without duplicating, the broad historical framework provided at the beginning by DeBenedetti...

...Such a notion was expressed by the poet Bertolt Brecht when he wrote: 'God help the society with no heroes, and God help the society that needs them.'" In this context, those who defy the existing structures and thought patterns— from Einstein's energy formula that enabled others to smash atoms to the Berrigans' smashing of nuclear missiles—have become the heroes to some, though anathema to those who support the status quo...

...Lawrence Wittner, for example, who writes here about Debs, wrote Rebels Without War, Jo Ann Robinson, who writes about Muste, is the author of Abraham Went Out: A Biography of A.J...

...the rise of revolutionary socialism in the developed world and anti-imperialist revolutionary wars of national self-determination in the colonial world, and the strength of an international right-wing element composed of corporate industrialists, landed oligarchs, conservative politicians, and military forces that favored war as a means of social stability and national unity...

...While Rambo gets a homecoming war hero's accolades in the screening room of the White House, little groups of unknown and unsung peace heroes continue to defy the military-industrial oligarchy, and to be imprisoned for their actions...

...Important women in the lives of some of these men—such as Coretta King, Liz McAlister—are mentioned sympathetically in passing, but neither their relationships nor their own lives are dealt with...

...Again, choices had to be made, and it is appropriate that the focus is on their activities in relation to peace and social justice...

...The question is, will the book be read, and by whom...

...But the political foibles and inconsistencies in the lives of the male "heroes"are not glossed over, and we are led to understand, without necessarily agreeing with, Einstein's acceptance of World War II, which he saw as a "necessary evil," Thomas's "critical support" of it once it had started, or Cousins's support of the Korean war, which he saw as an international action possibly leading to the kind of transnational law he envisioned...

...Of the nine "peace heroes" DeBenedetti selected—Jane Addams, Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas, Albert Einstein, A.J...

...This is a book teachers and parents ought to buy and forbid adolescents to read, so that future "peace heroes" will be sure to do so...

...Assessing modern industrial America, Curti notes that "even the most startling innovations in science and technology failed to create long-term heroes...

...Of the chosen "heroes," only Debs and Thomas addressed their lives specifically to political activity, although basic structural change was certainly implied in the words and actions of all the others...

...While all these miniature biographies give concise and comprehensive views of the subjects' public lives, almost nothing of their private lives is even suggested...

...This observation is not meant to disparage the editor, but rather to underline a fact we all know: that white males still have greater opportunities than women or blacks for recognized leadership in the peace and progressive movements as well as in the areas of business and mainstream politics...

...Einstein's and Cousins's focus was more particularly on an international structure that could provide "world order" to prevent war—somewhat at the opposite pole from the nonviolent direct actions of the seemingly anarchist/individualist Berrigans against the very instruments of war...

...Ann Morrissett Davidon (Ann Morrissett Davidon is a free-lance writer and peace activist...