Resistance to the American Empire

Ted Grimsrud—September 16, 2025

As the US embarked on a quest for world dominance after World War II, leaders’ quest for “full spectrum dominance” did not meet with total support from Americans. Opposition to newly expansive US warism received little media attention, though. It rarely effected policy makers. I knew nothing of the dissenters as a youth in my little corner of the world. For the story I tell in this series of posts, though, we should note the small pockets of dissent—both to indicate that American warism was not unanimous (people did dissent) and to recognize that the peace efforts that did shape my convictions beginning in the mid-1970s had important antecedents. 

Antiwar voices

In the late 1930s, many spoke in opposition to the US joining the War. Congress, which would not support a war declaration proposal from the president, did pass legislation for a draft in 1940, but only narrowly. Large movements of anti-war sentiment arose both from the right (the America First movement of traditional American isolationism) and the left (the popular antiwar movement that had arisen in the early 1930s after disillusionment with World War I). However, this war opposition almost immediately evaporated after the Pearl Harbor attack by the Japanese on December 7, 1941. With the Japanese attack the “America first” conservatives quickly jumped onboard in favor of what was widely perceived to be a war of national defense.

During negotiations in Congress on the draft, representatives from the various peace churches (led by the Quakers) managed to get alternative service for conscientious objectors included. With the popularity of the war and the government’s prowar propaganda, though, only a tiny fraction of draftees took the CO option. Most of the 12,000 draftees who performed alternative service were traditional, somewhat apolitical pacifists. Only a few thousand would have been opposed politically to the war effort. In addition to the legal COs, about 6,000 war opponents went to prison as draft resisters—though the large majority of those were Jehovah’s Witnesses whose refusal to cooperate with the draft had to do with the government refusing them ministerial exemptions, not their political opposition to the war effort.

Out of the tiny handful of COs that we could understand to be anti-empire did come important leadership for the resistance that found expression in years following. Imprisoned COs such as Dave Dellinger and Bayard Rustin developed their ideas about war resistance and nonviolent social change while spending the war years in prison and emerged afterwards as important peace movement leaders. It was also the case that the experience of many of the COs during the War had a significant formative impact. For example, numerous Mennonite COs shaped educational, service, and antiwar efforts among Mennonites and in the wider society in postwar years. Mennonite pacifism tried more to influence the wider world toward peacemaking.

The nonviolent struggle for civil rights

A significant social change movement emerged in part from the antiwar activists—the civil rights movement. The US entry into World War II, justified by ideals such as the Four Freedoms, contained a powerful irony. The stated American ideals for committing to the War existed alongside virulent racism that shaped life throughout the nation and violated those same ideals. The failure of the Civil War back in the mid-1800s to bring genuine freedom to black people had fueled social movements devoted to overcoming American racism, but the movements met with only limited success for many years.

During World War II, blacks drafted into the military were expected to fight, but racism limited opportunities for advancement and led to much discriminatory violence. Blacks risked their lives for the sake of a country that continued to treat them as second-class citizens. In general, returning soldiers found themselves bitterly mistreated when they returned to society.

Out of this discontent, a widespread civil rights movement arose, with the pacifists offering important leadership. The Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist organization, hired two World War II COs, Bayard Rustin and James Farmer, in the early 1940s to help spearhead the emerging movement and founded the Congress for Racial Equality, an important center for nonviolent direct action for racial justice. CORE and other groups emphasized training in nonviolent techniques. In 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, an organized boycott of the bus system led to the end of the segregation policy in the city and demonstrated the potential for nonviolent action. A young Montgomery pastor, Martin Luther King, Jr., led the boycott and became a national spokesperson for the movement. Nonviolence emerged as a central part of his message and the broader message of the civil rights movement. King recruited Methodist pastor James Lawson to lead crucial steps forward in the practice of nonviolent direct action.

Lawson went to Nashville to organize for integration. His campaign meticulously trained dozens of activists for a series of sit-ins intended to integrate downtown Nashville. Their rigorous commitment to nonviolence even in face of arrest and physical attacks led to success. The campaign gained national attention and, because of the self-discipline of the activists, garnered wide support—and made great strides in breaking down segregation in Nashville.

Activists in the American civil rights movement in the decade between Rosa Parks’s 1955 Montgomery action that initiated the bus boycott and passage of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 had a commitment to nonviolence. However, by the time of King’s murder in 1968, the civil rights movement as an expression of transformative nonviolence had lost its momentum. Its agenda remained unfulfilled to a large extent—witness the disparity today in the US in wealth between whites and blacks, witness also the evolution of the American criminal justice system into a powerful means of disenfranchising wide swaths of the African American community. The achievements of the movement remain of utmost importance, however, and resulted from nonviolent activism embodied by an enormously creative and dedicated generation of activists.

Opposition to nuclear weapons

By 1954 uneasiness about the growth of nuclear weaponry began to reach a critical mass that would lead to some significant resistance. The development of the hydrogen bomb—much more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima—intensified the concern. Deeply disturbed by this turn of events, critics of the bomb heightened calls for nuclear disarmament and appealed to ever larger sections of the public. Through the rest of the 1950s, the anti-nuclear movement grew steadily. In many places around the world, antinuclear activists created some of the largest protests their countries had ever seen.

For all the accomplishments the movement did achieve, it certainly fell far short of its aspirations. Activists galvanized support around a simple demand: Ban the Bomb. Decision-making elites in the nuclear-armed nations well understood that to pursue such a straightforward path would require major changes in national security policies. These elites showed a measure of responsiveness to the popular sentiment in favor of disarmament, but also worked strenuously, and by and large successfully, to minimize genuine change. The main success of the peace movement may be seen mostly in the fact that things did not get worse than they did.

Opposing the Vietnam War

As the anti-nuclear weapons movement wound down in the early 1960s, the expansion of the American war effort in Vietnam gradually gained attention. As with the antinuclear movement, the antiwar effort did not succeed in gaining its core goals. Yet, it did accomplish a gargantuan task in the face of an intransigent state committed to expanded militarism: it helped prevent the worst-case scenario from happening.

Organized opposition to the Vietnam War began in the early 1960s with pacifist organizations such as the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Catholic Worker, the War Resisters League, and the American Friends Service Committee. In time, war opposition expanded greatly and, in many ways, departed from its pacifist roots. By the mid-1970s, the American war effort had become untenable, and President Gerald Ford could not overcome Congress’s unwillingness to continue to fund the war. By this point, the antiwar movement had shrunk back mainly to activists linked with the groups who made up the original movement from the early 1960s.

When American military involvement in Vietnam first gained the attention of peace activists, the critique focused on several concerns: the immorality of the American military intervention that used “scorched earth” policies, the likelihood of endangering rather than enhancing regional and global political stability, and that the repressing of dissent against this war would have disastrous consequences for American democracy.

During the Vietnam War years, Friends and Mennonites sent young people, often COs performing alternative service, to Vietnam to engage in relief and development work. Those on-the-ground participants supplied first person witness to the devastating consequences of the war. The draft resistance movement pushed the Selective Service System to a point of collapse, leading the Nixon administration to end the draft in 1972. Even after President Nixon’s resignation in disgrace as a result of his illegal efforts to undercut the antiwar movement, the federal government’s support for the war could have continued indefinitely had not Congress finally pulled the plug on funding—due largely to the impact of the antiwar movement.

And yet, American warism survived this period mostly intact, ready for reinvigoration in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan’s warism. This sustenance of warist dynamics even in the face of such a major failure as Vietnam stands as witness to the transformation wrought by the creation and maintenance of the American national security state. The key element of the story of the opposition to the Vietnam War indeed may not be the movement’s ineffectiveness nearly so much as the intransigence of the American federal government.

The view from Elkton, Oregon

I began high school in the fall of 1968. Compared to my peers in our rural community, I paid attention to the wider world. However, my knowledge came mostly from watching network news, reading local newspapers, and news magazines. My awareness of antinuclear activism, and the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements was shallow and mostly negative. I felt uneasy about the dangers of nuclear weapons, the legacy of racism, and the destruction in Vietnam. But I uncritically accepted American mythologies. It would take a lot more than my superficial 1968 awareness to cause me to question my embedded theology of uncritical nationalism. My process of questioning would not begin until I left my home for college in 1972.

Even though I knew several people who had been stationed as soldiers in Vietnam (including my brother-in-law), I had heard few first-hand stories and had little sense of what the experience of fighting had been like. I had no contact with anyone who opposed the war. Even though I faced the genuine possibility of being drafted and sent to the war myself, I remained in a state of contented ignorance. I would say now that my embedded theology and its highly optimistic view of the US lulled me into complacency. I believed our country always did the right thing. I would without question accept it as an opportunity for honorable service should I be asked to join the military. That was all I needed to know. In the years to come, my sensibility would change, but it took some time (and, so to speak, a dodged bullet when the draft ended).

[This is the fifth of a long series of blog posts, “A Christian pacifist in the American Empire” (this link takes you to the series homepage). The fourth post in the series, “American warism,” may be found by clicking on this link. The sixth post, “Fundamentalism and warism,” may be found by clicking on this link.]