[In the following essay, Dewey comments on the timely reissue of Peace and Bread at the end of World War II.]

The present republication of Peace and Bread is peculiarly timely. Some of the external reasons for this timeliness are evident without need of prolonged analysis. The book is a record, searching and vivid, of human aspects of the First World War. It gives a picture of the development of American sentiment from 1914 to 1922, the year of its publication. It is a forceful reminder of things that would be unforgettable, did we not live on the surface of the current of the day's events. The book takes us through the period when the war seemed remote and unreal, and the American public reacted with incredulity and exasperation; through the phase of gradual hardening into sullen acceptance of war as a fact; to the time when, after a delay of two and a half years, we responded to the declaration of war with enthusiastic participation in which the earlier all but universal pacifism was treated as cowardly retreat or as actively treasonable; and then through the post-war years of disillusionment and reaction.

These facts the older ones among us have largely forgotten and the younger ones never knew. The picture the book gives would be of great present value if it merely gave the instruction and communicated the warning provided by the traits common to the First World War and to the present war which now afflicts the world on an even greater scale. But the instruction and the warning are increased rather than diminished, when we include in the reckoning certain matters which make the American attitude and response during the present war very different from that of thirty years ago, and that of the eight or ten years immediately following. A brief statement of some of these differences will, I think, disclose the nature of the increased timeliness.

Conditions at home as well as abroad produced a reaction to the outbreak of the European war in 1939 very different from that which greeted the events of 1914. Even only eight years after that date Miss Addams could write, "It is impossible now to reproduce that basic sense of desolation, of suicide, of anachronism, which the first news of war brought to thousands of men and women who had come to consider war as a throwback in the scientific sense." And she could also write, "It is very difficult after five years of war to recall the attitude of most normal people during those first years"—years when the reaction against war "was almost instantaneous throughout the country." What was difficult then is practically impossible now. Instead, we have an accentuation of that later development when, as Miss Addams wrote, "We have perforce become accustomed to a world of widespread war with its inevitable consequences of divisions and animosities."

It is characteristic of the change that, while some thirty years ago the idea of a war to end wars could be taken seriously, we now indulge only in the modest hope of being able to establish a peace that will last a generation or two. Even more significant is the change in the attitude of those who opposed our taking part in the two wars. In the case of the first war, it was the sense of the stupidity and immorality of war as war that animated the opposition. In the case of the present war, vocal opposition came most conspicuously from the nationalistic isolationism that wanted to keep us out of the devastation of war, while those who favored participation were those who, for the most part, took the ground of moral obligation.

There is, I believe, nothing paradoxical in saying that such differences as these, great as they are, increase, instead of lessen, the instruction and the warning, the timeliness, of the book written almost a quarter of a century ago. The warning is against adoption and use of methods which are so traditional that we are only too likely to adopt them:—methods which are called "terms of peace," but which in fact are but terms of a precarious interim between wars. The instruction concerns the need for adoption of methods which break with political tradition and which courageously adventure in lines that are new in diplomacy and in the political relations of governments, and which are consonant with the vast social changes going on everywhere else.

The term "pacifist" has unfortunately assumed a more restricted meaning during recent years. It used to apply to all persons who hoped and worked for a world free from the curse of war. It has now come to stand almost exclusively for those who are opposed to war under any and all conditions. On the other hand, the significance of the phrase "Peace Movement" has deepened. It used to stand for something which upon the whole was negative, for an attitude that made it easy to identify pacifism with passivism. A large measure of credit for producing this latter change must go to Jane Addams. In her book The Newer Ideals of Peace, published some years before the outbreak of World War One, she set forth aims and methods that are so intimately connected with Peace and Bread that the two books form a whole. The aims and methods set forth in both are of a kind that more than justify her in referring to them as "vital and dynamic."

Their nature may be gathered from the vigor with which she repudiated accusations that were freely and ungenerously brought against her and her fellow-workers. Speaking of the state of affairs before the war, she writes, "The world was bent on change, for it knew that the real denial and surrender of life is not physical death but acquiescence in hampered conditions and unsolved problems.… We pacifists, so far from passively wishing nothing to be done, contended on the contrary that this world crisis should be utilized for the creation of an international government able to make the necessary political and economic changes which were due; … it was unspeakably stupid that the nations should fail to create an international government through which each one, without danger to itself, might recognize and even encourage the impulses toward growth in other nations." And again she writes, "We were constantly accused of wishing to isolate the United States and to keep our country out of world politics. We were of course urging a policy exactly the reverse, that this country should lead the nations of the world into a wider life of coördinated political activity."

Miss Addams repeatedly calls attention to the fact that all social movements outside of traditional diplomacy and "international law" were drawing the peoples of different countries together in ever closer bonds, while war, under present conditions, was affecting civilian populations as it had never done before. Both of these factors have immensely increased since she wrote. The futility of dependence upon old methods, which is referred to in the passage just quoted, has correspondingly increased. Many persons, among whom the present writer enrolls himself, who are not pacifists in the absolute sense in which Miss Addams was one, believe that she has clearly indicated the directions which all peace efforts must take if they are not to be doomed in advance to futility.

Miss Addams remarks in the present book that "Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself." When one considers the intimately human quality of her writings it sounds pedantic to say that this sentence conveys a philosophy, one which underlies what she has to say about war and the conditions of enduring peace. But the human quality of her position and proposals in this case is a philosophy that gives the key to understanding her. Her dynamic and vital contribution to the Peace Movement is her insistence upon the necessity of international organization. Today the idea is a commonplace. The Wilsonian League of Nations at least accomplished that much. We are assured from all quarters that the War is being fought in order to achieve an organization of nations that will maintain peace. But when we ask about the process that is depended upon, we find the word "organization" covers very different things.

The process that looms largest in current discussions is "political" action, by which we usually mean governmental and legal action, together with coercive economic measures. Miss Addams does employ the word "political." But the context invariably shows that she uses it in a wide human sense. And while this usage of hers confers upon the word a moral, and in so far an idealistic, significance, her attitude is in fact much more realistic than is the attitude that puts its trust in "organization" of the traditional political type. For one can say, with as much justice as is consonant with brevity, that to trust to traditional political "organization" to create peaceful relations between nations involves reliance upon just that exaggerated nationalistic and power politics that has brought the world to its present pass.

In contrast, the process of organization upon which Miss Addams would have us depend is one which cuts across nationalistic lines. Moreover, instead of setting up a super-state, it also cuts under those lines. Its nature is indicated in a passage which follows the one already quoted, in which Miss Addams expressed the desire that the United States take the lead in guiding the world "into a wider life of coördinated political activity." What fits the United States, she holds, for assuming this leadership is precisely the fact that democratic development in this country has in fact increasingly cut under and cut across barriers of race and class. In nothing is Miss Addams' book more timely than in its sense of the positive values contributed by our immigrant populations. The pattern of American life, composed of multiple and diversified peoples, hostile in the countries from which they came but living in reasonable amity here, can and should be used to provide the pattern of international organization. One of the ironies of the present situation is that a war caused in large measure by deliberate Nazi provocation of racial and class animosity has had the effect in this country of stimulating the growth of racial fear and dislike, instead of leading to intelligent repudiation of Nazi doctrines of hate. The heart of the democratic movement, as Miss Addams saw and felt it, is "to replace coercion by the full consent of the governed, to educate and strengthen the free will of the people through the use of democratic institutions" in which "the cosmopolitan inhabitants of this great nation might at last become united in a vast common endeavor for social ends." Since the United States had demonstrated on a fairly large scale the practicability of this method, Miss Addams put her faith in extension of the democratic process to the still wider world of peoples. Its exact opposite she found in the use of "opposition to a common enemy, which is an old method of welding peoples together," a method "better fitted to military than to social use, adapted to a government resulting from coercion rather than one founded by free men."

There are today, as I have said, many persons not pacifists in the present technical sense who believe that Miss Addams' book is timely because it points directly to the source of the failure of the hopes so ardently entertained a generation ago. Men then thought they could attain peace through an international organization of the traditional political kind, which relies more upon coercive force than upon constructive meeting of human needs. When I try to formulate what Miss Addams said informally yet clearly, I come out with a sense of the difference between two methods and attitudes. On the one hand, we can trust to an international political organization of an over-all type to create the organs it requires. On the other, we can rely upon organs that have been formed to take care of human needs (including the need for change) to develop in the course of their own use an organization which can be depended upon, because it has become ingrained in practice. If history has proved anything, it is, I believe, that only the latter kind of organization is so "vital and dynamic" as to endure, while the former kind is likely to yield a mechanical structure of forces so uncertainly "balanced" as to be sure to collapse when old stresses and strains recur in new shapes. It has become customary to give the name "realistic" to the kind of organization that is based upon opposition to an enemy and that relies upon armed force to maintain itself. In contrast, the road indicated by Miss Addams is, I submit, infinitely more "realistic."

There are chapters in Peace and Bread, notably the fourth and the tenth, which supply material that makes concrete and definite the difference between processes or organizations of the traditional political-legal type, with their emphasis upon force—already war in posse—and the human and socially humane processes to which Miss Addams appealed for help. The formation of the UNRRA, even while war is still going on, is, as far as it goes, a recognition of the "Food Challenge" for world organization. The energy with which we use and extend this kind of process as the working model for other endeavors at international organization will decide the success or failure of efforts to achieve lasting peace. This is no mere prediction, but is based on the solid experience of the past.

The importance attached by Miss Addams to need for food points to a trait which animates almost every page of Peace and Bread, for the association of the two words in the title is fundamental. The need for bread is a symbol of the importance attached by Miss Addams to natural impulse and primitive affection. Her faith in them was the source of her interest in "social settlements"; it was nourished by the experiences that centered in Hull House. All who knew Miss Addams also know of her insistence that sharing in the activities which issued from it was not a matter of doing good to others as beneficiaries; those who took part had more to receive than to give. Miss Addams had a deep feeling that the simple, the "humble" peoples of the earth are those in whom primitive impulses of friendly affection are the least spoiled, the most spontaneous. Her faith in democracy was indissolubly associated with this belief. It permeates what she wrote because it was a part of the life she lived from day to day. Her own life was an active anticipation of what a recent writer has put into words: "Society will develop by living it, not by policing it." Miss Addams did not put her trust in the "Carlyle contention that the peoples must be led into the ways of righteousness by the experience, acumen, and virtues of the great man." Her faith was at the opposite pole. Leaders, whether political or intellectual, were to her trustees for the interests of the common people. Theirs was the duty and the task of giving articulate and effective form to the common impulses she summed up in the word "Fellowship." Were Jane Addams with us today her voice and pen would tell us how the events of the years which have intervened between two World Wars have intensified the evils which will surely follow if leaders betray the trust committed to them—events which have deepened the need for those humane processes and organs which alone can bring hope of enduring peace to a tragically torn and bleeding world.