How anti-war protest movements have made the U.S. stronger

Protesting war isn't some Vietnam-era relic, like love beads or Country Joe McDonald, but an American democratic tradition.

When President William McKinley opted to annex the Philippines—he wanted, he said, "to educate the Filipinos and uplift and Christianize them"—a motley array of critics from Andrew Carnegie to Mark Twain objected. William Jennings Bryan used his dissenting stance as the centerpiece of his (losing) 1900 presidential campaign.

During World War I, critics excoriated Woodrow Wilson—who had run for re-election in 1916 on the slogan "He kept us out of war"—for entangling America in a bloody European conflict.

In fact, the only major war that lacked an organized bloc of dissenters was World War II: Pearl Harbor had made an isolationist stance untenable. On the right, congressional Republicans launched an investigation of Pearl Harbor, with some implying that Franklin Roosevelt had foreknowledge of the attack.

Far from showing their patriotism, critics who muzzle themselves in wartime are abdicating a democratic responsibility.


Slate also quotes some of the funny and ridiculous arguments when The Supreme Court Tries Sodomy… and discovers that Texas is confused about it too.