ABSTRACT
At the same time she was writing for the family magazine, fighting racism, and campaigning for women's suffrage, Belle La Follette took up a new cause, ultimately becoming one of the most recognized leaders in the crusade for world peace. Her ability to articulate that movement's values and aims made her particularly effective in inspiring people to think critically about war, its causes, its futility, and its prevention. She became a pacifist in her late twenties after reading Die Waffen Nieder (Lay down Your Arms) by Austrian peace activist Baroness Bertha von Suttner. Many shared La Follette's conversion experience. Von Suttner's best-selling antiwar novel was later translated into sixteen languages and became the basis for two motion pictures, the Danish production Lay down Your Arms (1914) and West Germany's No Greater Love/The Alfred Nobel Story (1952). La Follette's claim that the novel and its author “exercised a world-wide influence in creating sentiment and action for universal world peace” was reflected in von Suttner becoming in 1905 the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1912 von Suttner spoke in Washington, D.C., at the same women's Congressional Club that often frustrated La Follette because the members so assiduously avoided potentially controversial topics, such as suffrage. She noted with delight that von Suttner simply assumed that they were all suffragists “because of the larger influence women would wield for humanity if they had the direct power of the ballot.” Based on the damage currently being inflicted in the Balkan war by new technology, especially the machine gun, von Suttner placed her earlier work on peace within the context of current warfare, proclaiming, “Modern invention has removed the last vestige of the sentiment of war. Personal courage, heroic deeds, play no part in it. Today war is but the slaughtering place of human beings.” The good news, according to von Suttner, was that war was not inevitable. Women, like men, were not powerless against it. In her hour-long talk von Suttner defined peace not as an unrealistic ideal but as a “great public question that must be studied and worked out as a practical international problem.” La Follette was profoundly persuaded by von Suttner's assertion that “we must strengthen and develop existing organizations, such as the Inter-parliamentary Union, the Hague Tribunal, etc., and create an international parliamentary political system that will give a legal basis to Universal Peace.” In the years to come, La Follette widely promoted this view of war's futility—which came to be known as the “outlawry of war” movement—and the practical possibilities of world peace through binding arbitration. Her impassioned advocacy would bring a rain of denunciation, including questions of her patriotism, pushing her ever closer to the brink of physical and emotional collapse. She steadfastly refused to modify or soft-pedal her beliefs, even when they came in conflict with those of members of her beloved family. 1
