The National Council was directed by Frederick Libby, an influential and highly effective Quaker activist, with major support in subsequent years from Dorothy Detzer. The National Council developed into a broad coalition that included not only the major peace groups but a wide range of organizations, from the Veterans of Foreign Wars to the Federal Council of Churches and the National League of Women Voters. The Council campaigned for disarmament throughout the 1920s and later became the National Council for Prevention of War. DeBenedetti described the campaign in support of the Washington disarmament conference as “the finest achievement of positive citizen peace action in the interwar period.” Cecelia Lynch called it a “successful and important beginning for peace groups.” The campaign generated six million letters, telegrams, and petitions and helped to create a climate of political support that facilitated the negotiation of significant arms reduction agreements. The results were a partial victory for the peace movement.
The most important agreement was the Five Power Naval Limitation Treaty, signed in February 1922, in which the major powers took the unprecedented step of voluntarily agreeing to mutual limitations of major armaments. The five major powers agreed to a moratorium on the construction of battleships for ten years and established fixed ceilings on capital ship tonnage, with Britain and the United States in the first rank, Japan in the second, and France and Italy in the third. The United States, Britain, and Japan agreed to scrap more than sixty warships that were already built or under construction.
The Washington conference was followed in 1930 by the London naval disarmament conference. Women’s groups in Britain took the lead in mobilizing public support for the conference. Eighteen organizations, including the WILPF, joined together to form the British Peace Crusade, which claimed to represent more than two million people. The Crusade campaigned vigorously for further arms reduction in delegation meetings with high-level US and British officials. These and other citizen efforts helped to encourage further arms reduction agreements at the London conference. The major powers extended the moratorium on battleship construction until 1936 and established ceilings on other major classes of warships, including cruisers, destroyers, and submarines. Peace groups were generally pleased with the results of the conference, although they worried that the new ceilings allowed an overall net build-up in the number of ships.
The naval disarmament efforts of the interwar years achieved some modest progress in placing partial restrictions on warship production, but they could not be sustained. The rise of fascist aggression led to worsening political tensions and dashed the hope that disarmament efforts could prevent war. Japan announced its withdrawal from the treaties in 1934. The other principals no longer considered themselves bound by the treaty limits, and the era of negotiated naval disarmament came to an end. Although of limited duration and impact, the Washington and London disarmament agreements nonetheless represented a significant advance in international peacemaking. They were the first successful disarmament agreements in modern history. The major powers were able to reach diplomatic accord in restraining one of the principal factors that many felt had caused war. The treaties confirmed the value of multilateral diplomacy and set a precedent for the nuclear disarmament agreements that emerged during the cold war.
The Emergency Peace Campaign
