[The crusade against civil liberties during World War I.]
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WAR FEVER  
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Eric Foner
February 7, 2023
The Nation
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_ The crusade against civil liberties during World War I. _

Eugene Debs at the US Penitentiary in Atlanta. , Courtesy of the
National Archives

 

With the exception of the Second World War, every military conflict in
which the United States has taken part has generated an anti-war
movement. During the American Revolution, numerous Loyalists preferred
British rule to a war for independence. New Englanders opposed the War
of 1812; most Whigs denounced the Mexican-American War launched by the
Democratic president James K. Polk; and both the Union and the
Confederacy were internally divided during the Civil War. More
recently, the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan split the
country. At the same time, wars often create an atmosphere of
hyper-patriotism, leading to the equation of dissent with treason and
to the severe treatment of critics. During the struggle for
independence, many Loyalists were driven into exile. Both sides in the
Civil War arrested critics and suppressed anti-war newspapers. But by
far the most extreme wartime violations of civil liberties (with the
major exception of Japanese American internment during the Second
World War) took place during World War I. This is the subject of Adam
Hochschild’s latest book, American Midnight.

AMERICAN MIDNIGHT: THE GREAT WAR, A VIOLENT PEACE, AND DEMOCRACY’S
FORGOTTEN CRISIS 

By Adam Hochschild 

Buy this book [[link removed]]

Adam Hochschild is one of the few historians whose works regularly
appear on best-seller lists, a tribute to his lucid writing style,
careful research, and unusual choice of subject matter. Most
historians who reach an audience outside the academy focus on
inspirational figures like the founding fathers or formidable
achievements such as the building of the transcontinental railroad.
Hochschild, on the other hand, writes about villains and rebels. His
best-known book, _King Leopold’s Ghost_, is an account of the
Belgian monarch’s violent exploitation of the Congo, one of the
worst crimes against humanity in a continent that has suffered far too
many of them. When Hochschild writes about more admirable figures, his
heroes are activists and reformers: British antislavery campaigners
in _Bury the Chains_, the birth control advocate and socialist Rose
Pastor Stokes in _Rebel Cinderella_, the Americans who fought in the
Spanish Civil War in _Spain in Our Hearts_.

_American Midnight_ does not lack for heroic figures. But as
Hochschild notes at the outset, the book presents a tale of “mass
imprisonments, torture, vigilante violence, censorship, killings of
Black Americans.” It will certainly not enhance the reputation of
President Woodrow Wilson or that of early 20th-century liberalism more
broadly, nor will it reinforce the widely held idea that Americans
possess an exceptional devotion to liberty.

Hochschild relates how, when the United States joined the conflict
against Germany and its allies in 1917, “war fever swept the
land.” Some examples of the widespread paranoia seem absurd:
Hamburgers became “liberty sandwiches,” frankfurters “hot
dogs.” (The latter name stuck, unlike the rechristening of french
fries as “freedom fries” in 2003, after France refused to support
the Iraq War.) The German Hospital and Dispensary in New York City
changed its name to Lenox Hill Hospital (even though no hill is to be
found nearby). In New Haven, Conn., volunteers manned an anti-aircraft
gun around the clock, oblivious to the fact that Germany had no
aircraft capable of reaching the United States. Neighbors accused Karl
Muck, the German-born conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, of
radioing military information to submarines from his vacation home on
the coast of Maine. Anecdotes like these have long enlivened history
classrooms. But Hochschild also details the brutal treatment of
conscientious objectors subjected to various forms of torture in
military prison camps, including the infamous “water cure” the
Army had employed in the Philippines, nowadays known as waterboarding.

In 1917 and 1918, Wilson and Congress codified this patriotic fervor
in the Espionage and Sedition Acts. These laws had nothing to do with
espionage as the term is commonly understood (and Hochschild points
out that hardly any German spies were actually apprehended). The
former criminalized almost any utterance that might interfere with the
war effort; the latter outlawed saying or printing anything that cast
“disrepute” on the country’s “form of government.” States
supplemented these measures with their own laws and decrees, including
banning speaking on the telephone in German or advocating “a change
in industrial ownership.” It is difficult to say how many people
were arrested under these statutes, but the number certainly reached
into the thousands.

Meanwhile, private organizations such as the Knights of Liberty and
the American Protection League took the law into their own hands. The
APL investigated the “disloyal” by, among other methods,
purloining documents, and it swept up thousands of Americans in
“slacker raids,” in which men were accosted on the streets, in
hotels, and in railway stations and were required to produce draft
cards. If a person did not have one, he would be dragged off to
prison. Throughout the country, individuals who refused to buy war
bonds were tarred and feathered and paraded through their communities.
German Americans everywhere came under suspicion for disloyalty, as
did members of other immigrant groups. In the years before the war,
Southern and Eastern Europeans had immigrated to the United States in
unprecedented numbers, sometimes bringing political radicalism with
them, and they too found themselves in the crosshairs of nativism.

The atmosphere of intolerance opened the door to settling scores that
predated the war. Long anxious to rid the nation of the Industrial
Workers of the World, business leaders and local and national
officials seized on the organization’s outspoken opposition to the
war to crush it. All sorts of atrocities were committed against IWW
members, from Frank Little, an organizer who was lynched in Montana,
to the more than 1,000 striking copper miners in Bisbee, Ariz., who
were rounded up by police and a small private army hired by the Phelps
Dodge company, then driven into the desert and left to fend for
themselves. Local police routinely raided the IWW’s offices without
a warrant. In 1918, over 100 “Wobblies” were indicted for
conspiracy to violate the Espionage and Sedition Acts, resulting in
the largest civilian criminal trial in American history. Every
defendant was found guilty and received a jail sentence.

Hochschild brings this history to life by introducing the reader to a
diverse cast of characters, some well-known, many unfamiliar even to
scholars. His protagonists include Ralph Van Deman, who oversaw the
surveillance of Americans deemed unpatriotic. Having honed his skills
in the Philippines by keeping track of opponents of American
annexation, Van Deman became head of the newly created Army
Intelligence branch—the first time, according to Hochschild, that
the US Army spied on American civilians. One of Van Deman’s men was
among the first to tap Americans’ telephones. The surveillance
reports in government archives also allowed Hochschild to follow the
exploits of Louis Walsh, a militant labor activist in Pittsburgh who
was actually Leo Wendell, a paid government agent who sent a
“blizzard” of paperwork to the Bureau of Investigation, the
FBI’s forerunner. Wendell boasted of joining “prominent Reds” in
stirring up violence, providing a justification for further
repression.

The Espionage Act empowered the Post Office to exclude from the mail
publications that undermined the war effort. Postmaster General Albert
S. Burleson interpreted this as an authorization to go after any
published expression of dissent. In the first year of American
participation in the war, Burleson banned 44 periodicals. He also
suppressed individual issues of other publications, including the one
you are reading now. Issues of _The_ _Gaelic American_, a supporter
of Irish independence, were barred for fear of offending our British
ally. Burleson particularly targeted the Socialist Party press, which
consisted of numerous small local newspapers—a powerful blow against
the party’s efforts to communicate with its membership. His first
target, though, was a small Texas newspaper, _The Rebel_, whose
offense had less to do with the war than with having published an
exposé of how Burleson had replaced Mexican and white tenant farmers
with convict laborers on a cotton plantation his wife had inherited.
And his crusade against unorthodox opinion continued after the
armistice: Even as the Paris Peace Conference deliberated in 1919, the
New York_ World_ commented, Burleson acted as if “the war is
either just beginning or is still going on.”

To ensure that Americans received the right kind of news, not the
“false statements” criminalized by the Espionage Act, the federal
government launched a massive wartime propaganda campaign, spearheaded
by the newly created Committee on Public Information. Headed by the
journalist George Creel, the CPI flooded the country with
publications, films, and posters. It mobilized journalists, academics,
and artists to produce pro-war works, as well as some 75,000 “Four
Minute Men” trained to deliver brief speeches at venues including
churches, movie theaters, and county fairs. In previous wars, such
propaganda had been disseminated by nongovernmental organizations. But
Wilson decided that patriotism was too important to be left to the
private sector. Much of Creel’s output whipped up hatred of the
Germans as barbaric “Huns.” But he also put forth a vision of the
country’s future strongly influenced by the era’s Progressive
movement, a postwar world in which democracy would be extended into
the workplace and the vast gap between rich and poor ameliorated. This
wartime rhetoric was one contributor to an upsurge of radicalism after
the conflict ended, when it became apparent that no such changes were
in the offing. Creel’s success at shaping wartime public opinion,
Hochschild remarks, launched the symbiotic relationship between
advertising and politics so visible today. It alarmed observers like
the political commentator Walter Lippmann, who in a series of writings
in the 1920s lamented that while democracy required an
independent-minded citizenry, the war experience demonstrated that
public opinion could be shaped and manipulated by the authorities.

Then there was Wilson’s attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer.
Obsessed with deporting radical immigrants, the “fighting Quaker,”
as the press called him, launched what came to be known as the Palmer
Raids, which lasted from November 1919 into the following year. By
this point, the First World War was over, but not the Wilson
administration’s war on the American left. Thousands of
people—critics of the war and suspected socialists and
anarchists—were arrested, mostly without a warrant. Many who had
recently immigrated and not become citizens were deported. The Palmer
Raids dealt a serious blow to the left, and they were followed by one
of the most conservative decades in US history.

A_merican Midnight_ does introduce the reader to more praiseworthy
figures. Hochschild devotes considerable attention to the great
anarchist and feminist orator Emma Goldman, who spent much of the war
in prison for conspiracy to interfere with the draft and was deported
a year after the arrival of peace as an undesirable alien. In contrast
to Burleson, Palmer, and the enigmatic Wilson, whom Hochschild
describes as simultaneously an “inspirational idealist” and a
“nativist autocrat,” a few government officials remained committed
to constitutional principles. If the book has a hero, it is Louis F.
Post, the assistant secretary of labor, who ran the Labor Department
in the spring of 1920 when his boss was away because of family
illness. Post’s career embodied much of the 19th-century radical
tradition: His forebears were abolitionists, and he himself
participated in Reconstruction in the South. Post was an ardent
follower of Henry George, the popular late 19th-century economist who
proposed a “single tax” on land to combat economic inequality. For
a time, Post edited a magazine that opposed America’s war in the
Philippines, denounced the power of big business, and called for
unrestricted immigration. He directed the Labor Department for only
six months, but in that time he invalidated thousands of deportation
orders that lacked the proper paperwork and released numerous
immigrants being held, ironically, at Ellis Island awaiting expulsion
from the United States. He also refused to be intimidated when a
congressional committee held hearings about his actions.

One individual who doesn’t quite get the attention he deserves is
Eugene V. Debs, the most prominent leader of the Socialist Party,
which on the eve of the war was a major presence in parts of the
United States, with 150,000 dues-paying members and a thriving local
press. The party controlled the local government in many working-class
communities, sent elected members to Congress, and won almost 1
million votes for Debs in the presidential election of 1912. Compared
with the colorful IWW, with its _Little Red Songbook_ and its
rallying cry of “One Big Union,” the Socialists seem boringly
respectable, which perhaps accounts for their relative neglect here.
But they arguably had a greater impact on American life. The Socialist
Party was the largest organization to oppose America’s entry into
the war.

 

Debs was arrested in 1918 after delivering a speech in Canton, Ohio,
critical of the draft. He received a sentence of 10 years in prison
for violating the Espionage Act. Before his sentencing, he delivered a
brief speech to the jury that remains a classic vindication of freedom
of expression. “I look upon the Espionage Law as a despotic
enactment in flagrant conflict with democratic principles and with the
spirit of free institutions,” Debs declared. He traced the right to
criticize the government from Thomas Paine to the abolitionists and
women’s suffrage leaders. While Wilson and his administration
proclaimed themselves the creators of a new, liberal world order, Debs
asked, “Isn’t it strange that we Socialists stand almost alone
today in upholding and defending the Constitution of the United
States?” After the war ended, Wilson rebuffed appeals for Debs’s
release. “I will never consent to the pardon of this man,” he
declared. It was left to his successor, Warren G. Harding, a
conservative Republican, to free Debs from prison in 1921.

Hochschild presents a vivid account of this turbulent time. But he
does not really explain one of its many disturbing features: why so
many Progressive-era intellectuals failed to raise their voices
against the suppression of free speech. Many, in fact, enlisted in the
CPI’s propaganda campaign. Although the Progressive movement, which
envisioned government as an embodiment of democratic purpose, is
sometimes viewed as a precursor of the New Deal and the Great Society,
it differed from them in a crucial respect: Civil liberties were not
among the Progressives’ major concerns. Many saw the lone person
standing up to authority as an example of excessive individualism,
which they identified as a cause of many of the nation’s problems.
They believed that the expansion of federal power required by the war
would enable their movement to fulfill many of its goals for social
reconstruction, from the public regulation of business to the creation
of social welfare programs, and they also hoped that the mobilization
of America for war would help integrate recent immigrants into a more
harmonious and more equal society.

Hochschild says nothing about one of the most memorable exchanges of
these years, the debate over American participation in the war between
the prominent intellectual John Dewey and the brilliant young writer
Randolph Bourne. Hailing the “social possibilities” created by the
conflict, Dewey urged Progressives to support American involvement. In
response, Bourne ridiculed the idea that forward-looking thinkers
could guide the conflict according to their own “liberal
purposes.” It was far more likely, he wrote, that the war would
empower the “least democratic forces in American life.” War,
Bourne famously declared, “is the health of the state,” and as
such posed a threat to individual liberty.

Despite the clear words of the First Amendment, the Supreme Court
offered no assistance to those seeking to defend civil liberties.
Early in 1919, the justices unanimously sustained the conviction of
the Socialist Party’s Charles T. Schenck for violating the Espionage
Act by distributing leaflets opposing the draft. A week later, it
upheld Debs’s conviction. The same result followed in 1919 in the
case of Jacob Abrams and four others jailed for distributing
publications opposing US intervention in the Russian Civil War. This
time, however, Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis
dissented. The next year, 1920, saw the formation of the American
Civil Liberties Union, founded by an impressive group of believers in
free speech, including Jane Addams, Roger N. Baldwin, Helen Keller,
and Oswald Garrison Villard, the editor of _The Nation_. The ACLU
would wage a long battle to invigorate the First Amendment. Its
efforts were initially stymied, its own pamphlets defending civil
liberties barred from the mail. But the excesses of wartime repression
were finally beginning to generate opposition.

How can we explain the “explosion of martial ferocity” in a
country where respect for the free individual is supposedly the
culture’s bedrock? Hochschild doesn’t offer a single explanation,
but he directs the reader’s attention to a number of
factors—historical, material, political, and psychological—that
“fed the violence.” They include nativism, which made it easy to
identify radical ideas with immigrants; the “brutal habits” (which
is to say, a penchant for torture) picked up by the military in the
Philippine-American War; and the long-standing hostility of business
leaders to trade unions and socialists. He notes that Palmer sought
the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1920, hoping to
ride the hysteria he had helped create all the way to the White House.
Hochschild also suggests that American men felt uneasy at a time when
“the balance of power between the sexes” was changing, with women
rapidly moving into the workplace and the campaign for women’s
suffrage reaching its culmination. War offered a way to reinvigorate
an endangered masculinity. As Lippmann observed, World War I created a
situation in which all sorts of preexisting prejudices and fears could
be acted out, a perfect storm in which “hatreds and
violence…turned against all kinds of imaginary enemies.”

One additional element should be noted: As Black Americans streamed
out of the South to take up jobs suddenly available in Northern
industry because the war cut off European immigration, “race
riots” broke out in East St. Louis, Chicago, Tulsa, and other
cities. Protests by Blacks who came to realize that Wilson’s
rhetoric about democracy did not apply to the American South were met
with an upsurge in lynchings. Some of the victims were soldiers still
in uniform. W.E.B. Du Bois had urged Black people to enlist in the
armed forces to stake a claim to equal citizenship. Instead, as he put
it, “the forces of hell” had been unleashed “in our own land.”

Wilson’s deep-seated racism has been the subject of much discussion
in the past few years. Princeton University recently removed his name
from its School of International and Public Affairs. (This step was
taken almost entirely because of his racial views; there was little
discussion of the wartime suppression of civil liberties.) The first
Southern-born president elected since the Civil War, Wilson grew up in
Columbia, S.C., during Reconstruction, a time of major gains for
African Americans but also a campaign of violence by the Ku Klux Klan
and kindred organizations. Wilson shared the prevailing disdain among
white Southerners for the enfranchisement of Black voters during
Reconstruction and embraced the system known as Jim Crow that
followed, which locked Blacks into second-class citizenship. One of
his initiatives as president was to segregate the civil service in
Washington, D.C.

_Copyright c 2023 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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_ERIC FONER, a member of The Nation’s editorial board and the
DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University,
is the author, most recently, of The Second Founding: How the Civil
War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution._

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* U.S. history
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* Civil Liberties
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* World War I
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* Eugene Debs
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* Woodrow Wilson
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* Espionage Act
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* Sedition Act
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* Supreme Court
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* First Amendment
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