And not just on the vaudeville stage. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, political organizations like Tammany Hall had been courting the immigrants’ favor, shrewdly recognizing that, newcomers though they were, they nevertheless would soon represent votes; it took much less time to become a citizen back then than it does today. By the early twentieth century, most of the recent immigrant groups had sent some of their own to city council, statehouse, and Capitol. Perhaps the most notable of these “immigrant” congressmen was Fiorello La Guardia, born in Manhattan in 1882 to an Italian father and Jewish mother, both recent arrivals. La Guardia understood immigrant concerns and, more important, culture; he spent several years working as an interpreter at Ellis Island. And when, in 1916, he first ran for Congress from East Harlem, he addressed his prospective constituents in their native tongues—Italian, Yiddish, German, even Croatian. He won handily.
From the start, La Guardia was a progressive firebrand, not the type one would expect to favor American participation in a conflict between crumbling old empires thousands of miles away. And yet, when America did enter the war, he was commissioned an officer in the United States Army Air Service. Barely five feet tall (his first name means “little flower” in Italian), he flew bombers over Austria-Hungary and Italy. The war, it seems, was all but irresistible.
People did resist, of course. But most often, their resistance—their opposition to the war—proved very troublesome for them. And costly.
Actually, “opposing the war” was so easy that it was entirely possible to do so unwittingly. Before America entered the war, there was lots of room for disagreement on the subject. And those who disapproved of American involvement were by no means a small minority; the notion of getting into the fight was so unpopular in the United States in 1916 that President Wilson liberally deployed the slogan “He kept us out of war” to get himself reelected that year. But just a few weeks after his reinauguration, America was in it, and suddenly, prevailing attitudes changed entirely. Not about the war itself; most people can’t change their deeply held beliefs so quickly, especially about a matter so grave. But literally almost overnight, it became unacceptable for people in the United States of America to voice their beliefs if they happened, still, to oppose the war. To be accurate, it wasn’t even acceptable to hold such beliefs any longer, though if you kept them to yourself and never hinted at their existence, you might just get away with it. Then again, you might not. Even silence was often read as opposition; to be really safe, you had to be openly, loudly, boisterously in favor of the war.
And if, by some chance, you should happen to express an unfavorable opinion about it? Twenty-seven of the country’s forty-eight states enacted sedition laws during the war, and most of them were used, among other things, to send dissenters to prison. One case I find particularly chilling is that of a traveling salesman who, while passing through Montana, made the mistake of referring, in conversation, to Mr. Hoover’s food regulations as a “big joke”; he was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to a term of seven to twenty years in prison. In all, nearly eighty men and women were convicted of sedition in Montana by the time the war ended. If you find yourself outraged over this, you may be gratified to learn that Montana’s governor did, eventually, grant them all pardons.
In 2006.
Montana’s law was particularly severe, which might explain why the federal government used it as the model for its own statute, the Sedition Act of 1918. That law, in turn, was actually a set of amendments to the Espionage Act of 1917, which starts off pretty reasonably—no passing on to the enemy any information about fortifications, ships, weaponry, movements, etc.—but then, in Section 3, decrees the following:
Whoever, when the United States is at war . . . shall willfully cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States, or shall willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States, to the injury of the service or of the United States, shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both.
This might seem reasonable too, at least at first; the problem was that it was just vague enough to cover almost any kind of statement that wasn’t entirely enthusiastic about the war and every last thing connected to it. Say you were in a bar somewhere, and happened to tell an old friend that sometimes you wondered if this war was worth all that trouble. Theoretically, your comment might be overheard by some young man who had yet to enlist; and if your remark should make him reconsider whether or not he should actually go through with it . . . well, then, you just obstructed the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States. And if, instead, you should call Mr. Hoover’s food-conservation initiatives a “big joke,” and someone who eats food should overhear you and, as a result, stop observing Meatless Mondays, the resultant smaller portion of beef on a doughboy’s plate could lead to a refusal of duty on his part, and that mutiny would be traceable to you.
And the 1918 act cast an even wider net:
Whoever, when the United States is at war, shall . . . say or do anything except by way of bona fide and not disloyal advice to an investor or investors, with intent to obstruct the sale by the United States of bonds or other securities of the United States or the making of loans by or to the United States . . . [or] willfully utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States, or the flag of the United States, or the uniform of the Army or Navy of the United States into contempt, scorn, contumely, or disrepute, or shall willfully utter, print, write, or publish any language intended to incite, provoke, or encourage resistance to the United States, or to promote the cause of its enemies, or shall willfully display the flag of any foreign enemy, or shall willfully by utterance, writing, printing, publication, or language spoken, urge, incite, or advocate any curtailment of production in this country of any thing or things, product or products, necessary or essential to the prosecution of the war in which the United States may be engaged . . . and whoever shall willfully advocate, teach, defend, or suggest the doing of any of the acts or things in this section enumerated, and whoever shall by word or act support or favor the cause of any country with which the United States is at war or by word or act oppose the cause of the United States therein, shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or the imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both: Provided, That any employee or official of the United States Government who commits any disloyal act or utters any unpatriotic or disloyal language, or who, in an abusive and violent manner criticizes the Army or Navy or the flag of the United States shall be at once dismissed from the service.
And that really covered just about anything you could say or do short of belting out “Over There” at the top of your lungs. You could be arrested for possession of an Austrian flag, or for saying you thought the Navy’s uniforms, with those oversized floppy hats and enormous bell-bottoms, were ugly. A lot of people—according to some estimates, as many as fifteen hundred of them—were sent to prison for saying something injudicious within earshot of a government official or informer. The most prominent of these was Eugene Victor Debs, the renowned labor leader who had already run for president four times on the Socialist Party ticket. Debs gave a speech in June, 1918, in which he implied he was dismayed that nearby, three fellow Socialists were rotting in prison for speaking out against the war; a few days later he was arrested, tried on ten counts of sedition, convicted, and sentenced to ten years in prison. He ran for president a fifth time, in 1920, from the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, and won nearly a million votes—3.5 percent of the electorate. A New York radio station was named WEVD in his honor.
Debs may have been popular with his followers, but his antiwar stance rendered him anathema to a great many others. Even more unpopular was Robert La Fol
lette, a former governor of Wisconsin who was first elected to the United States Senate in 1906. La Follette, who called himself a progressive (technically, his party affiliation was Republican), was an unwavering opponent of the war and everything connected with it, including the Espionage Act, and he was not shy about expressing his opinions on the floor of the Senate. His fellow senators weren’t shy, either: They attacked him virulently on that same floor, called him a traitor and a madman and a German agent, likened him to Benedict Arnold and Judas Iscariot, said that he should be hauled off to an internment camp, that he would be better suited to presiding over Germany’s parliament. Theodore Roosevelt—a fellow progressive—referred to him as a skunk “who ought to be hung.” Almost all of La Follette’s friends abandoned him.
The people of Wisconsin didn’t, though, and thus his job was secure. Sadly, the same was not true for the hundreds of Americans who were locked up under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, or the thousands who applied for deferments as conscientious objectors, a great many of whom were denied and faced the choice of going off to the trenches or to prison. Others, whose applications were approved, were not sent home but rather ordered to work in war-supportive industries under the auspices of the military; those who refused were also sent to prison, where they were often underfed, beaten, and put in solitary confinement. And countless others, who said and did nothing wrong at all, lost their jobs anyway because they spoke with suspicious accents or were regarded as “slackers.”
And while all this was going on, America watched in virtual silence. The newspapers, ordinarily guardians of free speech, didn’t condemn the Espionage and Sedition Acts; many, in fact, supported them, having previously secured a promise that the government would leave them alone. Intellectuals, by and large, kept mum. Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University—the main library on campus is named for him—had opposed the war in 1916; in 1917, he called opposition to it “treason,” and declared that there was no place among his faculty for anyone who didn’t wholeheartedly support it. Senator La Follette’s many friends in academia were among the first to distance themselves from him. I guess if Teddy Roosevelt wants to have you hanged, you should expect to be forsaken by professors.
You ask: How could such things happen in America?
They couldn’t have without two things: the war; and President Wilson.
The latter seems a strange thing to say given that, at this distance, Wilson is remembered as a progressive, a lone Democrat in a sea of Republican presidents, an idealist who kept the United States out of war as long as he could and then set to work on a plan to prevent all future wars, which he lamentably failed to sell to his more vengeful allies. But Wilson was also prickly and, as a knowledgeable source once told me, “remarkably thin-skinned.” Abraham Lincoln, the country’s last wartime president (unless you count McKinley, which you shouldn’t, as his war wasn’t much of one), was famous for being able to take an insult; political enemies and rivals called him everything from an idiot to a demon to a baboon, and worse. But Woodrow Wilson—well, he just couldn’t take criticism of any kind: not of him, nor of his war, nor of any of his decisions. He didn’t just support the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918; he conceived them. “If there should be disloyalty,” he warned, “it will be dealt with with a firm hand of stern repression.” And by disloyalty, he meant criticism. Freedom of speech? No, thanks, he said. Those who were less than fully “loyal,” as he would have put it, “sacrificed their right to civil liberties.”
So, if you’re wondering why nobody wrote another “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” after 1916—there you have it. Instead, they cranked out stirring numbers like “Our Wilson Is the Greatest Man The World Has Ever Known,” and “If You Don’t Like Our President Wilson (You Knife the Land That Feeds Us All).”
Harder to sing along with than “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.” But much safer.
The best estimates hold that some two thousand people were tried under the Espionage and Sedition Acts during the nineteen months Uncle Sam was at war with the Kaiser. About two-thirds of them were convicted. Nearly all of those went to prison. And not for sixty days, either; the typical sentence was three to twenty years. The government was methodical and ruthless in pursuing violators: In addition to its own secret agents, it depended upon the services of vigilante organizations with names like the Liberty League, the National Security League, the Home Defense League, the Anti–Yellow Dog League, and, to mix things up a bit, the Knights of Liberty. The Boy Spies of America—really—employed the nation’s youth in ferreting out the unfaithful; another posse, the Sedition Slammers, sounds more like a baseball team. (I wonder if they played in the same league with all those other leagues; the Loyalty League, maybe?) My favorite, at least in terms of nomenclature: the Terrible Threateners. Did they make terrible threats, or threaten terrible characters? Or was it that they were terrible at threatening?
The largest of these groups, the American Protective League, or APL, boasted a quarter of a million members in more than five hundred American cities. Founded in early 1917, it was officially sanctioned by US Attorney General Thomas Gregory (as were many of the other, smaller organizations); its members carried badges that read “American Protective League—Secret Service.” To those paying attention, though, it might have seemed like they did more attacking than protecting—spying on individuals and groups, infiltrating factories and unions, breaking up labor and Socialist rallies, investigating shopkeepers and customers to make sure they adhered to food and fuel regulations, and stopping passersby and demanding to see their draft-registration cards. Often they would infiltrate bars undercover and try to entrap patrons into making illegal statements about the war, the president, the rules of the day. Not infrequently, they succeeded.
The environment they fostered in 1917 and 1918, saturated with fear and suspicion and distrust, was hazardous enough for average citizens; for immigrants, whose American-ness was new and precarious, things were far worse. Their accents—whatever they might be—rendered them suspect. So did their funny-sounding names, their ridiculous clothing, the weird foods and spices they ate, the cacophonous languages they sometimes lapsed into, the way they couldn’t talk softly or without waving their hands all over the place, and the fact that they were here, in America, trying so hard to be just like everyone else—which is, of course, exactly what everyone else told them to do. If all Americans were at risk of being collared by a federal agent or someone from the APL, it seemed that the children and grandchildren of immigrants were at even greater risk, and actual immigrants at much greater risk still. Unless, that is, you were an English immigrant; the English, apparently, were a protected class, in part because they were America’s ally, and in part because America has always been infected with a peculiar Anglophilia borne, I suppose, out of guilt over the Revolution. So protected, in fact, were the British that when, in early 1917, a new motion picture titled The Spirit of ’76 cast them in an unflattering light—in 1776—the government decided to prosecute the insult to its ally. Interestingly, they didn’t go after the film’s screenwriter or its director—just its producer, Robert Goldstein. An immigrant.
If the film had only been released a year earlier, in 1916, it might have garnered its producer a serious payday instead of a serious prison sentence. Pluggers Howard Johnson and Joe McCarthy had a big hit that year with their song “It’s Not Your Nationality (It’s Simply You),” the lyrics of which proclaim:
Ev’rybody has a native land in the North, South, East or West
And it’s only right your native land should be the place you love the best.
Now, it makes no diff’rence what you are, don’t wait for fame to come
Just go and get it, and they’ll give you credit, no matter where you’re from.
So if you’ve got the spirit, never mind your name, they tell us at the end of the first verse. Folks will hear it, if you play the game.
That, though, wa
s 1916. When the war came to America a few months later, it suddenly made a whole lot of diff’rence what you were. Immigrants weren’t merely more likely to be arrested for sedition—they were more likely to be suspected of it, too. On April 6, 1917, the day that the United States of America declared war on Germany, the Honorable Joseph Buffington, senior judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, swore in a group of immigrants in Philadelphia as new citizens and took the opportunity to lecture them on the matter of loyalty; his speech was later reprinted in a booklet (available, according to its back cover, “in Bohemian, Polish, German, Italian, Hungarian and Russian”), published by—who else?—the Committee on Public Information, under the ironically ominous title Friendly Words to the Foreign Born. “To-day there are 14,500,000 of men in America of foreign birth,” Judge Buffington’s talk begins. “There are 14,000,000 who are the children of those of foreign birth.” He himself, he tells us, has been turning immigrants into citizens for a quarter century, through which work he has been brought “into close touch with the foreign-born, have learned to understand them, have believed in them, and have always said that when war faced us that these foreign-born men would prove themselves Americans. The crux is not the fact of the hyphen, but whether the man’s heart is at the American end of the hyphen.” The CPI chose to boldface that passage, as it did the following: “Remember what was only foolish and unwise in word and deed last week, in peace, may be treason when war comes.” Buffington’s “friendly advice” is:
The Last of the Doughboys Page 28