The Illusion of Victory

by Thomas Fleming

  The German language was banned from school curriculums and German music barred from auditoriums. Famed violinist Fritz Kreisler was denounced by the Daughters of the American Revolution when he tried to take the stage in Pittsburgh. When Baltimore, Washington and Cleveland also canceled performances, Kreisler retired for the duration. Karl Muck, the Swiss-born conductor of the Boston Symphony, was arrested and interned because he declined, on aesthetic grounds, to play the “Star-Spangled Banner” at the opening of each performance. The pro-German director of the Cincinnati Symphony, Ernest Kunwald, suffered a similar fate.37

  In September, Congress attached a rider to an unrelated bill, giving the government even greater control over the expression of opinion among German-Americans. Wilson signed the bill into law on October 6, 1917. Henceforth, German-language newspapers were required to supply the post office with English translations of “any comments respecting the Government of the United States . . . its policies, international relations [or] the state and conduct of the war.” the cost of providing these documents put many marginal newspapers out of business and had a chilling effect on the editorial policies of those that survived.38

  The Mennonites, a German-American pacifist religious sect, refused virtually to a man to submit to conscription, but said they would be willing to serve in noncombatant roles, as long as they did not have to don uniforms. They had come to the Midwest in the 1870s, after receiving an explicit promise from President Ulysses S. Grant that they would never have to serve in the American army. Mennonite leaders rushed to Washington to ask Secretary of War Baker if he would approve their stance. Baker advised them to tell their young men to submit to conscription, on his promise that their religious beliefs would be respected.

  Unfortunately, Baker, a prewar pacifist himself, had succumbed to the war will. He sent a confidential order to the commanders of army camps to make a major effort to persuade conscientious objectors to change their minds. While they were being persuaded, they were to wear uniforms, live in barracks, and undergo military training. Baker theorized that camaraderie with young men their own age, plus pressure from military superiors, would do the trick. On paper, he was proven correct: About two-thirds of the objectors—some 16,000—abandoned their beliefs and became fighting soldiers.

  How this change was accomplished is not a pretty story. Harassed camp commanders, already grappling with shortages of everything, had little time to give much thought to the techniques of persuasion. At most camps, the “conchies” were left to the untender mercies of sergeants and lieutenants, who called them yellow-bellies, cowards and pro-Germans. The Mennonites, who resisted all forms of persuasion, had a particularly bad time. At one camp, officers sent a dozen of them into an open field, where they were pursued by men on motorcycles until they collapsed. At another camp, a Mennonite resister was scrubbed with brushes dipped in lye. Sadists in another camp billeted them with men infected with venereal disease. Not too surprisingly, many resisted this brutal treatment and were courtmartialed. Some 110 were sentenced to the Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, army prison for terms ranging from ten to thirty years. One martyr to his faith and conscience wrote to his parents from his prison cell:“You cant emagen how it is to be hated. If it wasent fore Christ it would be empossible.”39

  XIII

  The Creel-Wilson determination to create a war will meant deep trouble for the radical union, the Industrial Workers of the World. One of the opening volleys was fired by Senator Harry Ashurst of Arizona. On August 17, 1917, he told his fellow solons that IWW stood for “Imperial Wilhelm’s Warriors” and called for the union’s extirpation. Ashurst’s antipathy was sharpened by the IWW’s tendency to cause trouble in Arizona’s copper mines, whose owners were among his chief supporters. The same could be said for many other Western governors and members of Congress who regularly denounced the IWW. The union had very few friends in high places.40

  The Wobblies, as they were called, were the loose cannons of the labor movement. A forerunner of the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), the IWW aimed at unionizing the unskilled and uneducated workers, people largely ignored by the craft-oriented AFL. The union had about 60,000 paid-up members in 1917, the twelfth year of its turbulent existence. The union returned with interest the violent hostility of the employers and their friends in the ruling “tendom.” wobbly rhetoric reeked with class warfare and calls for revolution. Their constitution candidly declared that they were out to “abolish the wage system.”

  Not too surprisingly, the IWW took a dim view of Wilson’s war. Its stance was almost perversely designed to please no one. On May 3, 1917, a month after the United States entered the war, the Wobblies’ one-eyed president, William D.“Big Bill” Haywood, told a lieutenant,“While being opposed to the Imperial Government of Germany, we are likewise opposed to the Industrial Oligarchy of this country.”41

  While Congress was arguing over the draft law, the Wobbly newspaper, the Industrial Worker, published a poem that was not likely to please Woodrow Wilson or anyone else in Washington:

  I love my flag, I do, I do

  Which floats upon the breeze

  I also love my arms and legs

  And neck and nose and knees.

  One little shell might spoil them all

  Or give them such a twist

  They would be of no use to me

  I guess I won’t enlist.42

  In the spring of 1917, with the defiant sangfroid that had won it the admiration of romantic liberals, the IWW was conducting strikes in the lumber and copper industries, hampering the construction of the longpromised fleet of 50,000 (sometimes reduced to 22,000) American planes, barracks for draftees, and the flow of weaponry to the British and French armies in Europe. It was easy for journalists and politicians to see treason in these work stoppages. Ignored was the June 8, 1917, explosion and fire in the North Butte Mining Company’s Speculator Mine, which killed 164 miners and enraged workers throughout the industry. Three days later, 10,000 Butte miners struck to demand recognition of their union and the abolition of the “rustling” card, a certificate issued by a companydominated union to blacklist Wobblies. The owners announced they would shut down the mines and flood them rather than talk to “anarchistic leaders.” Newspapers suggested that German money was behind the strike.

  Montana Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, one of the Wobblies’ few friends in Washington, told the government that the miners were hoping for presidential intervention to win them a just settlement. Behind the scenes, Bernard Baruch, in frequent touch with copper tycoon John D. Ryan, blocked Labor Department attempts to mediate the strike and pushed for the preservation of the status quo.

  Similar unrest threatened to shut down Arizona’s copper mines, which produced 28 percent of the nation’s ore. While the government looked the other way, shotgun-toting vigilantes organized by the Citizens Protective League, a clone of the American Protective League, rounded up some 1,200 Wobblies and other dissidents in Bisbee, Arizona, and deported them in railroad cars to the desert town of Hermanus, New Mexico, with dire warnings not to return. For the next four months, the Citizens Protective League ran Bisbee, issuing passports to local residents and deporting anyone who did not meet the league’s test of loyalty. The Los Angeles Times hailed the operation as “a lesson that the whole of America would do well to copy.” Theodore Roosevelt also applauded the direct action of Bisbee’s loyal citizens, saying he had no doubt the deportees were “bent on destruction and murder.”43

  The president’s secretary, Joe Tumulty, with his roots in Jersey City’s working class, was appalled by the deportations and urged the president to issue a condemnation. Wilson chose to wire the governor of Arizona, urging him not to let people take the law in their own hands. He also appointed federal mediators—a move condemned by many antilabor newspapers. One editorialized that it was crazy to “confer with a mad dog.” the only sensible thing to do was “shoot the dog.”44

  In Butte, Montana, vigilantes seized the IWW�
��s most dynamic spokesman, Frank Little, who represented the extreme left wing of the union. After Congress declared war, Little had persisted in calling for strikes, draft resistance and sabotage to undermine the American military effort. The assailants dragged Little through the streets tied to the rear bumper of a car and hanged him from a railroad trestle. The New York Times deplored the lynching, but added that IWW agitators like Little were “in effect and perhaps in fact agents of Germany.”45

  Similar warfare was waged on the IWW in towns around the iron mines of Minnesota. In Duluth, men carrying IWW cards were jailed for vagrancy. In Minneapolis, saloons known to be frequented by “sowers of sedition” (frequented by the IWW) were shut down by the police. The Minnesota Public Safety Commission appealed to the federal government to smash the Wobblies. Governors of Western states added their voices to the rising chorus of denunciations in Congress. Dozens of newspapers called for suppression of “the traitorous organization.” Not a word was said in the Wobblies’ defense by the already co-opted Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor.46

  Attorney General Thomas Gregory decided to act. With Wilson’s approval, he launched an investigation of whether the IWW was being supported by German money. When no evidence surfaced, Gregory ordered a massive assault on IWW offices in no less than thirty-three cities. Homes and apartments of IWW leaders were also raided. Tons of records, including personal diaries and letters, were seized and studied for evidence of violations of the Espionage Act. It was almost ridiculously easy to find in Wobbly rhetoric the quotations needed to “prove” the union members’ guilt.

  On September 28, 1917, 166 IWW officers were indicted using their own words to prove that they had violated eleven laws and proclamations related to the war, conspired to interfere with employers trying to fulfill vital government contracts, urged fellow Wobblies to refuse to register for conscription, and plotted to create insubordination in the armed forces. There was little doubt what the Wilson administration had in mind. The Philadelphia federal attorney stated it candidly in a letter to the attorney general:“Our purpose . . . as I understand it, [is] to put the I.W. W. out of business.”47

  XIV

  Few people in the United States were inclined to criticize this rampaging war will that Creel and Wilson were creating. One of the few was Senator Robert La Follette. Appalled by what the war was doing to the American spirit, he became more and more convinced that an early peace was imperative. When journalist Lincoln Steffens returned from Russia and told him that the new revolutionary Russian army was faltering because its soldiers had been told the Allies were fighting to fulfill greedy secret treaties of conquest, La Follette became even more disgusted with Woodrow Wilson’s war. Next, the German Reichstag adopted a resolution declaring that Germany sought “a peace of mutual agreements and enduring reconciliation of peoples.” La Follette decided to introduce a resolution in the Senate, calling for a restatement of U.S. war aims that would be conducive to a negotiated peace.48

  Numerous senators, notably John Sharp Williams of Mississippi, rose to denounce La Follette as a traitor. The Senate refused to consider the resolution. When the Russian army collapsed and the Germans began advancing rapidly into Russia, newspapers reprinted anonymous articles making the preposterous charge that La Follette was responsible for the mounting disaster. An anxious Lincoln Steffens wrote to his friend, warning about “war rage,” which he said was “as dangerous as madness and as unapproachable to reason.”49

  Undaunted as usual, La Follette accepted an invitation to speak to the Nonpartisan League, an organization composed largely of small farmers in the states of the old Northwest. When he arrived in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on September 19, 1917, he found his hosts in a state of high anxiety. The meeting was being harassed by Secret Service men and self-appointed patriots, who warned of major trouble if La Follette criticized the war. This was exactly what the senator had intended to do, with a special focus on the refusal of the rich to pay a decent share of the financial burden.

  The sponsors grew even more jittery when they read La Follette’s speech. They begged him not to deliver it, and he reluctantly agreed to say only a few extemporaneous words. When La Follette arrived at the auditorium, he found the placed packed with 10,000 people. Another 5,000 jammed the streets outside, agitating to get in. As he walked to the stage, the crowd rose and cheered so fervently, the sponsors changed their minds. Whacking the senator on the back, they shouted,“Go ahead, Bob, make your speech!”

  Unfortunately, the senator had left the speech in his hotel room. But he accepted the challenge of speaking without notes, and began by recalling his fight against corporate power in Wisconsin. He was still fighting for the same principles in the Senate of the United States—for fairness and justice for average citizens. The big issue, as he now saw it, was how to pay for this war—which, he added wryly, he had not been in favor of fighting.

  The words were greeted with huge cheers. La Follette added:“I don’t mean to say we hadn’t suffered grievances;we had, at the hands of Germany. Serious grievances. . . . They had interfered with the right of American citizens to travel on the high seas—on ships loaded with munitions for Great Britain.”

  From somewhere in the audience a voice shouted,“Yellow!” the interruption only spurred the senator to continue down this dangerous path. He still thought “the comparatively small privilege of the right of an American citizen to ride on a munitions-laden ship, flying a foreign flag, is too small to involve this government in the loss of millions . . . of lives.”50

  He compared the victims who died on such vessels to someone who went to France and camped near an arsenal. Getting more and more carried away, La Follette said that America should have considered more carefully what it had at stake when it went to war. He also asserted that the Lusitania was carrying munitions and that Secretary of State Bryan had asked Wilson to stop Americans from sailing on it but the president had done nothing.

  If the only things at stake in the war were loans made by the House of Morgan to foreign governments, and the profits of munitions makers, such things should be weighed, “not on a hay scale, but on an apothecary’s scale.” the implication, of course, was obvious: They were too small for a hay scale. The senator cited Daniel Webster, who questioned the Mexican War when it was at “full tilt,” asking whether there had been “sufficient grievance” to start such a bloody explosion.51

  La Follette went on to argue for bigger taxes on the rich, and ended with a swipe at Congress for failing to live up to its constitutional responsibility to oversee the war. In fact, every American had the right “to discuss freely whether this war might be terminated with honor . . . and the awful slaughter discontinued.” He was still angry about the Senate’s refusal to take up his war aims resolution.

  The audience gave the senator an ovation. While La Follette and his wife were on a train back to Washington, an Associated Press reporter filed a story quoting the senator as saying: “We had no grievance against Germany.” It produced huge headlines everywhere. In the New York Times, it became “La Follette Defends Lusitania Sinking.” theodore Roosevelt called the senator the worst enemy of democracy alive. The governor of Minnesota announced that La Follette might be arrested under the Espionage Act. Nicholas Murray Butler, Columbia University’s president, called for La Follette’s expulsion from the Senate. Butler compared allowing La Follette to speak freely to putting poison in the food of men on troopships to France.52

  The day after the speech, Secretary of State Lansing released to the newspapers the text of an intercepted message that Germany’s former ambassador, Count von Bernstorff, had sent to Berlin, asking for $50,000 to influence Congress. The timing of the release was hardly accidental. The newspapers splashed it across their front pages. An Alabama congressman called for an investigation, declaring that he could name thirteen or fourteen members of Congress who had “acted in a suspicious manner.” Called before the House Rules Committee and ordered to name names, h
e mentioned three congressmen and Senator La Follette. Meanwhile, the secretary of state hastily retreated, saying he had no evidence connecting any legislator with German propaganda.

  A week later, La Follette gave another speech in Toledo, Ohio. The city was in the grip of manic war rage. “Vigilante groups hounded, horsewhipped and tarred and feathered war-resisters,” said one minister, who had been dismissed from his church for his antiwar views. Several hotels refused to rent the senator a room, fearing they might be burned down. Forty policemen guarded the packed hall, and when La Follette appeared at a side door, they urged the senator to cancel his speech. He ignored them and spoke about the imperative need for a statement of America’s war aims. He got another ovation, and a local reporter wrote in a puzzled tone that he gave “no special cause for offense.”

  Back in Washington, La Follette learned that the Minnesota Public Safety Commission had petitioned the U.S. Senate to expel him. Petitions from similar groups, from the National Security League to the Grand Army of the Republic, soon followed. These appeals were referred to the Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections for investigation. On October 3, the Democratic governor of Wisconsin staged a mass meeting in Madison, at which Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo was the featured speaker. Along the secretary’s parade route were illuminated signs calling La Follette a slacker and a copperhead. Another one read,“La Follette misrepresents Wisconsin. GET HIM OUT.” In his speech, McAdoo made clear his opinion of dissenters:“America intends these well-meaning people who talk inopportunely of peace . . . shall be silenced.” warming to his theme, he added,“Every pacifist speech in this country made at this inopportune and improper time is in effect traitorous.”