by Jay Feldman
Seen in this context, the persecution of dissenters during World War I; the red scare and Palmer raids of 1919–20; the Mexican deportations and repatriations of the 1930s; the internment of Japanese-, German-, and Italian-Americans during World War II; the witch hunts of the Cold War years; and the COINTELPRO operations of the 1950s and the Vietnam era were not isolated threats to democracy but related, recurring manifestations of a profoundly antidemocratic streak that lurks just below the surface in American society. President Harry S. Truman, whose Cold War loyalty program for federal employees was itself just such a manifestation, observed—with no apparent irony—that there have always been those who “have seized upon crises to incite emotional and irrational fears. Racial, religious, and class animosities are stirred up. Charges and accusations are directed against many innocent people in the name of false ‘patriotism’ and hatred of things ‘foreign.’ ”23
From this perspective, the recent excesses of the George W. Bush administration in attempting to put a stranglehold on civil liberties after 9/11 were not an anomaly; although the Bush government went far beyond what many people thought possible, those extremes were a difference of degree, not kind. It has been happening in one form or another for nearly a century.
This book is an account of that history. It is not necessarily a pleasant story, but it is a crucial one, for the themes that run through it return again and again in our national life. And while it is a cautionary tale, it is hopefully neither a reductionist account nor one governed by conspiracy theory.
As we emerge from the shadow of one of the most repressive administrations this country has ever known, it serves us well to look back and reflect on these issues in the hope that we can begin to move forward without endlessly repeating our mistakes, for though the election of Barack Obama in 2008 may have relieved the all-out assault of the Bush years, the surveillance apparatus is still in place, and President Obama has demonstrated little if any inclination to dismantle it.
In an 1852 speech to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, the great abolitionist Wendell Phillips declared, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”24 More than a century and a half later, his admonition has lost none of its relevance. Now, as ever, vigilance is required if liberty is to survive.
CHAPTER 1
The Fine Gold of Untainted Americanism
The drumbeat started right after the sinking of the British luxury liner Lusitania. When the passenger ship was torpedoed by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland on May 7, 1915, and 128 American citizens were among the 1,198 killed, the cry for “preparedness” quickly arose.
Preparedness meant two things. In the more conventional sense of the term, it required that the nation arm itself in preparation for the eventuality of being drawn into the war that had raged across Europe for the past year. Before the Lusitania, the idea of a military buildup was supported only by the most vociferous and belligerent proponents of American intervention and international adventurism, the most prominent of whom was the former president Theodore Roosevelt. When the passenger ship went down, however, there was a decided shift, as public officials and an outraged press loudly condemned German aggression.
President Woodrow Wilson also now adopted the preparedness stance, and despite his continuing public insistence that the United States would maintain its neutrality, he grew increasingly resigned to the inevitability of participating in the war.* In late July, Wilson directed his cabinet to develop a plan for rearmament.
On a subtler level, preparedness also entailed gearing up the propaganda machinery to mobilize public opinion—which lagged far behind the official point of view—in support of the mounting likelihood of American involvement.†
A major part of this effort included instilling in the populace a crisis mentality with regard to the dangers on the home front—it was much easier, certainly, to create alarm about an allegedly immediate threat to internal security than it was to demonstrate the peril the United States faced from another nation an ocean away. Wilson gave the engine a jump start in October, when he told the Daughters of the American Revolution, “I am not deceived as to the balance of opinion among the foreign-born citizens of the United States, but I am in a hurry for an opportunity to have a line-up and let the men who are thinking first of other countries stand on one side and all those that are for America first, last, and all the time on the other side.”1
In early November, Wilson proposed a program of “reasonable” military preparedness, which would include a newly created reserve force of 400,000 men and a significant increase in shipbuilding. On December 7, he used the occasion of his third annual message to Congress to sell his rearmament plan, arguing that preparedness would allow the United States to maintain its “providentially assigned” neutrality.2 His remarks were received coolly, eliciting only mild applause from the assembled legislators.
At the end of his talk, however, Wilson brought his listeners to their feet when he launched an all-out attack on the menace posed by the nation’s “disloyal” immigrants:
I am sorry to say that the gravest threats against our national peace and safety have been uttered within our own borders. There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags … who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life; who have … sought to destroy our industries … and to debase our politics to the uses of foreign intrigue … [W]e should promptly make use of processes of law by which we may be purged of their corrupt distempers … [W]e are without adequate federal laws to deal with it. I urge you to enact such laws at the earliest possible moment … Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out … and the hand of our power should close over them at once.3
These words were the opening salvo on the domestic battleground and would set the tone for the next five years. “WILD APPLAUSE GREETS THE PRESIDENT’S DENUNCIATION OF DISLOYAL CITIZENS,” read The New York Times headline the following day. Based on the lawmakers’ reaction, the Times article predicted that there would be “no difficulty” enacting federal legislation aimed at prosecuting “plotters against the peace and well-being of the nation,” noting that both Republicans and Democrats joined in their approval of Wilson’s condemnation of “certain hyphenates.”
“Hyphenates”—as in German-Americans—were the first scapegoats of the World War I domestic conflict, recipients of the latest wave of nativist anger directed against immigrants, a theme that had surfaced repeatedly in American life throughout the nineteenth century, most notably against Irish Catholics. The implication of the term “hyphenates,” or “hyphenated Americans,” as it was sometimes expressed, was that immigrants’ and second-generation Americans’ retention of their ethnic identities was a sign of divided loyalties. As George Creel lamented the month after Wilson’s speech to Congress, “The melting-pot has not been melting.”4
The German-American community took deep umbrage at the implication behind Wilson’s call for new legislation, and the German-language press forcefully expressed its indignation. “No one could have objected,” wrote the Cincinnati Volksblatt, “if the President had asked Congress for a law to check lawlessness … He might have said, ‘I demand a law against incendiaries, against violators of the neutrality laws,’ but he had no right to say, ‘I demand a law against German-Americans.’ ”5
With a combined immigrant and second-generation population of more than eight million, German hyphenates were by far the largest ethnic minority in the country. Although, as with most immigrant groups, they retained a significant part of their native culture and even in many instances strong emotional ties to their homeland, Germans on the whole had fulfilled the American dream, becoming assimilated to a great extent and achieving success in such varied fields as business, farming, civil service, and the skilled trades. The leaders of the German-American community were self-assured and outspoken, and ever since the war in Europe had broken out, they had not hesitated to voice their sympath
y for the fatherland, especially as America was not yet involved in the fighting.
At the same time, the British War Propaganda Bureau had skillfully and successfully worked American public opinion, and U.S. “neutrality” leaned heavily toward the Allies, as U.S. arms manufacturers sold vast quantities of munitions to Britain and France on credit. American bankers also granted huge loans to the Allies, including the house of Morgan’s $50 million advance to the French. Pointing out the hypocrisy of this situation, the maverick Republican senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, a staunch peace advocate, asked, “How … can we maintain a semblance of real neutrality while we are supplying the Allies with munitions of war and the money to prosecute war?”6
German-American leaders asked the same question, demanding an end to America’s arms shipments to the Allies and calling for an embargo on the export of munitions. Preparedness advocates denounced this stance as an attempt to influence U.S. foreign policy in favor of Germany while themselves endeavoring to sway foreign policy in support of the Allies.
When representatives of all the major German-American organizations met in Washington on January 30, 1915, to press for an embargo on arms exports, they were harshly taken to task in a New York Times editorial. “The meeting of so-called German-American societies held in Washington Saturday evening,” said the Times, “professed to ‘re-establish genuine American neutrality and to uphold it, free from commercial, financial, and political subservience to foreign Powers.’ Never since the foundation of the Republic has any body of men assembled here who were more completely subservient to a foreign Power and to foreign influence, and none ever proclaimed the un-American spirit more openly.”7
The hyphenate problem was the hot-button issue of the day, and perhaps the only thing about which Wilson and Roosevelt agreed. And though they both, together with the press and many German-American leaders, tried to distinguish between the overwhelming majority of “loyal” German-Americans and what Roosevelt often referred to as the “professional German-Americans,” the fine differences were largely lost on the public.8 Indeed, the implication that only a small minority of Germans were disloyal produced an edgy wariness in the general population, which was now faced with discerning exactly who the treacherous Germans were.
After the Lusitania incident, many German-American leaders rushed to express support for Wilson and the United States. On May 15, the German-American Alliance’s president, Henry Kersting, said, “The manner in which the so-called German-American citizens” had supported the president proved that “there is no such thing as a German-American or any other hyphenated American.”9 The following day, Rudolf Bernerd, president of an organization representing more than twenty thousand leading German-Americans whose fathers were German war veterans, vowed that should war be declared, every single German-American would fight for the United States. Several months later, twenty-four New York business and professional men, most of them of German extraction, called on “American citizens of foreign birth or parentage to come forward and declare themselves for the United States.”10 None of these statements made much of a dent in public opinion.
The mistrust only got worse when it came to light that German agents in the United States, operating as the German Information Service, had spent more than $25 million on propaganda efforts that included supporting pro-German lecturers, furnishing material to over one thousand foreign-language publications, sponsoring the showing of movies depicting German valor, attempting to control the editorial policy of an influential German-American publication, secretly purchasing New York’s Evening Mail, and financing the arms embargo efforts. Although these tactics were legal, they were excoriated in the press, which labeled them, among other things, “double-faced treachery” and “unscrupulous and colossal machination.”11
Even more damaging was the revelation of German attempts at espionage and sabotage. A network of German agents had initiated a variety of activities aimed at disrupting U.S. munitions production and arms shipments to the Allies. In addition to the fomenting of strikes and walkouts in defense-related industries, there were attacks on railroads, bridges, munitions factories, shipyards, warehouses, military installations, and cargo ships; the two most notorious were the July 1916 Black Tom explosion in New York harbor and the bombing of the Canadian Car and Foundry Company of New Jersey in January 1917. Although German agents were responsible for the overwhelming majority of these incidents (the kaiser’s military and naval attachés were banished from the country as a result), and no significant degree of involvement by German-Americans was ever conclusively established, the propaganda and espionage/sabotage efforts nevertheless brought the entire German-American population under increasing suspicion.
On May 13, 1916, a Citizens’ Preparedness Parade with more than 135,000 marchers was held on New York City’s Fifth Avenue, which was lined with American flags and patriotic signs. According to The New York Times, the procession of “rich persons and poor … in every walk of life” took eleven hours to pass the reviewing stand, and the “only disturbing incidents of the day” came from anti-preparedness organizations like the Women’s Peace Party and the Church of the Social Revolution, which distributed leaflets and displayed pacifist banners.12
By this time, a significant and outspoken opposition to the preparedness movement had arisen, and it was by no means limited to hyphenates. Certainly, German-Americans were prominent among the dissenters; they were joined by many Irish-Americans, who objected to U.S. support of Britain. But also to be found among the resistance were pacifists, with their principled opposition to war; Socialists, anarchists, Wobblies, and other left-wing radicals, who saw the European conflict as a capitalist war; and many farmers, members of mainstream labor organizations, and others, who could perceive no benefit to America’s becoming embroiled in such far-distant hostilities.
The anti-preparedness forces were bolstered by numerous influential progressives, many of whom were pacifists and had been previously allied with Wilson in his determination to keep the United States neutral, but were now dismayed over his commitment to rearmament and to what President Dwight D. Eisenhower would more than forty years later label the military-industrial complex.‡
On the floor of the Senate, La Follette declared that “the commercial, industrial, and imperialistic schemes of the great financial masters of this country” were behind preparedness efforts.13 The New York Evening Post and Nation editor Oswald Garrison Villard wrote to Wilson, expressing his “most profound regret” that the president had “decided to go on the side of the large armament people … The new departure seems … anti-moral, anti-social, and anti-democratic, and the burdens rest primarily on the already overtaxed and overgoverned masses … You are sowing the seeds of militarism, raising up a military and naval caste.”14
All of these groups and individuals believed that rearmament would inevitably prove more likely to push the nation closer to war rather than to preserve America’s “providentially assigned” neutrality, which Wilson had asserted to Congress in December 1915. For their opposition to preparedness, opponents of rearmament were vilified and lumped, by preparedness advocates and the press, into the same “disloyal” camp as hyphenates, thereby interweaving three threads: anti-hyphenate sentiment, the preparedness movement, and antiradical attitudes.
Throughout the spring of 1916, Wilson continued to lay a foundation of intolerance and suspicion, as he repeatedly introduced the themes of hyphenates and disloyalty into his speeches. In May, he posed a hypothetical question to a Charlotte, North Carolina, audience: “What kind of fire of pure passion are you going to keep burning under the [melting] pot in order that the mixture that comes out may be purged of its dross and may be the fine gold of untainted Americanism?”15 In a June Flag Day address, he again stated his belief in the loyalty of the majority of those “whose lineage is directly derived from the nations now at war.” Nonetheless, he warned, “There is disloyalty active in the United States, and it must absolutely be crushe
d.” He ended with a challenge to his listeners: “Are you going yourselves, individually and collectively, to see to it that no man is tolerated who does not do honor to that flag?”16
Roosevelt also hammered away. “I stand for straight Americanism unconditioned and unqualified,” he thundered in a May speech in St. Louis, “and I stand against every form of hyphenated Americanism … [U]nless the immigrant becomes in good faith an American and nothing else, then he is out of place in this country and the sooner he leaves it the better.”17
The admonitions of Wilson and Roosevelt kept the twin threats of ethnicity and dissent on the front burner, as the preparedness engine steamrollered along, steadily gaining momentum. In the months following the huge New York City parade, similar demonstrations were held in large cities throughout the country.18 Wilson himself, decked out in a straw boater and carrying a large American flag, marched at the head of the Washington preparedness parade.
In his September speech accepting the Democratic renomination for the presidency, Wilson once again equated hyphenates with infidelity. The party platform, which Wilson was instrumental in drafting, denounced every organization seeking “the advancement of the interest of a foreign power” or tending “to divide our people into antagonistic groups and thus to destroy that complete agreement and solidarity … so essential to the perpetuity of free institutions.”19