Manufacturing Hysteria
Page 4
The march resumed. After a few blocks, the “patriots,” now numbering three hundred servicemen and a thousand civilians, barged in from a side street and marched in formation through the length of the parade, “effectively ripping it apart and destroying all semblance” of its order. The American flag at the head of the procession was seized, and patriots snatched away the red flags with white circles, symbolizing peace, that many of the marchers carried. Fistfights broke out everywhere. One of the attackers was clubbed over the head by a police officer just as he grabbed a protester’s flag, but a Justice Department agent stepped in and whispered something to the patrolman, and the man was released. Boston’s finest tried to restore order, but “the willingness of the uniformed men and their followers to pitch into any who denied their demands was so evident few cared to encounter them,” and the police soon gave up trying to restrain them.
With their parade destroyed, the marchers “flowed onto the Common like a flood,” gathering with their remaining signs on the baseball field, where the melee resumed. The planned speakers, who included the president of the Pennsylvania State Federation of Labor, tried to make themselves heard, but the affair was beyond the point of rescue. The crowd ran about, “not unlike cattle,” rushing from one fight to another, as the rest of the protesters’ signs, banners, and flags were confiscated and trampled underfoot. Many of the usual Sunday visitors to the Common, who had unsuspectingly turned out to enjoy the sunshine, were buffeted about like driftwood in rough surf, suffering minor bruises and torn clothing. To avert worse trouble, the Boston police superintendent, Michael Crowley, revoked the marchers’ meeting permit that had been granted by the mayor’s office.
At about 4:00 p.m., the servicemen got the idea “to do a systematic job,” and they fell into formation and marched to Socialist Party headquarters at 14 Park Square. A crowd rushed up the two flights of stairs to the office, broke down the doors, and poured in. When a marine bugler appeared in one of the windows and played the opening notes of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the crowd in the street below took up the national anthem. After they finished, “the work of destruction began.” The office telephone was torn out; records, publications, furniture, and a suitcase containing clothing and personal effects were thrown out the windows onto the square, where they were fed into a bonfire. Servicemen draped the American flag that had been seized from the head of the parade over the Park Square statue of Abraham Lincoln.
Their work at the office accomplished, one of the soldiers cried out, “Come on, we’ll go back to the Common and bust up that meeting.” A group of servicemen and civilians formed up and began a parade of their own, waving the tattered and defaced banners they had taken from the protesters. Superintendent Crowley ordered his men not to interfere with the new march lest an even greater disaster ensue. The rest of the crowd surged back to the Common, exhorted by “dozens of leaders, each with a different idea of how to proclaim the triumph of patriotism.” More flags were planted on more statues. The throng swelled to about twenty thousand.
Adding a bizarre, surrealistic touch to the bedlam was the customary Sunday concert on Parkman Bandstand, which started up and continued, even as the contiguous pandemonium raged. Soon the men in military uniforms had taken over the management of the concert, instructing the orchestra on which songs to play and commanding the assembled listeners on when to doff their hats, as an ad hoc vigilance committee made sure they complied.
The mayhem had been in progress for almost three hours when a Justice Department agent telephoned the Navy Reserve office at Commonwealth Pier to request troops. Just before six o’clock, a squadron of thirty armed reservists arrived, creating the discomfiting prospect of reserve men acting against uniformed soldiers and sailors. In full view of the crowd, the three ensigns in charge “unlimbered their revolvers and made sure that the cartridge chambers were stocked.” Followed by a large crowd, the reservists cut through the Common to Park Square, where a second sacking of Socialist Party headquarters was under way. The order to fix bayonets was given.
As the reservists were locking their bayonets into place, a reporter asked one of the ensigns about who had ordered them to the scene and if they were enforcing martial law. He was told to “get out.” The ensign then ordered someone, anyone, to arrest the reporter, after which a uniformed man punched the journalist in the face, breaking his glasses. To prevent worse, a small group ushered the writer out of the area.
Working with the Boston police and federal Secret Service agents, the reservists methodically cleared Park Square and restored an air of order to the Common before withdrawing. By the end of the afternoon, ten people had been arrested.
One Boston newspaper called the assault on the march “a deep disgrace to Boston and a sorry stain to the American uniform … in a year when the nation has been urged to give its blood to ‘make the world safe for democracy.’ ”
Among the protest signs that were demolished in the fray was one that read, “First War Victims—Freedom of Assembly, Freedom of Speech.”
The repression began immediately after Congress declared war, as the Wilson administration unleashed an all-out assault on dissent with a three-pronged attack of legislation, propaganda, and surveillance.
When the American people reelected Woodrow Wilson in 1916, they voted to stay out of the war. It is questionable, however, whether Wilson ever felt bound by his campaign slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War,” with its implied promise of continued neutrality, as his veiled intentions were revealed in a letter to a friend two days after his war message to Congress. “It was necessary for me,” Wilson wrote, “by very slow stages indeed and with the most genuine purpose to avoid war to lead the country on to a single way of thinking.”3
Now that war had arrived, the Wilson administration went to work to stifle opposition and to make certain that the entire country adhered to that “single way of thinking.” On the very day that the United States entered the war, Wilson issued a proclamation, based on the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (one of the Alien and Sedition Acts), categorizing “all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of Germany, being males of fourteen years and upwards, who shall be within the United States and not actually naturalized,” as “alien enemies.”4 The proclamation contained twelve regulations “for the public safety,” forbidding alien enemies to, among other things, possess firearms or other munitions, use aircraft or wireless devices, criticize in writing the U.S. government, and reside or remain in any area designated by the president as “restricted.” Violation of any of the twelve regulations meant “summary arrest.” Ten days after the United States declared war, Congress passed an updated version of the Alien Enemies Act.
Even before war was declared, “elaborate preparations” had been made for the detention of German aliens deemed dangerous.5 Since August 1914, the Department of Justice had been compiling the names of Germans and German sympathizers, and on March 30, Assistant Attorney General Charles Warren (who framed Wilson’s April 6 proclamation on alien enemies) wrote to Attorney General Thomas W. Gregory to recommend a swift and repressive course of action, despite having no indication of illegal activity. “There are many dangerous leaders and plotters in New York and elsewhere,” wrote Warren, “of whom we have no absolute evidence, at present, of having committed a Federal crime but yet who would be very dangerous if left at large. It seems to me the height of folly to wait until these German aliens commit crimes before we arrest them. I believe that the wise policy is to avert trouble and not try and remedy it after it has happened.”6
On the heels of the declaration of war, sixty-three German aliens—now “enemy aliens”—were arrested. This was just the beginning of the crackdown, and German-Americans were not the only ones who would come under attack as the government used the alleged threat from hyphenates to institute a wide-ranging curtailment of civil liberties and the expression of dissent. In turn, the public carried on these tactics as a popular extension of official policy.
As early
as December 1915, in Wilson’s third annual message to Congress, in which he attacked immigrants who “poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life,” the president had appealed for stronger laws to deal with “disloyal” behavior.7 The day after his speech, Wilson’s cabinet instructed Gregory to develop such legislation, and in June 1916 the attorney general’s proposals, aimed at addressing “the new conditions of warfare by propaganda,” were presented to both House and Senate committees for consideration.8 The proposed legislation was aimed at restricting freedom of speech and the press as well as punishing sabotage, but Congress adjourned before any bill could be considered.
During a special session of Congress in early February 1917, Senator Lee Overman and Representative Edwin Webb, both of North Carolina, introduced bills in their respective bodies based on Gregory’s recommendations. The Senate version passed on February 20. At the House Judiciary Committee hearings, Norman Thomas, then a young New York minister, testified on behalf of the American Union Against Militarism, a stronghold of pacifist principles and activism. Despite guarantees from the bill’s supporters that it would never be brought to bear against “loyal” Americans, Thomas expressed his disquiet, arguing, “It certainly could be used to muzzle such conscientious objectors as the Quakers and other good souls, although treason would be the last thing to enter their minds.”9 Thomas’s concerns were not without basis—from Wilson on down, the definition of “disloyal” had never been spelled out.
Though the House adjourned on March 4 before the Overman-Webb bill could be brought to a vote, the special congressional session did bring forth the Threats Against the President Act, which presaged the coming trend.10 When Congress reconvened on April 2 to hear Wilson’s war message, the Overman-Webb bill, now known as the Espionage Act, was placed at the top of the legislative agenda.
Just how quickly the wheels were rolling may be evidenced by an April 17 letter from the AUAM to Wilson, expressing alarm over the snowballing infringements on civil liberties, even before any restrictive laws had been passed.* The letter, signed by such notables as Jane Addams, Herbert S. Bigelow, Samuel Gompers, Morris Hillquit, George Foster Peabody, Amos Pinchot, and Rabbi Stephen Wise, communicated trepidation that
the administration of such laws … may easily lend itself to the suppression of free speech, free assemblage, popular discussion and criticism … Even by this time, we have seen evidence of the breaking down of immortal rights and privileges. Halls have been refused for public discussion; meetings have been broken up; speakers have been arrested and censorship exercised, not to prevent the transmission of information to enemy countries, but to prevent the free discussion by American citizens of our own problems and policies. As we go on, the inevitable psychology of war will manifest itself with increasing danger, not only to individuals, but to our cherished institutions.11
The letter urged Wilson to “make an impressive statement” that would remind people “of the peculiar obligation devolving upon all Americans in this war to uphold in every way our constitutional rights and privileges,” but no such statement was forthcoming from the White House.
What emerged instead was the Committee on Public Information, the official state organ of propaganda, created by Wilson on April 14 and headed by George Creel. The CPI, with its daily publication, the Official Bulletin, and a torrent of other pamphlets, films, signs, and additional media output, was instrumental in creating the climate of paranoia and war hysteria, feeding the notion, as one historian has written, “that spies and saboteurs lurked behind every bush.”12
According to John Lord O’Brian, director of the Justice Department’s Emergency War Division, “No other one cause contributed so much to the oppression of innocent men as the systematic and indiscriminate agitation against what was claimed to be an all-pervasive system of German espionage.” Writing after the war, O’Brian cited “the large number of false stories of enemy activities within the United States, put forth through the medium of press dispatches, pamphlets of patriotic societies and occasionally speeches on the floor of Congress.”13
The efforts of the CPI were coupled with the emergence of a rash of patriotic vigilance organizations with names like the All-Allied Anti-German League, the American Anti-Anarchy Association, the Anti–Yellow Dog League, the Boy Spies of America, the Sedition Slammers, and the Terrible Threateners. By August 1917, Gregory reported having several hundred thousand private citizens engaged in spying on their neighbors. (This despite Gregory’s opinion, expressed in a July cabinet meeting, that all the “talk of spies” was little more than “hysteria.”14)
Two of the most powerful of these groups were the National Security League, originally formed at the beginning of the European war to advocate for preparedness and universal military training, and its offshoot the American Defense Society, which had declared itself upon formation to be “the announced enemy of those peace organizations who urge disarmament.”15 The former was funded by men like Cornelius Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Simon Guggenheim; the latter had Theodore Roosevelt as its honorary president. According to Creel, these two groups “were chiefly responsible for the development of a mob spirit in many sections.”16
But the largest, and probably most influential, of the vigilance organizations was the American Protective League.17 The APL was created in late March 1917, when the Justice Department accepted the offer of the Chicago businessman Albert Briggs to form a volunteer organization that would act as an arm of the department and investigate foreign agents and “persons unfriendly to this Government.”18 On May 12, the Justice Department announced that the APL would gather intelligence but would supposedly have no authority to make arrests “except after consultation with the Federal authorities.”19 In the first three months, the APL enlisted almost 100,000 bankers, businessmen, industrialists, and professionals in six hundred locales; by the end of the war the membership would grow to 250,000.
From its Washington office, the APL used Justice Department letterhead, giving it the appearance of a legitimate arm of the government. Reinforcing this impression was the badge members bought for one dollar that originally said “Secret Service Division” but was later changed to read “Auxiliary of the U.S. Department of Justice” after the Treasury Department complained that the first wording might cause confusion with its own Secret Service.
Despite its semiofficial status, the APL was in fact a vigilante manifestation of what O’Brian would later call the wartime “spy mania,” a domestic surveillance organization that functioned as a quasilegal, quasigovernmental adjunct to the Justice Department.20 One writer has characterized the APL as a “government-sponsored lynch-mob which proudly took the law into its own hands in summary and brutal fashion.”21
APL members were responsible for countless illegal arrests and detentions, and in his book about the organization, Emerson Hough boasted that the APL had illegally opened mail, tapped phones, and broken into homes and offices “thousands of times [but] never been detected.”22 Hough claimed that the league brought three million cases of disloyalty to judgment. As preposterous as that figure appears, it is not beyond credibility that in its patriotic zeal the APL actually conducted “investigations” of and maintained files on that many citizens—a year after the founding of the organization, Gregory said that vigilance groups enabled the government to keep tabs on hundreds of thousands of individuals: “We have representatives at all meetings of any importance. We use large numbers of men, and some women, who understand and speak the German language. Gatherings of Germans are given special attention.”23
The vigilance organizations were merely one component of the new surveillance state that was taking hold. People were also actively encouraged to spy on their neighbors. “Complaints of even the most informal or confidential nature are always welcome,” Gregory told U.S. district attorneys. “Citizens should feel free to bring their information or suspicions to the attention of the nearest representative of the D
epartment of Justice.”24 As a result, a thousand letters or more poured into the department every day, the overwhelming majority of which, not surprisingly, were of no importance.
The government also instituted a practice of factory surveillance called the Plant Protection Section in companies with defense contracts, which may have amounted to as many as 37,000 firms.25 Ordinary workers, without their knowledge or consent, were kept under observation by their fellow employees. PPS members infiltrated unions, filing reports on organizing efforts, strike tactics, and leaders’ activities, and often causing dissension in the ranks. They opened mail, broke into homes, and employed a variety of other illegal tactics in gathering information on “suspects.”
Spying on civilians thus became the order of the day. At the end of April, First Assistant Postmaster J. C. Koons sent a directive to local postmasters, instructing them to “keep on the lookout” for “anything which might be important.”26
The Bureau of Investigation (precursor to the Federal Bureau of Investigation), which had grown from a hundred agents in 1914 to three hundred in 1916, continued its rapid expansion during the war. The Military Intelligence Division mushroomed to three hundred uniformed officers and a thousand civilian employees. Both the BI and the MID were heavily involved in spying on civilians. The Justice Department conducted investigations of sixty thousand enemy aliens in the course of the war.27 By 1918, Gregory would boast that “never in its history has this country been so thoroughly policed as at the present time.”28