by Jay Feldman
The press also picked up the call for surveillance. The Literary Digest invited readers “to clip and send us any editorial utterances they encounter which seem to them seditious or treasonable.” The New York Times proclaimed, “It is the duty of every good citizen to communicate to the proper authorities any evidence of sedition that comes to his notice. He may be mistaken, but nobody will be injured in that case”—a strikingly ingenuous assertion that would prove mistaken many times over.29 In Iowa, the editor of The Des Moines Capital wrote, “In the present crisis, what is the duty of every citizen? It is his duty to join a patriotic society. It is his duty to support President Wilson and the patriotic men who are struggling against all opposition in congress. It is his duty to find out what his neighbor thinks … It is every patriot’s duty to find out what the school teachers are intending to do in regard to patriotism.”30 Freedom of thought now joined freedom of speech and freedom of assembly on the list of endangered liberties.
While Congress was debating the Espionage Act, there was another piece of business that needed attention. In his war message, Wilson had proposed a military draft, and on May 18 the Selective Service Act was passed and signed into law. The fifth of June was designated as the date when men between twenty-one and thirty years of age were to register; failure to do so would bring a year in jail. Ironically, many immigrants from Europe, particularly Germans, who had fled to avoid conscription were now facing the same situation in their adopted country. “Thou shalt not Prussianize America!” challenged a broadside titled “No Conscription, No Involuntary Servitude, No Slavery.”31 Pacifists, Socialists, anarchists, and Wobblies all swore resistance to the draft.
On the night the draft law was signed, there was “a wild anti-conscription demonstration” in Harlem, sponsored by the No-Conscription League.32 The speakers included Emma Goldman, who has been accurately characterized as “the central figure of American anarchism” in early-twentieth-century America.33 “Red Emma,” as the press called her, was born in Lithuania, then part of Russia, and immigrated to the United States in 1885 at age sixteen. To the cornerstone anarchist belief that the perfection of humanity would render government unnecessary, Goldman brought a feminist consciousness, advocating issues like gender equality and birth control. Despite not being a native speaker, she was thoroughly fluent in English and an eloquent, charismatic orator.
The government and the American public had plausibly been on edge with regard to anarchists since the May 1886 Haymarket riot, in which anarchists were accused of throwing a bomb that killed a police officer at an open-air labor meeting in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. In the ensuing melee, seven other policemen and four workers were killed, and dozens more policemen were injured. Eight anarchists were tried for conspiracy to commit murder, and despite a conspicuous lack of evidence all were convicted. Seven were sentenced to hang, the eighth to serve fifteen years. One of the condemned men committed suicide in prison, and four others were executed in November 1887; the remaining two first had their sentences reduced to life imprisonment by one governor of Illinois and later received pardons from another.
Fears of anarchists in general and Goldman in particular were exacerbated by the September 1901 assassination of President William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz, a self-styled anarchist with a history of mental illness, who claimed to have been influenced by Goldman. Goldman was arrested as being the mastermind behind the assassination but was released after two weeks in custody for lack of evidence. Her editorial “The Tragedy at Buffalo,” published in Free Society the month after the killing, was not so much a defense of Czolgosz as a condemnation of “the economic and political conditions of this country,” but it nevertheless reinforced her image as a treacherous foe of American society.34
Goldman had undeniably been a thorn in the side of the government for decades, but despite her fiery and unwavering radicalism she had largely managed, except for two short prison terms, to escape attempts to prosecute her before the war. In the months leading up to America’s entry, however, Goldman’s incendiary rhetoric brought her under increasing scrutiny. Giving no quarter, she wrote in her publication Mother Earth in March 1917:
President Wilson and other officials of the administration assure us that they want peace. If that claim had even one grain of truth, the government would have long ago … put a stop to the export of munitions and food stuffs …
Washington is capable of nice phrases, but … it has never made a single determined step for peace …
[W]ar in this country is at present only a possibility, and already the Germans and the Austrians are being deprived of employment, ostracized and spied upon, persecuted and hounded …
These millions of Germans and Austrians … are now to be treated like enemy aliens, just because Wall Street feels itself checked in its unlimited use of the seas for plunder, robbery and theft …
Then there is the systematic, barbarous persecution of radical and revolutionary elements throughout the land …
The workers must learn that they have nothing to expect from their masters. The latter, in America, as well as in Europe, hesitate not a moment to send hundred thousands of the people to their death if their interests demand it …
I for one will speak against war so long as my voice will last, now and during war. A thousand times rather would I die calling to the people of America to refuse to be obedient, to refuse military service, to refuse to murder their brothers, than I should ever give my voice in justification of war, except the one war of all the people against their despots and exploiters—the Social Revolution.35
In the face of America’s growing war fever, such strident, outspoken opposition understandably alarmed the government. As the U.S. attorney Francis Caffey said, “Emma Goldman is a woman of great ability and of personal magnetism, and her persuasive powers are such as to make her an exceedingly dangerous woman.”36
At the May 18 anti-conscription meeting in Harlem, Goldman railed against the draft and promised that the rally would be just the first of many to come. In advising young men to refuse conscription, she would finally provide the government with a justification to take her out of circulation. No arrests were made, but police stenographers recorded the speakers’ every word, in order to later determine whether action would be taken.
As Goldman promised, there were more protests in New York and other locations around the country. “GOVERNMENT MOVES SWIFTLY TO CHECK WIDESPREAD EFFORT TO COMBAT CONSCRIPTION LAW,” read a May 29 New York Times headline, as more than two dozen men and women were arrested in Texas, Virginia, Detroit, Chicago, and Seattle. Attorney General Gregory was quoted as saying, “These arrests should be accepted by the country generally as a warning against interfering with the enforcement of the provisions of the new army law.”
On June 5, the day all men of draft age were required to register, there were incidents—including demonstrations, arrests, and beatings—all over the country. In Butte, Montana, a parade of six hundred men and women was “pounced upon by patriotic citizens, reinforced by the police”; troops with fixed bayonets broke up the ensuing riot, and the city was placed under martial law as soldiers patrolled the streets.37 National Guardsmen were called out in a Michigan mining town to prevent an anti-conscription demonstration from taking place. Members of the Navajo nation in northwestern Arizona drove a government agent off their reservation when he tried to register them, and Utes in Colorado similarly refused to sign up, spending the day instead performing traditional dances, while the governor of the Santo Domingo Pueblo in New Mexico was arrested along with two other prominent members of the pueblo for conspiring to prevent more than twenty Santo Domingo residents from registering.
In a June 10 editorial, The New York Times equated draft resistance with disloyalty, specifically laying the blame at the feet of those old bogeymen, the hyphenates, and keeping alive the conflation of dissent and anti-Americanism. “The Selective Draft act,” said the Times, “gives a long and sorely needed means of disciplining a certain insolen
t foreign element.”
At a June 11 meeting in New York where Emma Goldman spoke, U.S. agents detained thirty men who could not produce registration cards. “We would have been entirely justified in arresting every man who attended this meeting,” said the U.S. marshal Thomas D. McCarthy, “and they can be thankful that we did not. The United States is at war, and the people who attend and applaud anti-American utterances are not good Americans. I have informed this Goldman woman that we will not permit her to organize such meetings. If she does she will be arrested if I have to do it myself. This goes for all of her kind, too.”38
McCarthy did not wait for Goldman to organize another meeting. On June 15, he led a raiding party of two dozen men on anarchist headquarters in uptown Manhattan. Refusing to produce a search warrant, McCarthy and his agents confiscated a “wagon load of anarchist records and propaganda,” including an extensive card file and the ten-thousand-name subscription lists of Mother Earth and another anarchist publication, The Blast. They arrested Goldman and her colleague Alexander Berkman—according to The New York Times, “the two most notorious anarchists in the United States”—who had for weeks “been conducting a campaign against all the aspirations and activities of this Government,” during which time they had “almost preached sedition.”39†
Within weeks, the two anarchists were convicted, and each was sentenced to two years and a $10,000 fine. “It took a world war to put Goldman and Berkman where they should have been years ago,” crowed The Wall Street Journal.40
Meanwhile, the Espionage Act had been making its way through Congress. Title I, section 4 of the original bill gave the president the power during wartime to prohibit the publishing of “any information relating to the national defense which, in his judgment, is of such character that it is or might be useful to the enemy.”41 Despite the qualifier that this provision did not “limit or restrict any discussion, comment, or criticism of the acts or policies of the Government or its representatives,” a furor ensued as Congress and the press correctly interpreted this section of the bill to be a thinly disguised attempt to gag the press. Alarm bells went off everywhere.
The American Newspaper Publishers Association sent a letter to Vice President Thomas R. Marshall requesting that the provision be eliminated, claiming that it “strikes at the fundamental rights of the people, not only assailing their freedom of speech, but also seeking to deprive them of the means of forming intelligent opinion … The censorship proposed is believed to be a violation of the Constitution of the United States, which prohibits Congress from abridging the freedom of speech or of the press … In war especially the press should be free, vigilant, and unfettered.”42
Papers across the country reacted strongly. The Los Angeles Times accused the administration of “establishing a Caesarism, a Kaiserism, at home in the very era in which it is seeking to dispossess a Caesarism abroad,” while The New York Times said, “Let the attempt to suppress freedom of speech, in whatever guise it appears, be defeated unanimously.”43‡
Despite Wilson’s insistence that it was “imperative that powers of this sort should be granted,” anti-press-censorship sentiment prevailed, and the provision was struck from the legislation.44
Another troubling stipulation of the bill provided that any publication in violation of “any of the provisions of this act” or “of a treasonable or anarchistic character” could be banned from the mail by the postmaster general. Calling the provision “a menace to all,” Representative Meyer London of New York, the only Socialist in Congress, condemned its inherent potential for stifling dissent.45 Senator Charles S. Thomas of Colorado agreed, labeling it “a far greater evil than the evil which is sought to be prevented.”46
Representative Dick T. Morgan of Oklahoma, on the other hand, argued that “in time of war, in time of danger, in time of great national peril, it is necessary sometimes that individual citizens shall be willing to surrender some of the privileges which they have for the sake of the greater good.” He also expressed the opinion—which would be proved many times over to be mistaken—that “a man who is a true and loyal citizen, whose intentions toward this Nation are right and proper, need not fear that he will be convicted and sent to prison unjustly and unfairly.”47 (In fact, not one spy or saboteur would be convicted under the Espionage Act during World War I—the law would instead be directed against individuals who opposed the war on the basis of philosophical, political, or religious beliefs.)
Noting that the mailability provision gave broadly repressive powers to the postmaster general, London argued fervently against it:
There is nothing more oppressive in the world than a democracy gone mad, than a democracy which has surrendered its rights to an individual …
I want to lift my voice on behalf of free speech and the free word, both written and spoken. If there are any treasonable thoughts in the minds of the American people, I want them expressed; if there is any discontent with the war, I want to hear it. Is it or is it not treasonable to plead for international peace? … to demand a revocation of the war resolution? … to oppose the sending of an army abroad? …
I heard some people here attack certain utterances as treasonable which were nothing more than a protest against the war …
Let men speak freely. Do not drive them into the cellar of conspiracy. Do not turn people into hypocrites and cowards. Let us not, while we talk of fighting for liberty abroad, sacrifice and crush our liberties here.
… I am entirely willing to vote for every measure that will guard the military and naval secrets of the country. Further than that I will not yield. I will not surrender any of the liberties of the humblest citizen of the United States.48
London’s impassioned plea may have had an effect, for the bill’s final version removed the phrase “treasonable or anarchistic character” and substituted “any matter advocating or urging treason, insurrection, or forcible resistance to any law of the United States.”49 It was a Pyrrhic victory, however, as every fear that London and others expressed would soon be realized.
In the Senate, William Borah was one of only six to vote against the Espionage Act. In a letter to a friend, he wrote that “a more autocratic, more Prussian measure could not be found in Germany. It has all the ear marks of a dictatorship. It suppresses free speech and does it all in the name of war and patriotism.”50
On June 15, the same day that Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were arrested in New York, the Espionage Act became law. In addition to the powers granted the postmaster general, the statute made it illegal during wartime for any person to make any statement intended to interfere with military or naval operations, including recruitment and enlistment. The punishment for violating the act was up to ten years in prison and/or up to a $10,000 fine. The passage of the Espionage Act was a crucial step in the marginalization of dissident minorities, narrowing the avenues of opposition and making protest against the war increasingly dangerous.
*One unknown security measure was Wilson’s secret April 7 executive order regarding federal employees, which authorized heads of civil service departments to dismiss any employee who, “by reason of his conduct, sympathies, or utterances, or because of other reasons growing out of the war,” appeared to be a security risk. (The complete text of Wilson’s order can be found in Paul Van Riper, History of the United States Civil Service, p. 266.) By the beginning of July, The New York Times reported, “Suspected individuals have been subjected to strict surveillance and discharges from public service among this class have been frequent” (July 6, 1917).
†Berkman had previously served a fourteen-year sentence for the attempted assassination of the Homestead Steel manager Henry C. Frick, whom Berkman held responsible for Pinkerton detectives’ having fired upon striking workers at the Homestead plant in 1892. After his release from prison, Berkman renounced violence.
‡Six days later, the same New York Times would thunder against Emma Goldman’s right to speak out against the draft.
CHAPTER 3
The Heel of the Government
On April 7, the day after Congress declared war, 176 representatives of the Socialist Party of America had assembled at an emergency convention in St. Louis. At the time, Socialists were a significant minority force in American politics, particularly at the state and local levels. Party membership had peaked at nearly 120,000 in 1912, the year Eugene V. Debs received 900,000 votes—6 percent of the total cast—for president of the United States. By 1917, membership had declined to about 80,000, but Socialists still held many offices, and the Socialist Party publication Appeal to Reason enjoyed a weekly circulation of over half a million.
With their view of the war in Europe as a capitalist plot, Socialists had played a prominent role in the anti-preparedness movement. In March 1917, with war looking ever more likely, the party called the St. Louis meeting to decide the question of what stance it would take in the event that the United States became involved in the conflict—a fait accompli by the time the convention opened.
The position adopted by the delegates caused many prominent Socialists to resign from the party, but it was nevertheless approved by the national membership. It stated, in part, “Modern wars as a rule have been caused by the commercial and financial rivalry and intrigues of the capitalist interests in the different countries … War brings wealth and power to the ruling classes and suffering, death, and demoralization to the workers … We, therefore, call upon the workers of all countries to refuse to support their governments in their wars. The wars of the contending national groups of capitalists are not the concern of the workers.” The statement further asserted: “The American people did not and do not want this war. They have not been consulted about the war and have had no part in declaring war. They have been plunged into this war by the trickery and treachery of the ruling class of this country through its representatives in the national administration and National Congress, its demagogic agitators, its subsidized press, and other servile instruments of public expression.” In conclusion, the delegates vowed to maintain “continuous, active, and public opposition to the war.”1