by Jay Feldman
They might just as well have painted targets on their backs. When the Espionage Act went into effect, the Socialists were fish in a barrel, and the government wasted no time in starting to pick them off. Leading the target practice was Postmaster General A. S. Burleson.
A Texas native, Burleson was a small-minded autocrat with what one biographer described as “a calculated pomposity that provoked Woodrow Wilson to call him ‘the Cardinal.’ ”2 In the course of his tenure as postmaster general, Burleson saw to it that white and black postal workers were segregated, and throughout the South he routinely demoted and fired large numbers of African-Americans.
In applying the non-mailability provision of the Espionage Act, he would make a mockery of Wilson’s assurances that no part of the law would “be used as a shield against criticism” or to deny people “their indisputable right to criticize their own public officials.”3 Burleson’s heavy-handed tactics in banning from the mail virtually all publications critical of the war and the administration would lead Upton Sinclair to write, in a letter to Wilson, “Your Postmaster-General reveals himself a person of such pitiful and childish ignorance … it is simply a calamity that in this crisis he should be the person to decide what may or may not be uttered by our radical press … It is hard to draw the line, Mr. President, as to the amount of ignorance permitted to a government official; but Mr. Burleson is assuredly on the wrong side of any line that could be drawn by anyone.”4
As soon as the Espionage Act became law, the postmaster general rolled up his sleeves and got down to serious business. The day after Wilson signed the new legislation, Burleson sent a secret directive to local postmasters across the country, instructing them to “keep a close watch on unsealed matters, newspapers, etc.,” looking for anything “calculated to … cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty in the military or naval service, or to obstruct the recruiting, draft or enlistment services … or otherwise embarrass or hamper the Government in conducting the war.”5 Local postmasters were instructed to forward any suspect material to Washington. By including material that might “embarrass” the government, Burleson clearly exceeded his authority, imputing to the Espionage Act stipulations that its language nowhere expressed or even implied.
On July 6, Burleson banned Chicago’s American Socialist from the mail for advertising a leaflet called “The Price We Pay,” which the newspaper had published as an article two months earlier. The piece claimed that America’s entry into the war “was determined by the certainty that if the allies do not win, J. P. Morgan’s loans to the allies will be repudiated, and those American investors who bit on his promises would be hooked.”6
By the following week, a dozen more Socialist publications had been denied mailing, including Chicago’s International Socialist Review, Detroit’s Michigan Socialist, St. Louis’s Social Revolution and St. Louis Labor, Philadelphia’s People’s Press, Cleveland’s Socialist News, New York’s Four Lights, and Girard, Kansas’s Appeal to Reason. Yet Burleson would steadfastly maintain that he was not targeting Socialist publications, disingenuously asserting that a publication was non-mailable only if it contained “treasonable or seditious matter,” then adding, “The trouble is most socialist papers do contain this matter.”7
Burleson also went after Max Eastman’s monthly, The Masses, an attractive and dynamic journal in both its style and its content, with a distinguished list of contributors that included luminaries like Sherwood Anderson, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, John Reed, Bertrand Russell, Carl Sandburg, Louis Untermeyer, and Mary Heaton Vorse. As one admirer saw it, The Masses was an elegant publication, “with bright-colored covers and oversize pages filled with bold drawings and lively satire, political criticism and intellectual commentary.”8 Another referred to it as a repository of “almost everything … alive and irreverent in American culture.”9
The government viewed The Masses quite differently. The attorney general’s report described it as “not an official Socialist paper,” although “the group of men editing it may be said to belong to the literary, as distinguished from the political, type of Socialist agitators.” The magazine’s content was characterized as “glorifying those who objected to war and resisted military service, and picturing the war as a base conspiracy of the capitalists, and all who participate in the war as nothing better than abject victims of this conspiracy.”10
In the June 1917 issue, Eastman had written of America’s involvement in the European conflict, “It is not a war for democracy. It did not originate in a dispute about democracy, and it is unlikely to terminate in a democratic settlement.… [M]en have already been sent to jail since April 6th upon the theory that it is treason to tell an unpleasant truth about one’s country.” The article also advised readers of The Masses to resist the “war-fever and the patriotic delirium” and save their strength for the “struggle of human liberty against oppression.”
The August issue of The Masses contained a number of cartoons and articles critical of the war and the draft, as well as a poem praising Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. Burleson declared it non-mailable, and when Eastman repeatedly asked post office officials to identify those passages that were causing the publication to be banned, they refused, citing simply the “general tenor” of the issue.11 “I spent the whole winter,” Eastman told an emergency meeting of publishers in New York, “trying to think up the worst possible consequences of our going to war … but I never succeeded in thinking up anything half so bad as this.”12
On July 12, Eastman, Amos Pinchot, and John Reed wrote to Wilson, listing a dozen publications that had been effectively suppressed and asking him whether he thought that “free criticism, right or wrong, of the policy of the government ought to be denied at this time … Is it not of the utmost importance in a democracy that the opposition to the government have a free voice? Can it be necessary, even in war time, for the majority of a republic to throttle the voice of a sincere minority?”13
Forwarding the letter to Burleson, Wilson sought the postmaster general’s advice. “These are very sincere men,” the president wrote, “and I should like to please them.”14 Burleson’s answer was that the listed publications had not been suppressed; rather, particular issues of them had simply not been approved for mailing. He further assured the president that the post office had no intention of stifling criticism of the government.
Eastman sought a restraining order against the mailing ban, and in a courageously independent decision Judge Learned Hand of the Southern District of New York granted a temporary injunction, thereby declining to make the Espionage Act a vehicle for suppression of all dissent against the war.15
The same day Hand signed the injunction, however, Burleson appealed to a circuit court judge in Vermont, who, using a rare and long-discarded practice, issued an order staying Hand’s order until a hearing on Burleson’s appeal could be held. As Eastman later wrote, the judge “decided to hold up our August issue until its value was lost in order to find out whether it should be held up or not.”16
Then, adding insult to injury, Burleson rescinded the publication’s second-class mailing status on the grounds that because it had missed mailing one issue, it was no longer a periodical. As Upton Sinclair protested to Wilson, this Kafkaesque decree was “as if a policeman were to knock a man down, and then, because he cried out in pain, arrest him for making a public disturbance.”17 Nevertheless, it was a tactic that Burleson employed against all the banned publications.
In the course of Burleson’s assault on the dissident press, Wilson made only the feeblest attempts to control him. Wilson’s biographer Ray Stannard Baker recounts an exchange in which the president told the postmaster general, “Now Burleson, these are well-intentioned people. Let them blow off steam.”18
According to Baker, Burleson replied, “I am willing to let them blow off steam, providing they don’t violate the Espionage Act. If you don’t want the Espionage Act enforced I can resign.”
“Well, go ahead and d
o your duty,” Wilson acquiesced.
On another occasion, Wilson urged Burleson to “act with the utmost caution and liberality in all our censorship,” and in one case he advised the postmaster general that “there is a margin of judgment here and I think that doubt ought always to be resolved in favor of the utmost freedom of speech.”19
Burleson brushed off all of these directives, and Wilson rolled over, never pursuing the issue to any meaningful degree. “I am willing to trust your judgment after I have once called your attention to a suggestion,” he told the postmaster general, essentially giving him free rein.20 In public, he defended Burleson’s actions as “very just and conciliatory,” telling those who expressed concerns that they had misinterpreted the postmaster general’s intent.21*
When the circuit court of appeals reversed Judge Hand’s ruling in the Masses case in early November, it delivered a devastating blow for repression. Emboldened by the decision, Burleson stepped up his campaign against left-wing publications. The aftermath of the decision against The Masses ravaged not only the Socialist press but the Socialist movement nationwide, particularly in rural areas, where subscribers were dependent on their newspapers for information and thus lost the drift of the mainstream Socialist current.
The more militant Industrial Workers of the World suffered even rougher treatment than the Socialists, from whose bosom they had sprung a dozen years earlier. The Socialist movement at least had some leaders who were looked upon by the ruling class as respectable. Principals like Allan Benson, Charles Edward Russell, Upton Sinclair, John Spargo, and Rose Pastor Stokes had been quick to endorse the war and repudiate the April 7 St. Louis declaration. The Wobblies, on the other hand, hardly retained a claim on respectability in 1917.
With an ideology that the IWW historian Melvyn Dubofsky called “a peculiar amalgam of Marxism and Darwinism, anarchism and syndicalism—all overlaid with a singularly American patina,” the Wobblies were situated on the extreme left wing of the labor movement.22 Formed in 1905 in Chicago, at a convention that included many prominent Socialists, anarchists, and radical trade unionists, the IWW was founded as a reaction against Samuel Gompers’s American Federation of Labor, after the latter group repudiated socialism and aligned itself with capital. As the only labor group to organize migrant workers, the Wobblies attracted many immigrants but also counted many U.S. citizens as members.
The IWW gained worldwide attention in 1914–15, when the Wobbly organizer Joe Hill was convicted, upon the flimsiest of evidence, of a Utah murder and subsequently executed, despite the blatant holes in the prosecution’s case and an outpouring of support from around the globe.
While the IWW supported the AFL’s fight for an eight-hour day and higher wages, the Wobblies’ long-term goal was to take over industry and abolish the wage system altogether. Whereas the mainstream union movement was committed to working with employers in order to secure better pay and working conditions, the preamble to the IWW charter bluntly stated, “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common … It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism.”23 The IWW slogans “One Big Union” and “An Injury to One Is an Injury to All” were a repudiation of traditional trade unionism in favor of a worldwide syndicalist affiliation of workers, “with an uncompromising attitude of hostility toward organized capital.”24 It was this animosity to the employing class and the expressed intent to take over industry that so alarmed business interests and eventually led to the government crackdown on the IWW.
Focusing on the bottom rung of the labor force—the unskilled and the migrant workers whom organized labor ignored—the Wobblies were considered an unadulterated threat to the American way of life. This was hardly surprising, given published statements like, “Of all the idiotic and perverted ideas accepted by the workers … patriotism is the worst,”25 and pronouncements from the IWW leader William D. “Big Bill” Haywood like, “It is better to be a traitor to your country than to your class.”26
Though membership would never reach beyond 100,000, the union’s strident militancy alarmed big business from the outset, and the federal government, in its alliance with capital, had been gunning for the Wobblies since early 1912, when the union’s growing strength and influence were amply demonstrated by its management of the successful Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile strike.
In September 1912, the Republican National Committee proposed “vigorous action” against the Wobblies in California as a way of delivering the state to President William Howard Taft in the upcoming presidential election. The RNC argued, “Regardless of the political aspect of the situation … the Government should use all its power … to stamp out the revolutionary methods of this anarchistic organization.”27
At the same time, a group of five hundred powerful Southern California Republicans sent a delegate to Taft with documents that supposedly showed a conspiracy of ten thousand anarchists and Wobblies, headed by Emma Goldman, poised “to introduce a new form of government, or non-government,” in California. Taft agreed that California was a hotbed of subversion and recommended to Attorney General George W. Wickersham, “We ought to take decided action … [I]t is our business to go in and show the strong hand of the government.”28 After an investigation of the evidence, however, the attorney general’s office found no cause to move against the Wobblies.
By 1913, it had become clear that the Wobblies, with their belief in direct action—strikes, propaganda, boycotts—stood in opposition to the Socialist program of political action, and when Big Bill Haywood was removed from the Socialist Party’s National Executive Committee in 1913, the two organizations went their separate ways. Over the next several years, the union continued to make gains in the wheat fields of the Midwest, the mines of the Southwest, and the timber industry of the Northwest, even as it attracted further scrutiny.
When war fever gripped the country, the Wobblies took an intractable stance against American involvement. “Let the capitalists fight wars for their interests!” proclaimed an editorial in Seattle’s Industrial Worker. “The working-class are fighting for theirs, and arrayed against us, we find the very interests that are now asking us to fight for them. Capitalists of America, we will fight against you, not for you!”29 Many IWW leaders viewed American involvement as an opportunity to make inroads against the bosses. “Why should we, on our part, sacrifice working class interests, for the sake of a few noisy and impotent parades or antiwar demonstrations?” wrote one prominent Wobbly in February. “Let us rather get on the job of organizing the working class to take over the industries, war or no war, and stop all future capitalist aggression that leads to war and other forms of barbarism.”30
Such talk unnerved the big-business community. In a confidential May 1917 report to the Council of National Defense, James A. B. Scherer, president of the college that would later become the California Institute of Technology, stated that the IWW “recognizes no law, no obligations, no ethical control … It should be exterminated as we would exterminate a nest of vermin—swiftly, secretly, and completely, since otherwise it will more and more infest the body politic and ultimately reach the very heart of government.”31
By the summer of 1917, the IWW had become, according to the National Civil Liberties Bureau, “the most bitterly attacked and most deliberately misrepresented of all labor organizations.”32 In little more than a decade of existence, the Wobblies had been assigned a place among the most feared and despised bogeymen in America. As the investigative reporter Robert W. Bruère wrote in his 1918 chronicle, Following the Trail of the I.W.W., “Very few people had any accurate knowledge of the tenets or tactics of the I.W.W. The three letters had come to stand in the popular mind as a symbol of something bordering on black magic; they were repeated over and over again by the press … and were always accompanied with suggestions of impending violence.”33 In no small part because of the revolutionary rhetoric of their publications, the Wobblies had acquired an undeserved reputation as property-de
stroying anarchists, “cut-throat, pro-German … desperadoes who burn harvest-fields, drive iron spikes into fine timber and ruin the mill-saws, devise bomb plots, who obstructed the war and sabotaged the manufacture of munitions—veritable supermen, with a superhuman power for evil, omnipresent and almost omnipotent.”34
In addition to their own published statements, another dynamic contributed to the unfair demonization of the IWW. All too often, the more radical of the Wobblies—that is, those advocating violent measures—turned out to be company or government infiltrators who were trying to incite some form of illegal activity. In an August 20, 1917, letter to Attorney General Thomas Gregory, the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts attributed “a good share of the virulent socialism and IWW-ism to private detective agencies … These agencies are the meanest, lowest, parasitic pests now present in the community.” He went on to explain that the agencies would place one of their men in a factory job, making it impossible to tell whether the radicalism of any given labor group was genuine or “one of these pseudo, artificial creations of the trouble-making detective agency.”35
With business interests exerting increasing pressure on the government to shut the Wobblies down, U.S. involvement in World War I provided the government with a golden opportunity. In early summer, IWW-instigated strikes broke out both in the copper mines of Arizona and Montana and in the forests of Washington and Idaho.
The mining and timber industries were both vital to the war effort, and the strikers were viewed by many as putting their own interests above those of the nation. In reaction, a wave of hysteria swept through the press as newspapers throughout the country condemned a supposed nationwide IWW conspiracy to hamper essential war production. In fact, as opposed as the Wobblies were to the war, there was no evidence to indicate any coordinated national effort on their part—of the 521 labor disputes that occurred between April and October 1917, the IWW was involved in only the aforementioned locales—much less in any plot to interfere with the war effort.36 The strikes, as later investigations would clearly show, were about higher wages, shorter hours, overtime pay, union recognition, better working conditions, and in the case of the northwestern lumberjacks—whose camps were unimaginably squalid—better living conditions.