Manufacturing Hysteria

by Jay Feldman

  If the investigations turned up nothing, it was only because the Wobblies were guilty of nothing—at least not in terms of their actions. Certainly, they had always preached “revolution, anti-militarism, and anti-patriotism,” but their activities were within the framework of the law, despite the countless unproven allegations to the contrary.7 So, when the investigations found nothing for which the IWW could be prosecuted, the Justice Department went to Plan B, the “something quite effective” that Assistant Attorney General Fitts alluded to in his letter to Senator Fall.8 In late August, Gregory wrote to Wilson, “You know of the intended action I have in mind with respect to the I.W.W.”9

  On August 19, in a precursor of what was soon to follow, troops raided IWW headquarters in Spokane, Washington, and arrested twenty-seven union members, all of whom were subsequently interned. The major assault, planned and carried out with military precision, came on September 5, when federal agents made simultaneous raids in thirty-three cities, hitting virtually every IWW office in the country, as well as a number of homes of IWW officers. Although “it was said that the move was not against the organization per se,”10 the real reason for the raids was known full well, as Francis F. Kane, U.S. attorney for Philadelphia, revealed in a letter to Gregory when he wrote, “our purpose being, as I understand it, very largely to put the I.W.W. out of business.”11

  In Chicago, eight different locations were raided, including the national headquarters of the Socialist Party, the offices of two German-language newspapers, and the residences of several IWW leaders. Among the many items agents confiscated at the home of Ralph Chaplin, editor of the IWW newspaper Solidarity, were three bundles of love letters Chaplin had written to his wife years earlier. The eight Chicago raids alone yielded more than five tons of correspondence, records, books, pamphlets, equipment, office supplies, furniture, and miscellany.

  With and without search warrants, the raids continued throughout the rest of the month, as federal agents sought additional incriminating “evidence.” They found plenty, all of it circumstantial. In IWW literature, they encountered revolutionary rhetoric; in IWW correspondence, they came across open discussions of industrial sabotage and firebombs; in official and personal documents, they located countless antigovernment and antiwar diatribes.

  On the basis of this evidence discovered in the confiscated documents, a Chicago federal grand jury indicted 166 IWW leaders, including Bill Haywood and Ralph Chaplin, on charges ranging from interfering in numerous ways with the war effort, to conspiring to obstruct the Selective Service Act, to violating various provisions of the Espionage Act. That many of the offending passages cited as evidence were written before the war, and thus before the Selective Service and Espionage acts were law, was of no consequence.

  Similar indictments soon followed in other cities, including Cleveland, Fresno, Omaha, Sacramento, San Francisco, and Wichita. It was the beginning of the end for the IWW.

  The following month, Congress passed the Trading with the Enemy Act, which increased the censorship powers of the postmaster general by requiring that foreign-language newspapers submit, for Post Office Department approval, English translations of all articles pertaining to the government, the conduct of the war, or any of the belligerent nations.

  The new law gave Postmaster General A. S. Burleson virtually absolute censorship powers.*

  On October 9, he served notice that “if newspapers go so far as to impugn the motives of the government and thus encourage insubordination, they will be dealt with severely.” He went on to specify what would not be tolerated:

  Papers may not say that the Government is controlled by Wall Street or munition manufacturers, or any other special interests. Publications of any news calculated to urge the people to violate law would be considered grounds for drastic action. We will not tolerate campaigns against conscription, enlistments, sale of securities, or revenue collections. We will not permit the publication or circulation of anything hampering the war’s prosecution or attacking improperly our allies.12

  The Trading with the Enemy Act was aimed squarely at the German-language press. Given the limited resources of most of these publications, the law was a de facto gag rule, forcing papers to either toe the government line or close down, which many did.

  The attack on the ethnic German press was merely the latest in the continuing campaign against German-Americans and German-American culture. Across the country, the names of parks, streets, schools, and even whole towns were renamed to remove any hint of Germanic influence. East Germantown, Indiana, became Pershing; officials in Berlin, Iowa, renamed their town Lincoln; and in Nebraska, Germantown was changed to Garland in honor of a local soldier who died in combat. Sauerkraut became “liberty cabbage”; hamburger went by “liberty steak.” German language courses were removed from school curricula, and in a number of cases teachers of German were summarily dismissed. The renowned violinist Fritz Kreisler was forced to retire from public appearances for the duration of the war, while the German-born Dr. Karl Muck, the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a Swiss citizen, was interned. Thousands of German families living in restricted areas were required to relocate, and thousands of others were confined to their neighborhoods, as untold numbers lost their jobs as a result. German-Americans were further stigmatized on November 16, when President Wilson issued eight additional enemy alien regulations, including the required registration of all male German aliens over the age of fourteen.

  Despite Gregory’s instructions that arrests of aliens “should be exercised with great care, so that innocent and harmless alien enemies may not be disturbed,” local authorities and citizen groups proceeded to make hundreds of unauthorized arrests, including many of non-enemy aliens, who were apprehended along with Germans.13 After posting bond and finding a sponsor who was an American citizen, most German aliens were released on parole within a few weeks, but many were held in jail for months while their cases were decided. Those deemed too dangerous for release—a large percentage of whom were Socialists, Wobblies, and union organizers—were handed over to the War Department for internment, either at Fort Douglas, Utah, or Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia. Grounds for internment included “anti-American remarks, failure to purchase Liberty Bonds, membership in the I.W.W.,† possessing pacifist or anti-war literature, or even information given by an anonymous informer to local officials for the purpose of eliminating a rival.”14 Through the end of October 1917, at least 895 alien enemies had been arrested on presidential warrants and 295 interned; by the end of the war, there would be nearly 6,300 warranted arrests and about 2,300 internments, many of which were for minor infractions.15 Ninety percent of those interned were labor leaders, leftists, IWW members, and anarchists. Countless thousands more were arrested without warrants.

  The arrests and internments were carried on as secretly as possible. According to John Lord O’Brian, “Government operations should remain a mystery so the arrest of a few would have the greatest possible impact on the many.”16

  Another element of this approach was the confiscation of alien enemy property. The alien property custodian, A. Mitchell Palmer, who would shortly succeed Gregory as attorney general and lend his name to one of the most flagrant violations of civil liberties in U.S. history, took possession of the holdings of interned aliens, claiming that the government was “merely protecting and conserving the property of the allies of the enemy.”17‡

  The number of enemy aliens rose dramatically when the United States declared war on Austria-Hungary on December 7. In the century preceding the war, close to four million Austro-Hungarians had immigrated to the United States, making them the fourth-largest ethnic group in the country, outnumbered only by Germans, Irish, and Italians. Concentrated in the industrial cities of the Northeast, two million Austro-Hungarian men were now in the same boat as German aliens.

  The lines were becoming increasingly blurred when it came to the varieties of the “disloyal”—that is, those who opposed the war on any grounds, b
e they moral, political, cultural, or religious. Socialists, anarchists, Wobblies, pacifists, and Germans were all lumped together and reviled. In a caveat to all “traitors,” Gregory issued a stern warning: “May God have mercy on them, for they need expect none from an outraged people and an avenging Government.”18

  Since the beginning of the war, pacifists had been denigrated as unpatriotic and lumped in the same category as “slackers,” that is, draft dodgers. Physical assaults on pacifists were not uncommon. One of the most highly publicized was the kidnapping of the Reverend Herbert Bigelow, a prominent Cincinnati pacifist and Socialist who had nevertheless publicly declared his support for the war on many occasions. Bigelow was seized by a gang of men before a scheduled speech in Newport, Kentucky, directly across the Ohio River from Cincinnati; he was forced into a car and driven out of town, where a gang of two or three dozen men “wearing white masks and aprons or skirts of the same material” removed his coat and vest and bullwhipped him “in the name of the women and children of Belgium and France.”19 After the flogging, they cut off locks of his hair and poured crude oil over his head. Before they drove off, the leader warned him to leave Cincinnati within thirty-six hours and stay away for the remainder of the war. Bigelow was hospitalized for a week.

  On July 2, 1917, the day after the Boston peace parade was broken up, a new organization was introduced, with one of its main functions being “the defense of men who refuse to fight on the ground that they are ‘conscientious objectors.’ ”20 The National Civil Liberties Bureau was an outgrowth of the American Union Against Militarism and the People’s Council of America for Democracy and Peace, two staunch antiwar organizations.§

  Its formation was a watershed moment in U.S. history, as the NCLB would become the American Civil Liberties Union soon after the war.

  Part of the need for defending conscientious objectors was that the Selective Service Act had granted CO status only to members of the traditional antiwar churches, such as the Quakers and Mennonites. Others who opposed the war on humanitarian, political, or ethnic grounds were left to try to convince skeptical draft boards of the sincerity of their beliefs. Even among those who received CO status, many were subjected to the harshest kind of treatment—because there was no official policy regarding alternate service before March 1918, conscientious objectors were until that time inducted into the Army and sent to boot camp, where they were held while the government decided what sorts of noncombatant roles were acceptable. In Army camps, COs often faced harangues, beatings, hosings, mock hangings, handcuffings, and other forms of physical and mental abuse. A few died from the mistreatment; a handful committed suicide. Of the close to twenty-one thousand conscientious objectors who were inducted into the Army, nearly seventeen thousand wound up accepting combat status rather than endure the continued abuse. Conscientious objectors who refused any sort of cooperation or noncombatant work were sentenced to prison terms of up to thirty-five years, though most were released by 1920.

  Through the winter and spring of 1918, the mood of the country turned increasingly ugly. In December, Vice President Thomas Marshall declared that Congress should confiscate the property and “take away the citizenship of every disloyal American—every American who is not in support of his Government in its crisis … This is no time for pacifists to be running loose.”21 In January, in a speech before the National Security League, Representative Julius Kahn of California, who had led the House fight on the draft law, proposed that “a few prompt trials and a few quick hangings would prove most salutary at this point.”22 In March, Senator Warren Harding suggested putting German spies “against the wall,”23 and the following month, on the day before Robert Prager was lynched in Collinsville, Illinois, former president Taft, while cautioning against mob rule, similarly expressed the opinion that spies should be court-martialed, lined up, and shot.24

  The reaction to the Prager murder was a demand for more stringent laws—not against mob rule but against the “disloyal.” On the day of the killing, Collinsville’s mayor, John Siegel, sent Senator Lee Overman of North Carolina a telegram urging him to do all he could to speed the passage of new legislation, believing “it would have a wholesome effect on those tending to be disloyal.”25 Expressing the logic of prevailing sentiment, Attorney General Gregory agreed, saying, “While the lynching of Prager is to be deplored, it cannot be condemned. The department of justice has repeatedly called upon Congress for the necessary laws to prevent just such a thing as happened in the Illinois town.”26 In other words, if dissent had been more forcefully restricted, a mob would not have had to take it upon itself to enforce vigilante justice. “Mob violence, in this view,” the historian David Kennedy has astutely observed, “was strangely transformed into the visible sign of a healthy society, vigorously rooting out criminal—or at least less than ‘decent’—elements from its midst.”27 Indeed, as The Washington Post editorialized, “Enemy propaganda must be stopped, even if a few lynchings may occur.”28 The fact that there was no evidence of Prager’s having been a spy or a traitor never entered the discussion, nor did the distinction between truly dangerous spies and saboteurs and those who simply opposed the war.

  In response to the demand for harsher legislation, Congress immediately sped up work on two pending bills. The Sabotage Act, passed on April 20, provided penalties for the destruction of property. But it was the Sedition Act, an amendment to the Espionage Act of 1917, that provided truly draconian limitations on freedom of speech and would come to be regarded as one of the most repressive laws ever enacted in the United States.

  According to Gregory, a new law was necessary because the Espionage Act “did not reach the individual casual or impulsive disloyal utterances.”29 That is, there was no way to prosecute the person who offhandedly said, “Damn this war,” or, “To hell with the government.”

  The Sedition Act made it unlawful to “utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States,” the Constitution, the flag, and the military forces or their uniforms.30 The irony of prohibiting any negative word about the Constitution by abridging the right of free speech guaranteed therein was lost on the supporters of the Sedition Act.

  The bill also made it illegal “to incite, provoke, or encourage resistance to the United States, or to promote the cause of its enemies.” One provision of the law forbade anyone to advocate any curtailment of a war-related product, leading the Georgia senator Thomas W. Hardwick to conclude that “the real—in fact, practically the only—object of this section is to get some men called I.W.W.’s.”31 The maximum penalties for any of these offenses were a $10,000 fine and/or twenty years in prison.

  Finally, the legislation empowered the postmaster general, “upon evidence satisfactory to him,” to return to the sender any mail that he suspected of being in violation of the act, with the words “ ‘Mail to this address undeliverable under Espionage Act’ plainly written or stamped upon the outside.” Burleson now held absolute power over every publication in the country. By the end of the war, he would in one way or another impede or completely shut down seventy-five different publications, more than half of which were Socialist.

  If there was any type of dissent not already squelched by the Espionage Act, the Sedition Act took care of it. Even Theodore Roosevelt was appalled, calling the bill “unconstitutional,” “sheer treason,” and “a proposal to make Americans subjects instead of citizens.”32

  Yet there was very little resistance to the bill in Congress. Hiram Johnson of California, one of the few senators to argue against it, called it the result of “a peculiar sort of mental hysteria.”33 The Republican conservative Henry Cabot Lodge declared he could not go along with the bill’s repressive extremes, arguing that the law was aimed not at curbing sedition but “at certain classes of agitators … in different parts of the country.”34

  Senator Miles Poindexter of Washington, on the other hand, could not understand his colleagues
’ uneasiness with the Sedition Act, or why they attached more value to “the right to talk as they choose and express all sorts of opinions than they do to the right of life and the right of property and the right of trade.”35 Representative William Bell Walton of New Mexico thought the measure did not go far enough, saying, “I would have voted for it much more readily if it carried the death penalty.”36

  The strongest opposition stand came from the Maryland senator Joseph I. France, who was of the opinion that such a repressive law had not “been enacted in any country since the dark ages” and introduced an amendment that stated “nothing in this act shall be construed as limiting the liberty or impairing the right of any individual to publish or speak what is true, with good motives, and for justifiable ends.”37 The Senate passed the France amendment unanimously, but the House-Senate conference committee killed it on the advice of the director of the Emergency War Division, John Lord O’Brian, who cautioned that “the most dangerous type of propaganda in this country is religious pacifism” because it was virtually impossible to impugn on the basis of motive.38

  The final version of the Sedition Act passed in the Senate by 48–26 (21 senators did not vote), and 293–1 in the House, where the New York Socialist Meyer London cast the lone vote against. On May 16, Wilson signed it into law. With few exceptions, editorial pages coast-to-coast hailed the Sedition Act as a welcome and long-overdue measure.