Manufacturing Hysteria

by Jay Feldman

  The Harvard Law Review, however, wrote that the law left

  little room for any public discussion adverse to the war policies of the national government … and if [it] is held to be constitutional, the power of Congress to abridge the time-honored right of freedom of speech will seem well established … Freedom of speech, being a constitutional guaranty, cannot be abridged in times of stress and strain any more than when the country is at peace … [T]rue patriotism consists as much in protecting the legal and constitutional rights of individuals as it does in giving the government an undivided and whole-hearted support.39

  When the Sedition Act became law, the trial of the Chicago Wobblies had been going on for a month and a half. The judge in the case was Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who would soon become the first commissioner of baseball following the 1919 Black Sox scandal, a post he would hold until his death in 1944, during which time he would use the power of his office to keep organized baseball racially segregated.

  Of the 166 Wobblies who had been arrested, 53 were released for lack of evidence. The remaining 113 were each charged with four counts of conspiring to hinder the draft and interfere with the U.S. war program by disrupting industrial production. After a month of jury selection, the actual trial phase finally got under way on May 1.

  The defendants never had a prayer. Relying more on public opinion than on hard evidence, the government concentrated on IWW philosophy, its criticisms of capitalism, various antiwar literature, written discussions of sabotage, and advocacy of the general strike. In effect, the prosecution put the IWW on trial rather than the 113 defendants. After almost four months of testimony, the jury took just fifty-five minutes to find 96 men guilty on all four counts. With 113 defendants each charged with four counts, the jury had spent an average of 29.2 seconds per defendant and 7.3 seconds per count. The prison sentences ranged from a few days to the maximum twenty years, and the fines from $20,000 to $30,000. Bill Haywood and Ralph Chaplin were among the 14 who got twenty years.

  • • •

  With Haywood and Emma Goldman out of circulation, the federal government had silenced the two most dynamic and influential leaders of the IWW and anarchist movements. Now it targeted the last of the big three, the Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs.

  When the government went after the charismatic Debs in June 1918, two other important Socialist leaders had already been convicted of Espionage Act violations. In December 1917, Debs’s close friend Kate Richards O’Hare was sentenced to five years for an antiwar speech she had delivered in North Dakota the previous July.40 Six months later, Rose Pastor Stokes, who had resigned from the Socialist Party after its April 1917 antiwar proclamation only to rejoin the following February, received a ten-year sentence for writing, in a March letter to The Kansas City Star, “No government which is for the profiteers can also be for the people, and I am for the people, while the Government is for the profiteers.”41

  After O’Hare’s conviction, Debs, an electrifying speaker, was increasingly outspoken in his defense of those serving prison sentences for violating the Espionage Act, and in his criticism of Wilson and the war. On June 16, he delivered a passionate and defiant speech at Canton, Ohio, that would go down in the annals of great American oratory. He began by saying, “It is extremely dangerous to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a country fighting to make democracy safe in the world … I must be exceedingly careful, prudent, as to what I say, and even more careful how I say it.” Debs then proceeded to throw all caution to the wind, inviting the wrath of the government upon himself:

  Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder … The master class has always declared the war; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—especially their lives …

  [T]he working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and alone make peace …

  They are continually talking about your patriotic duty. It is not their but your patriotic duty that they are concerned about. There is a decided difference. Their patriotic duty never takes them to the firing line or chucks them into the trenches …

  War makes possible all … crimes and outrages. And war comes in spite of the people. When Wall Street says war the press says war and the pulpit promptly follows with its Amen.42

  Debs was indicted on June 19 and tried in September. The prosecuting attorney called him “the palpitating pulse of the sedition crusade.”43 He was convicted and sentenced to ten years.

  Throughout the spring and summer of 1918, the American Protective League, working with local law-enforcement agencies and/or military personnel, had been carrying on “slacker” raids to ferret out draft dodgers in cities across the country. In large sweeps, they stopped men on the street, in saloons, at ballparks, in movie theaters, in restaurants, and demanded to see proof of their draft status. Those lacking draft registration cards—which the Selective Service Act required registrants to have in their possession at all times—were arrested, often at bayonet point by soldiers or at gunpoint by APL agents, and held in custody while their draft boards were wired for verification of their status; in some cases, it was weeks before confirmation was received and the men were released. At least one raid, and more typically a series, was carried out in Birmingham, Boston, Cleveland, Davenport, Dayton, Detroit, Galveston, Louisville, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and St. Louis.

  By July 1, an estimated 100,000 men had been arrested and detained.44 The government and the APL justified the raids on the basis of the 20,000 slackers apprehended, with no mention of the 80,000 innocent men who were taken into custody. In Chicago, a three-day July offensive carried out by ten thousand APL members canvassed 150,000 men and arrested 16,000, of whom only 1,200 were draft dodgers and 265 deserters. By the end of August, the raids had netted 30,000 slackers.

  The raiders saved the New York City area for last. On September 3 and 4, with the war already winding down, a force of Justice Department agents, APL members, a thousand sailors, and several thousand soldiers swept New York City and five northern New Jersey cities. Newspaper accounts gave differing numbers, but according to The New York Times a staggering 60,187 men were arrested or temporarily detained.45 The Times reported that 16,500 were slackers, but the actual number of draft dodgers was only about 1,300; the rest were delinquents whose records were out of date for one reason or another.46

  The sheer magnitude and widespread press coverage of the New York raids raised a cry of outrage in the press and in the Senate. Frank Cobb, editor of the New York World and a confidant and unwavering supporter of Wilson, was irate, calling the raids a “lawless proceeding,” a “monstrous invasion of human rights,” and “a shameful abuse of power.”47‖

  The Nation denounced the Wilson administration for allowing “arrests without warrants, mostly by striplings in uniform and irresponsible agents of a volunteer self-appointed protective (!) league.”48 Even The New York Times, ordinarily the establishment’s inveterate apologist, decried “the press gang method adopted” and cautioned, “The appearance of infringing personal liberty should be sedulously avoided.”49

  Senators Charles Thomas, Henry Cabot Lodge, Hiram Johnson, George Chamberlain of Oregon, William Calder of New York, Reed Smoot of Utah, and others strongly condemned the New York raids. The Illinois senator Lawrence Y. Sherman demanded to know “whether bayoneting men around when there is no martial law proclaimed, when civil law is in full effect in New York City … whether there is any difference between democracy in the United States and Kaiserism in Berlin?”50

  Senators Miles Poindexter, Lee Overman, and William Kirby of Arkansas were among those who found nothing alarming in what had occurr
ed. Kirby thought it far better that “some individuals are inconvenienced or individual rights are infringed … than that the law shall not be enforced,”51 while Poindexter insisted, “There is no showing that any great hardship has been imposed upon a single individual.”52

  In a letter of response to Wilson’s request for an explanation, Attorney General Gregory accepted “full and entire responsibility” for initiating the raids and defended the practice, including the use of APL members and military personnel.53 The only misgiving he expressed was that the arrests were illegally carried out by soldiers, sailors, and APL members out of an “excess of zeal for the public good.” That detail aside, Gregory upheld slacker raids as necessary and legitimate and informed Wilson that he intended to continue with the project unless directed otherwise. Wilson released Gregory’s letter to the press, thereby giving his tacit approval to the procedure.

  Meanwhile, J. Edgar Hoover had begun his meteoric rise through the ranks of the Department of Justice. By December 1917, after less than five months at the agency, he had been chosen by John Lord O’Brian for the War Emergency Division’s Alien Enemy Bureau.

  That same month, in Wilson’s State of the Union message to Congress, the president proposed that the alien enemy regulations be extended to cover women, including American citizens who had demonstrated their disloyalty by marrying alien enemy men, thus giving the government reason enough to take away their citizenship. When the new rules went into effect the following April, 220,000 German women and 2 million Austro-Hungarian women were required to register, bringing the total number of alien enemies in the United States to between 4 and 4.5 million.54

  Hoover was the Justice Department’s point man for the registration of these new female alien enemies. In addition to working on alien enemy registration for the rest of the war, he was entrusted with the responsibility of evaluating the legal issues and making decisions in particular cases.

  It was here in the Alien Enemy Bureau that Hoover learned the methods that he would later employ with such imperious force. As his biographer Richard Gid Powers has observed, “Hoover’s wartime experience … accustomed him to using administrative procedures as a substitute for the uncertainties and delays of the legal process. The enemy status of the aliens Hoover supervised had stripped them of the protection of the Constitution, and so he got his first taste of authority under circumstances in which he could disregard the normal constitutional restraints on the power of the state.”55 Less than a year after the war ended in November 1918, Hoover would already be exercising these lessons to devastating effect.

  • • •

  “World War I … brought an internal sacrifice of civil liberty more serious than any the American people had suffered before,” observed one historian in 1944. “The record of our behavior with respect to civil liberties during World War I is not one in which the thoughtful citizen can take much pride or satisfaction.”56

  The World War I years left a legacy in the United States that would change the Republic in two fundamental ways. First, the ascendancy of the military-industrial complex gave arms manufacturers enormous influence in governmental affairs. Second, the birth of the surveillance state created a self-perpetuating infrastructure that enabled and encouraged spying on civilians; as a result, surveillance would quickly seep into the bedrock of American life, and governmental secrecy would increasingly become an operational norm. These would prove instrumental in the postwar red scare.

  *Less than a week after the passage of the Trading with the Enemy Act, Wilson issued an executive order establishing the Board of Censorship, which was ruled over by Burleson, who used his new power to read the private correspondence of antiwar dissidents, as well as to collect information on what a Seattle censor referred to as “Bolsheviki, Industrial Workers of the World, Socialists, or other organizations whose aims are antagonistic to this government” (see James R. Mock, Censorship 1917, p. 130).

  †In July 1917, Gregory ordered internment of all German aliens who were Wobblies.

  ‡Later, in the midst of the postwar red scare hysteria that he played a major part in unleashing, Palmer would reveal a more honest and more accurate acknowledgment of the insidious implication of these seizures when he wrote, “No feature of the great war was so radical a departure from precedents … as the invasion of private rights and private property” (“Why We Seized German Property,” Forum, Dec. 1919, p. 584).

  §On July 4, The New York Times, which just one month earlier had hastened to defend freedom of speech when the Espionage Act threatened to restrict the press (see Chapter 2, above), now published an editorial titled “Jails Are Waiting for Them,” denigrating the National Civil Liberties Bureau as a “little group of malcontents” who “make the mistake of believing that speech can be literally and completely free in any civilized country.”

  ‖Cobb also wrote to the president’s secretary to say, “I can think of nothing that will have a worse effect on public opinion and war sentiment in this city than this action of … arresting tens of thousands of patriotic and law-abiding citizens at the point of the bayonet and driving them through the streets under armed guards to remain under arrest until they prove their innocence” (Cobb to Joseph P. Tumulty, Sept. 5, 1918, Wilson Papers, LOC).

  CHAPTER 5

  The Gravest Menace to the Country

  At the break of dawn on the morning of December 21, 1919, a lone ship slipped unceremoniously out of New York harbor, bound for an unknown destination. Dubbed the “Soviet Ark” by the press, the vessel was the Buford, a venerable five-thousand-ton troop transport ship on loan from the War Department to the Department of Labor for the purpose of conveying 249 aliens being deported to Soviet Russia.

  The impending departure of the Soviet Ark had been keenly anticipated in the press as the purging of “scores of Bolsheviki, anarchists, I.W.W.’s and other … dangerous Reds” from U.S. shores.1 One hundred eighty-four of the deportees had been swept up in a November 7 nationwide raid on the Union of Russian Workers, a “revolutionary” group with a national membership of between four thousand and seven thousand.2 Fifty-one others were supposed “anarchists” whose banishment had been previously decreed, the most prominent of whom were Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. The other fourteen outcasts were garden variety “undesirables”—aliens who had become public charges or been convicted of crimes of moral turpitude.

  As ever, Goldman was defiant. “I do not consider it a punishment to be sent to Soviet Russia,” said Red Emma, dressed entirely in black, and one of only three women in the group. “On the contrary, I consider it an honor to be the first political agitator deported from the United States … I am coming back … I insist that I am an American.”3

  In an editorial, The New York Times bade good riddance to bad garbage: “With the general American gratification at the departure of these unclean spirits may well be mingled something of shame to remember how long they were suffered to afflict us.”4

  According to Department of Justice officials on hand to witness the Buford’s sailing, the deportations were merely the tip of an iceberg of sixty thousand radicals residing in this country. As J. Edgar Hoover, now head of the Bureau of Investigation’s new General Intelligence (that is, antiradical) Division, promised, “The Department of Justice is not through yet, by any means. Other ‘Soviet Arks’ will sail for Europe just as often as it is necessary to rid the country of dangerous radicals.”5

  To hear government officials talk of it, the mass deportation had rid the country of the most dangerous revolutionary leaders in the United States. According to the Bureau of Investigation’s director, William J. Flynn, the Buford carried off “the brains of the ultra-radical movement.”6 The reality was a far cry from that.

  Following the armistice of November 11, 1918, international events continued to shape U.S. domestic affairs. The Bolshevik revolution of October 1917 in Russia had created seismic waves of anxiety among the ruling classes of Europe and the United States, and when the n
ew Soviet government signed the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany and the Central powers on March 3, 1918, the Russians were vilified for betraying the Allied cause. Compounding the insult, the new Bolshevik government called for an end to all fighting and a worldwide proletarian revolution to hasten the demise of capitalism. Communism—or Bolshevism, as it was also known—now took its place alongside anarchism and socialism as the archenemies of democracy.

  The Soviets’ withdrawal from the conflict meant that Germany was no longer forced to carry on a two-front war. In response, the Allies sent troops to northern Russia and Siberia to keep up the fighting on Germany’s eastern front while also attempting to destabilize the Soviet government. American troops landed at Vladivostok and in northern Russia in August and September; by the end of the year, the United States had seven thousand troops stationed on Russian soil. At the same time, it appeared that Bolshevism was making serious inroads in Europe, as Austria, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Bavaria either were flirting with or had already established Soviet-style governments. The red menace seemed to be spreading.

  In September, George Creel’s Committee on Public Information released to the press a series of documents smuggled out of Soviet Russia by the CPI representative Edgar Sisson. The documents “proved” that the Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky were German agents, that the Bolshevik revolution was financed by the German government, and that the Soviet government was “not a Russian government at all, but a German government acting solely in the interests of Germany and betraying the Russian people.”7 When serious doubts about the documents’ authenticity were raised—they were, in fact, later proven to be forgeries—two academics, one of whom knew no Russian, were engaged to study them. The men were pressured into declaring the documents genuine, and in October, despite lingering questions, the CPI published them in a pamphlet called The German-Bolshevik Conspiracy, thereby putting the federal government’s imprimatur on the bogus papers.