Manufacturing Hysteria

by Jay Feldman

  With the link between Germans and Bolsheviks thus firmly established, and with the memory of “radical” opposition to the war fresh in the public mind, the stigmatization and hostility that had been aimed at German-Americans and other minorities during the war were swiftly and easily redirected toward Russians, Bolsheviks, and “reds” of every sort. The intolerance of the postwar years was a direct outgrowth of the tone set during the war—the target shifted, but the scapegoating was the same.

  The federal government, in concert with the leaders of big business and the press, now triggered a red scare, giving the federal surveillance program an urgent new impetus that would have severe and lasting repercussions on civil liberties in the United States.*

  As Frank J. Donner has written in The Age of Surveillance, “If World War I created a climate favorable to the federalization of intelligence, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution gave it a permanent raison d’être, constituency, and mission … The twin traumas of war and revolution at once consolidated a nationwide countersubversive constituency and made intelligence its spokesman.”8

  The marshaling of the new hysteria began just two months after the signing of the armistice, with a Senate subcommittee chaired by North Carolina’s Lee Overman. The panel had been investigating German influences in the brewing industry, and with the war over it appeared that the group would soon be out of business.

  On January 9, 1919, however, the outgoing Bureau of Investigation director, A. Bruce Bielaski, introduced during his testimony the issue of Bolshevism and other left-wing radical activity in the United States, and Overman saw the red peril as an opportunity to breathe new life into his moribund committee. The problem was how to segue from German brewers to Russian Bolsheviks to American radicals.

  The answer was provided on January 22 by Archibald E. Stevenson, a New York lawyer and supposed expert on the radical movement in the United States, who presented himself to the committee as a BI agent and an operative of the Military Intelligence Division.9 The rabidly anti-Communist Stevenson informed the committee: “The Bolsheviki movement is a branch of the revolutionary socialism of Germany. It had its origin in the philosophy of Karl Marx and its leaders were Germans … German socialism … is the father of the Bolsheviki movement in Russia, and consequently the radical movement which we have in this country to-day has its origin in Germany.” Bolshevik propaganda, he warned the committee, is “the gravest menace to the country today.”10

  For two days, Stevenson lectured the committee about the dangers of Bolshevism. The following exchange among Stevenson, Overman, the Minnesota senator Knute Nelson, and the War Department representative Major E. Lowry Humes is representative of the quality of Stevenson’s information:

  HUMES: What are the forms and requirements for marriages and divorces under the Soviet government in Russia?

  STEVENSON: Simply a statement before the proper commissary that they want to be married or that they want to be divorced.

  OVERMAN: Do they have as many wives as they want?

  STEVENSON: In rotation.

  HUMES: Polygamy is recognized, is it?

  STEVENSON: I do not know about polygamy. I have not gone into the study of their social order quite as fully as that.

  NELSON: That is, a man can marry and then get a divorce when he gets tired, and get another wife?

  STEVENSON: Precisely.

  NELSON: And keep up the operation?

  STEVENSON: Yes.

  OVERMAN: Do you know whether they teach free love?

  STEVENSON: They do.

  HUMES: Can a divorce be secured upon the application of one party to the marriage, or has it to be by agreement?

  STEVENSON: I think by one party.

  HUMES: By either party?

  STEVENSON: By either party.

  HUMES: They can renounce the marital bond at will?

  STEVENSON: Precisely.

  HUMES: Do you know whether or not the element that is active in this country is advocating the same thing here in their public speeches, or their literature?

  STEVENSON: In considerable of the literature some of the element has done so. I will not say that all have.11

  Apart from the opéra-bouffe aspects of Stevenson’s testimony, he managed to do some real damage. Using the same tactic of guilt by smear and innuendo that Senator Joseph McCarthy would employ so effectively thirty-five years later, Stevenson provided the committee with a “Who’s Who in Pacifism and Radicalism” that he had compiled.12 The list contained the names of about two hundred “clergymen, professors, lawyers, writers, Socialists, labor leaders, architects, an I.W.W. agitator, and one former publisher of a New York newspaper” who were “active in movements which did not help the United States when the country was fighting the Central Powers.” After going over the names in executive session, the committee eliminated more than 70 percent of the people on the list, whittling it down to sixty-two. The names that were entered into the record included such prominent Americans as the social reformer Jane Addams; the economist Emily Greene Balch; the National Civil Liberties Bureau director Roger Baldwin; the historian Charles Beard; the IWW leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn; the Socialist attorney Morris Hillquit; the U.S. commissioner of immigration for New York Frederic C. Howe; the former Stanford University president David Starr Jordan; Rabbi Judah L. Magnes; the peace activist Scott Nearing; the Socialist Kate Richards O’Hare; the attorney Amos Pinchot; the Reverend Norman Thomas; the Nation editor Oswald Garrison Villard; the sociologist Lillian D. Wald; and of course Eugene V. Debs. Baldwin, O’Hare, and Debs were serving prison sentences for violation of various wartime statutes.

  Some of those named protested—“I am boiling with indignation,”13 fumed the Brown University professor Lindsay T. Damon—while the New York attorney Gilbert E. Roe attacked Stevenson’s motivation in presenting his list of names. In a letter to Overman, Roe charged that Stevenson “used the committee for giving publicity to himself” and pointed out:

  The persons mentioned on your list have only one thing in common—they have opposed the Prussianization of the United States … Most of them, I think, were opposed to the passage of the espionage law … They have also been opposed to the lawlessness of which the Military Intelligence Department has been guilty, whereby … the emissaries of the Military Intelligence Department again and again, in disregard of every right of the citizen, without warrant or pretense of authority, have invaded homes, arrested persons, held them incommunicado for days, seized and carried away property.

  Retaliation for having represented many of these individuals, Roe maintained, was “the real reason for my name appearing upon this list.”14

  Sensing the half-baked and unfounded nature of many of Stevenson’s claims, the Delaware senator Josiah O. Wolcott asked him whether the radicals, “after all their efforts and agitation and the expenditure of a great deal of labor and emotional energy,” had actually made “any kind of an impression at all on the plain, common-sense American people.”15

  “I think if you really mean the American people,” admitted Stevenson, “I should say no, Senator.”

  “That is what I mean,” said Wolcott. “I mean the ordinary American citizen … Of course, they can make some trouble here and there in spots, but, taking the great body of the American people, were they not too level headed to be influenced by this outfit?”

  In his response, Stevenson reached back for the nativism that had been an undercurrent in American life for decades and had played so well during the war. “They have made a very great impression on the foreign element,” he asserted.

  When asked by Overman his opinion of U.S. immigration laws, Stevenson said, “I think they ought to be very much more stringent.”16

  “Would it do to pass a law that no person should enter this country unless he is a white man—an Anglo-Saxon—for the next 10 years?” asked the chairman.

  “If it could be done I think it would be a good thing,” responded Stevenson.

  “You think it would
be a good law to pass?” pressed Overman.

  “Yes, sir,” maintained Stevenson.

  “So do I,” Overman agreed.

  Stevenson’s testimony breathed new life into the Overman Committee. Abandoning its inquiry into Germans and the brewing industry, the group requested and received Senate permission to extend its investigation, in order to concentrate on Bolsheviks and others who sought to change the government and/or the economic system.

  Throughout its investigation, the committee enjoyed the close cooperation of the Bureau of Investigation. Overman was already well-known to the BI, having acted as an informant during and after the war.†

  Accordingly, Attorney General Gregory granted the committee access to Justice Department files and assigned Special Agent William R. Benham to help the committee conduct its investigation. The committee, in turn, gave the information it acquired to the bureau.

  From February 11 to March 10, the Overman Committee, assisted by Benham, amassed information and statistics on the radical movement, investigated individual radicals and monitored their activities, and collected and analyzed radical literature, while a parade of witnesses provided a litany of by-now-familiar lurid descriptions of the horrors of life in Soviet Russia. Despite all its digging, however, the committee never produced any remotely convincing evidence concerning either the prevalence of Bolshevik propaganda in the United States or the danger posed by the radical movement in this country.

  One witness, Raymond Robins, who had led an American Red Cross mission to Soviet Russia and was an outspoken opponent of Bolshevism, expressed the opinion that repression was not the best way to combat radicalism in the United States. “I have faith enough in our institutions,” said Robins, “to believe that we will throw that foreign culture, born out of a foreign despotism, back out of our land, not by treating it with the method of tyranny, not by a witch hunt, nor by hysteria, but by strong intelligent action.”

  Overman took umbrage. “What do you mean by ‘witch hunt’?” he demanded.

  “I mean this, Senator,” responded Robins. “You are familiar with the old witch-hunt attitude, that when people get frightened at things and see bogies, then they get out witch proclamations, and mob action and all kinds of hysteria takes place.”17

  The months following the signing of the armistice were fraught with economic insecurity. As industry began the conversion to a peacetime economy, the nine million Americans formerly employed in war-related work faced an uncertain future. Also, four million returning servicemen glutted the job market. Inflation soared as prices and the cost of living doubled from what they had been before the war.

  Labor and management were on a collision course. Organized labor, which had enjoyed tremendous gains during the Progressive Era, had for the most part patriotically suspended its agenda in support of the war effort. Aside from the IWW copper and lumber strikes, most labor actions during the war had been small and localized. With the conflict now over, the labor movement was eager to claim its due in the form of increased wages, improved working conditions, and, most important, collective bargaining. The business interests, on the other hand, which were quite content with the general lack of opposition they had enjoyed during the war years, were equally determined to not only hold the line against new demands but to reverse the gains that labor had made in the years leading up to the war. Collective bargaining, in particular, was not negotiable.

  The resulting clash between labor and management would become one of the primary fronts on which the government waged its new battle against radicalism. In this campaign, the Department of Justice, the Bureau of Investigation, and the General Intelligence Division would function as outright instruments of capital, defending management against the upstart ambitions of labor and fanning the public’s fears of radicals. As Frederic C. Howe, the immigration commissioner in charge of Ellis Island during the red scare, later wrote, “There was a concerted determination on the part of employers to bring wages back to pre-war conditions and to break the power of organized labor. This movement against alien labor leaders had the support of the Department of Justice. Private detective agencies and strike-breakers acted with assurance that in any outrages they would be supported by the government itself … The government borrowed the agent provocateur from Old Russia; it turned loose innumerable private spies.”18

  The first skirmish in the labor-management conflict took place in Seattle, a hotbed of union activity, where the BI had been keeping tabs on IWW and Socialist activity since 1915. After the war, the bureau continued its surveillance of labor radicals as informants from patriotic groups like the American Protective League and the Minute Men and strikebreaking outfits like the Pinkerton National Detective Agency infiltrated various labor organizations and fed biased information to the bureau.

  In December 1918, with a shipyard strike brewing in Seattle, BI informants depicted the cause of the unrest as being due to the presence of radical agitators. According to a typical APL informant named Walter R. Thayer, who had infiltrated the Seattle Central Labor Council, “The ignorant worker … falls an easy victim to the Bolshevists because there is no … restraint on the agitator, no restraint on the tons of damnable literature they are selling openly on the streets of Seattle.” Thayer claimed that a shipyard strike would result in the imposition of martial law, which “would be the beginning of the end of permanent peace in this country,” as the aim of the strike’s leaders was to set off a revolution. As Thayer saw it, “The Bolshevist spirit will control industry in the United States in a few years as certain as sunrise.”19

  An evaluation of Thayer’s assessment of the labor movement’s motives, which would become the dominant view during the ensuing struggle, reveals three mistaken, interrelated premises that would underlie the government’s mind-set in dealing with the red scare. The first was trusting in the reliability of intelligence provided by informants, a basic fallacy that would persist for decades, as the bureau and the General Intelligence Division—and later the FBI—would time and time again act against individuals and organizations on the basis of concocted and prejudiced information furnished by informants.

  The second error was the literal reading of radical propaganda, which led officials to overestimate the extent of radical influence in the labor force. In the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution, radicals in the United States were convinced that, like the Bolsheviks in Russia, they could take over the government with a tiny minority. This delusion led to the publication of wildly optimistic literature with all manner of far-fetched revolutionary rhetoric. The business community and the government took this propaganda at face value, seeing in it the threat of imminent overt action, even though organized labor, led by the American Federation of Labor’s staunchly antiradical Samuel Gompers, assiduously dissociated itself from any taint of radical sway.

  The third faulty notion in this pre–Great Depression era was that the American economic system, though subject to minor flaws, was essentially infallible and that any criticism of capitalism by workers could only be the result of agitation by radicals. Little credence was given to the possibility that the fundamental causes of discontent could be rooted in the conditions of millions of laborers, especially immigrants, who were overworked, underpaid, and living in poverty and in general constituted an underclass in America. As government and big business saw it, otherwise contented—or at least complacent—workers were always being stirred up and manipulated by radical troublemakers.

  Thus, when thirty-five thousand Seattle shipbuilders walked off the job on January 21, 1919, Seattle’s mayor, Ole Hanson, saw the strike as an attempt at revolution by miscreants who “want to take possession of our American Government and try to duplicate the anarchy of Russia.”20 According to The New York Times, Hanson was a reformed radical who had called himself “the friend of the ‘under dog,’ ” until “radical elements” refused to let him run for office on their ticket. After repeated snubs, Hanson changed his views to the degree that “he found favo
r with the Business Men’s party” and won the mayoralty as their candidate.21

  In support of the shipyard workers, the Seattle Central Labor Council, representing 110 unions, called for a general strike—the first ever in the United States—to begin at ten o’clock on the morning of February 6. The city was thrown into a state of excitement and alarm. The labor council paper, the Seattle Union Record, boasted, “We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by LABOR in this country, a move which will lead—NO ONE KNOWS WHERE!”22 On the other side, in a simultaneous plea and threat, The Seattle Star cautioned potential strikers to “STOP BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE … You are being urged to use a dangerous weapon—the general strike … This is America—not Russia.”23

  To defend against the insurrection, Mayor Hanson telegraphed Secretary of War Newton Baker on February 5 to request federal troops. The following morning, driving his flag-draped auto, the mayor personally escorted a contingent of fifteen hundred soldiers from Camp Lewis into Seattle. The troops were equipped with machine guns and hand grenades and had orders to “shoot to kill at first sign of rioting.”24 Augmenting the military force were fifteen hundred policemen.

  Some sixty thousand workers joined the general strike on February 6, virtually shutting down the city, except for essential services such as garbage collection and food and fuel deliveries. “REDS DIRECTING SEATTLE STRIKE,” screamed a headline in the Los Angeles Times, which labeled the work stoppage “a real Bolshevik movement.”25 Nevertheless, despite the press’s portrayal of the strike as Bolshevik-inspired and “The Rule of the Mob,”26 there was no violence, and not one strike-related arrest was made.27