The World Remade

by G. J. Meyer

  Woodrow Wilson would have been shocked.

  Chapter 12

  ____

  Cracking Down

  WILSON THE WAR leader, no less than the Wilson of the neutrality years, professed to loathe war and did so sincerely. But the post-intervention version saw his war as a unique exception, with a purpose that set it apart from every other war in history. It was going to liberate the whole of mankind. It would lead to just and lasting global peace, and so it was worth any sacrifice of blood and treasure. And because it was such a glorious cause, so incomparably noble, the president found it inconceivable that anyone might not want to join it. Just as Germany, if it was at war with Woodrow Wilson’s United States, must be the most monstrous of nations, so, too, there must be something monstrous at work in the hearts of those who refused to follow him at home. If such people couldn’t see what he saw, they must be morally tainted if not deranged. They had to be stopped from spoiling everything.

  The character of the wartime Wilson, so needful of maintaining an almost superhuman image and self-image and forcing the rest of the world to submit, explains his ferocious support for one of the most remarkable pieces of legislation in American history, the Espionage Act of 1917. Though the act he signed into law on June 15 fell short of what he had originally demanded, it was momentous all the same. What made it so was not a grant of power to censor the press—not even a Congress controlled by his party could bring itself to agree to that, despite the president’s insistence—but the right it conferred upon the government to define dissent as treason and punish it accordingly, and to single out for destruction any publications of which it did not approve.

  Here is what it made the law of the land:

  Whoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully make or convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States, or to promote the success of its enemies, or shall willfully make or convey false reports, or false statements…or incite insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States, or shall willfully obstruct…the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States, or…shall willfully utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States…or shall willfully display the flag of any foreign enemy, or shall willfully…urge, incite, or advocate any curtailment of production…or advocate, teach, defend, or suggest the doing of any of the acts or things in this section enumerated and whoever shall by word or act support or favor the cause of any country with which the United States is at war or by word or act oppose the cause of the United States therein, shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both.

  That was far from all. At least as insidious as the act’s broad, vague list of ill-defined new crimes, at least as ominous as the draconian punishments it prescribed, was an article that gave tyrannical powers to, of all improbable recipients, the Post Office Department. It authorized the postmaster general to refuse to mail any publication that in his opinion violated any of the provisions quoted above, or that he judged to have advocated treason, insurrection, or “forcible resistance” to any American law.

  The man to whom it fell to interpret these provisions and put them to work, Albert Sidney Burleson, had been a seven-term congressman when Woodrow Wilson became president in 1913. Burleson badly wanted a cabinet post and got his wish thanks to his fellow Texan Colonel House. He has been called the worst postmaster general in American history, but that is unfair; he introduced parcel post and airmail and improved rural service. It is fair to say, however, that he may have been the worst human being ever to serve as postmaster general. Shortly after taking office, he introduced racial segregation into an organization that had been relatively free of it since the establishment of the U.S. Civil Service in the 1880s. He segregated lunchrooms and toilets, ordered the installation of screens to spare white employees the indignity of having to see or be seen by black co-workers, and had blacks in southern states discharged or demoted. He required photographs to be submitted with job applications, so that supervisors would not have to waste their valuable time interviewing unwanted candidates. The leading African American intellectual of the time, W. E. B. Du Bois, would say that the Wilson administration originated “the greatest flood of bills proposing discriminatory legislation against Negroes that has ever been introduced into the American Congress.”

  Albert Sidney Burleson, U.S. postmaster general, 1913–1921

  The most powerful postmaster general in history, thanks to the Espionage Act.

  This side of the Wilson administration, and therefore to some extent of the president himself, has only recently been brought to public attention and become a cause of some embarrassment for Princeton University, where Wilson has long been revered as a kind of secular patron saint. Wilson appears to have viewed Burleson with benign amusement. He called him “the Cardinal” because of his pompous, self-important airs, and although on at least two occasions he suggested that Burleson consider being a bit less aggressive in the exercise of his authority, nothing changed either time. When challenged about his administration’s employment and racial policies—Burleson’s innovations soon spread to the Treasury Department and elsewhere—the Virginia-born, Georgia-raised Wilson did not deny responsibility for them. He said, rather, that they were intended to protect black employees by keeping them separate as they worked their way toward eventual equality. In the 1910s few white citizens found this explanation unsatisfactory.

  The Espionage Act left it to Burleson to decide whether anything in any publication might “cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny or refusal of duty” and to neutralize those he found guilty by denying them access to their subscribers. He was eager to get started, and within twenty-four hours of congressional approval of the Espionage Act was instructing local postmasters to be on the alert for “unsealed matter, newspapers, etc. containing matter which is calculated to [here he repeated at great length the language of the Act]…or otherwise embarrass or hamper the Government in conducting the war.” All such matter was to be sent to him. There was no need to fear that he would fail to take action.

  Many were suspect in Burleson’s eyes: Lutheran churches because of their German-American membership, Catholic churches with German- or Irish-American congregations, academic journals, farm journals, labor unions, black organizations, and others. But the juiciest targets, and the ones to which he gave priority, were the country’s socialist and left-leaning journals. These were numerous enough, and in some cases successful enough, to keep Burleson busy for quite some time. Socialism had been growing into a substantial force in the years before the war. The American Socialist Party, founded in 1901, still claimed a membership of only 70,000 when the war came, but its presidential candidate received 600,000 votes in 1916 although few voters knew anything about him except that he was a socialist. There were socialist mayors in cities as widely scattered as Minneapolis and Butte, Montana; socialist congressmen had been elected in Milwaukee and New York City; and in the 1914 elections socialists had won more than 160 local and county offices in Oklahoma.

  But every indication that socialism might be spreading, every success at the polls, made new enemies for the movement. Every sizable newspaper in the country warned its readers that socialism was an alien and dangerous thing, one of the European pathologies, incompatible with true Americanism. The postmaster general was entirely typical in sharing this view. As a young clergyman and future socialist presidential candidate named Norman Thomas observed, Burleson “didn’t know socialism from rheumatism.” But he had no doubt that he, and all good Americans, had a duty to exterminate it.

  Few socialists tried to conceal their opposition to intervention. The European socialist p
arties were widely seen as having discredited themselves, at the start of the war, by casting aside their preachments about an international fellowship of the working classes and declaring allegiance to their respective home countries. Many American socialists, seeing this as a betrayal and damaging to the movement, were determined not to repeat it. Days after the president’s signing of the declaration of war, delegates to an emergency party convention approved a resolution that condemned intervention as “a crime against the people of the United States.” They voted to support resistance to the draft, to censorship, and to the curtailment of workers’ right to strike.

  Some prominent socialists, among them the muckraking novelist Upton Sinclair, recoiled from such positions and declared their support for the president and the war. A good many did so out of belief in the cause. Others may have been afraid of becoming pariahs or of causing their fellow citizens to equate socialism with subversion. The party as a whole, in any case, held together in opposition. And no small number of the publications associated with it were soon giving the postmaster general exactly what he was looking for. When he moved against them, he did so with the vociferous approval of the most influential people, organizations, and publications in the country. Together, intervention in the war and the Espionage Act had made attacks on the very existence of American socialism seem more legitimate, more patriotic, more necessary than they had ever been. The socialists, for their part, had few friends in high places and enemies beyond numbering.

  By one count, Burleson’s first move stripped some sixty publications of access to second-class mail delivery. This drew protests from publications that had not yet been targeted, and their turn came next. The June issue of The Masses, an irreverently sophisticated monthly that carried the writings of a number of the best-known leftist journalists in the country, published a complaint by editor Max Eastman that “men have already been sent to jail since April sixth on the theory that it is treason to tell an unpleasant truth about one’s country.” Payback came quickly: the August edition was rejected by the New York post office on orders from Washington.

  When Eastman and his associates appealed, the case went before a young federal court judge named Learned Hand, who in a long career would become a judicial legend. He issued a temporary restraining order, which meant that pending a final decision, the post office was supposed to accept and deliver The Masses as in the past. Burleson ignored the order, and one can imagine the glee with which he made his next move. He ordered that no future issues of The Masses were to be accepted because, having failed to mail an August issue, the magazine was no longer a periodical. A higher court lifted Learned Hand’s restraining order, and The Masses was beaten. Wilson asked the postmaster general, in passing, if perhaps he was being a bit harsh. Burleson replied that if the president did not wish to support him, he was prepared to resign. That did not prove necessary.

  In August one of the oldest and best-known socialist newspapers, The New York Call, wrote of Burleson as “the mediocre monarch now mismanaging the post office.” It, too, lost its mailing privileges but was able to carry on by delivering copies door-to-door. The socialist Milwaukee Leader was less fortunate because more dependent on postal delivery. When Burleson moved against it, it lost the ability to reach all but a small minority of its fifteen thousand subscribers.

  Almost anything could get a publication’s mailing privileges terminated. It happened to The Public for saying what President Wilson had said in asking for a declaration of war: that the costs should be paid more through taxes and less through borrowing. It happened to The Freeman’s Journal and Catholic Register for printing a statement of Thomas Jefferson’s that Ireland should be independent. The Jeffersonian, published in Georgia by Tom Watson, once nationally famous as a leader of the populist movement, had to go out of business after writing such things as “men conscripted to go to Europe are virtually condemned to death and everybody knows it.”

  In October, Congress showed its satisfaction with everything Burleson was doing by passing a new Trading With the Enemy Act to broaden his powers. Now he could require all foreign-language publications to submit to the Post Office, in advance of distribution, English translations of all content that had anything to say about the U.S. government, any other governments engaged in the war, or the war itself. He was authorized to exempt any publications that met with his approval, but of course he was not much interested in exemptions. The new requirements were sufficiently onerous to oblige many small periodicals to cease operations.

  Burleson, a canny enough politician, knew better than to interfere with publications of influence in the political mainstream. His biggest target was Appeal to Reason, a midwestern weekly that had a circulation of half a million but, being avowedly socialist, few readers capable of making trouble in Washington. William Randolph Hearst’s chain of big-city dailies was a different matter. Though it was hostile to the Wilson administration and critical of its conduct of the war, Burleson left it alone.

  It is hardly surprising, in such a climate, that local authorities felt called upon to do their part to keep fools and subversives from threatening national unity, giving aid and comfort to the enemy, or complicating the minds and lives of the brave young Americans who soon would be going off to war. In the decades leading up to the Great War, local law enforcement agencies and state militias had usually been more conspicuous than Washington in taking action against socialists, labor organizers, and radicals of every variety. Thus there was nothing particularly novel about the use of such agencies, when the war came, to deal with perceived threats to domestic tranquillity.

  It was much the same with private citizens who wanted to play their patriotic part. Even before the Revolutionary War, colonial Americans had sometimes expressed their displeasure with British rule by tarring and feathering agents of the king. And as the young United States expanded westward, mob action often filled the vacuum created by an absence of formal law enforcement, and lynching became its trademark. Lynching also became one of the instruments by which Reconstruction was brought to an end in the post–Civil War South and freed slaves were reduced to quasi-serfdom. In 1917, when men infected with war fever gathered to deal in extrajudicial ways with neighbors whom they deemed insufficiently patriotic, they had reason to see themselves as following in a venerable American tradition. No doubt many of them thought it a great tradition.

  Everywhere they looked, almost every time they picked up a newspaper, citizens were reminded that they were living through an emergency of the highest order and that extraordinary measures were necessary. “We are at war with the most merciless and inhuman nation in the world,” The Providence Journal declared. “Hundreds of thousands of its people in this country want to see America humiliated and beaten to her knees, and they are doing, and will do, everything in their power to bring this about. Take nothing for granted. Energy and alertness in this direction may save the life of your son, your husband or your brother.” This appeal was reprinted in papers from Connecticut to New Mexico, from North Dakota to Florida. There were warnings, too, that the U.S. Justice Department had neither the manpower nor (some complained) the will to deal with the problem. It is hardly mystifying that readers occasionally felt themselves being called upon to take the law into their own hands.

  Attorney General Thomas W. Gregory, though a man of moderately progressive leanings, appears not to have been greatly concerned as reports of mob violence became widespread. Though like Burleson a Texan, he had never been as conservative as the postmaster general, but now that the nation was in crisis, the two became partners in purging it of alleged internal enemies. “May God have mercy on them,” Gregory said of those objecting to intervention, “for they need expect none from an outraged people and an avenging Government.”

  Such words gave state and local officials all the encouragement they needed to demonstrate their own patriotism and the price of nonconformity. As early as mid-April, before the passage of either the Selective Service Act or the
Espionage Act, two Seattle men were arrested for distributing a circular titled “No Conscription, No Servitude, No Slavery.” Even in the overheated environment of the time, it was impossible to charge them with doing what had not yet been made illegal. They were charged instead with conspiring to block the carrying out of the declaration of war and sentenced to two years in a federal penitentiary.

  Thomas Gregory, U.S. attorney general, 1914–1919

  “May God have mercy on them,” he said of dissenters, “for they need expect none from an outraged people and an avenging Government.”

  When two New Yorkers were sent to prison and fined for passing out notices of an antiwar meeting, the anarchist leaders Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman denounced the judge who heard the case. They were arrested and taken before the same judge on a charge of conspiring against the government. Each received a two-year sentence and was fined ten thousand dollars.

  Objections to the draft became even riskier as the June 5 registration day approached. In West Virginia a man was sentenced to six months in jail for distributing a flyer titled “Are We Facing a Militarized America?” A New Yorker was given ninety days in the city workhouse for, on the Fourth of July, handing out copies of the Declaration of Independence to which he had appended a single question: “Does your government live up to these principles?”

  They were lucky. In Philadelphia the editor of a Lithuanian paper wrote an editorial accusing Burleson of intending to destroy any publication daring to say that “American capitalists have drawn this country into war.” He got three years. A San Francisco lawyer got five years for being the leader of a group that produced a booklet titled Legal Opinion and Advice on the Conscription Law to American Patriots. One of President Wilson’s little group of willful men, newly (and voluntarily) retired senator John Works of California, complained upon learning of this sentence that the government was suppressing legitimate dissent. No one who mattered cared.