The World Remade

by G. J. Meyer

  South Dakota, apparently supposing itself to be a hotbed of spies and subversives, became wonderfully alert. The chairman of the state’s socialist party, upon declaring himself a conscientious objector, was sent to prison for twenty years. When twenty-seven German-American farmers sent a petition to the governor objecting to the draft and claiming that the conscription quota for their county was unfairly high, they were rounded up and given sentences of between one and two years each. A man of advanced years got into an argument about the draft, said it was “all foolishness” to send young men to be killed “all for the sake of Wall Street,” and found himself sentenced to five years in Leavenworth federal prison. In nearby Iowa, Walter Matthey walked out halfway through a meeting featuring a speaker who vigorously attacked the draft. Someone reported to the authorities that Matthey had been observed not only clapping but making a donation of twenty-five cents. He got a year in jail.

  Some sentences were later reduced, and some convictions were even reversed. But this generally happened years later, after the war had ended and passions had subsided, and only in scattered instances as a result of intervention by the president or the Justice Department. In any case, prosecutions were a small part (though the most visible and intimidating part) of the process by which the administration used the Espionage Act to suppress dissent and the appearance of dissent. The Committee on Public Information’s appeals for the public to report anyone and anything that seemed suspect produced far more leads than federal agents could investigate, much less take to court. Agents would call on individuals who had been reported, warn them that if they failed to do a better job of demonstrating their patriotism they would find themselves in trouble, and in most cases eliminate the problem if in fact one had ever existed. The Espionage Act served as a kind of universal sword of Damocles, falling on relatively few citizens (some 850 were convicted in the two years following its passage) but frightening untold thousands.

  As the crusade for conformity went on, its consequences became ever more gruesome and absurd. Robert Goldstein, the producer of a feature film about the American Revolution titled The Spirit of ’76, was charged with violating the Espionage Act because of a lurid scene showing British Redcoats bayoneting innocent civilians and dragging women offscreen with obviously evil intent. His crime was fostering hatred for America’s ally in the war against tyranny. Conviction was inevitable, Goldstein’s company went bankrupt, and he received a sentence of ten years.

  As lunacy became epidemic, school districts began to ban the teaching of German. California’s state school board declared it to be “a language that disseminates the ideas of autocracy, brutality, and hatred.” An Iowa official revealed to the nation that “ninety percent of all the men and women who teach the German language are traitors.” Few of the targets of such malignant nonsense were foolhardy enough to try to defend themselves, but resentment simmered. The Wilson administration, by using its own hard tactics and tacitly encouraging local authorities to do worse, was deepening some of the worst divisions in American society—divisions not just of political belief but of race and class and faith. The summer of 1917 brought some of the worst race riots and labor disputes in the nation’s history—disasters unlikely to have happened if not for the war. Herbert Croly, co-founder and editor of The New Republic magazine and among the most respected progressive thinkers in the country, wrote to Wilson that his intolerance of dissent was “dividing the body of public opinion into two irreconcilable classes” and leaving moderates in an impossible position. Another progressive of national stature, Amos Pinchot, observed with dour amusement that the president was putting “his enemies in office and his friends in jail.” And as Senator La Follette’s son Philip (himself a future governor of Wisconsin) would observe years later, “the strange thing about World War I, in terms of public reaction, was that by and large the people who seemed to have lost control of their emotions to a greater extent than any other part of our population were the intellectuals.”

  If perhaps not strictly speaking an intellectual, Elihu Root was in 1917 one of the stoutest pillars of the eastern Republican establishment, a man of monumental attainment and respectability. A former secretary of war and secretary of state, a onetime senator from New York and future recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, he said days after the president signed the declaration of war that “we must have no criticism now.” Four months later, his attitude hardened by the failure of so many citizens to take his advice, he was taking a more strident line. “There are men walking about the streets of this city tonight,” he told an enthusiastic audience at Manhattan’s exclusive Union Club, “who ought to be taken out at sunrise and shot for treason.” President Wilson was increasingly inclined to express similar opinions and in doing so to legitimate them. “Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way in this day of high resolution when every principle we hold dearest is to be vindicated and made secure for the salvation of the nation,” he declared in a Flag Day speech in June. It would appear that he did not regard freedom of speech as among the principles that the nation held most dear.

  Elihu Root, U.S. secretary of state, 1905–1909

  “Never until Wilson,” said this pillar of the establishment, “have we had an unscrupulous and dishonest president.”

  The courts did nothing to stem the tide. To the contrary, it became clear that the administration could do almost anything it wished without danger of judicial interference. Judges, content to allow prosecutors to interpret the flabby language of the Espionage Act in whatever way they chose, gave them the full benefit of the so-called bad-tendency test. According to this test, first applied early in the nineteenth century in cases involving criticism of public officials, citizens could be punished for speaking or writing in ways deemed likely to cause or encourage illegal acts. Its practical effect was to broaden the ability of the courts to find opinions criminal simply because the person expressing them was believed to be a socialist, or a pacifist, or an anarchist, or otherwise underserving of the protection of the law.

  It came to be understood that there was rarely any point in appealing for relief from the government’s actions. When federal authorities asked that certain motion pictures not be shown, usually because they were deemed insufficiently patriotic or showed France or Britain in a not entirely flattering light, the unsatisfactory response of producers and distributors led to the movies in question being banned outright. There were no legal challenges, no appeals or repercussions. Occasional court rulings in support of freedom of speech served mainly to spark the anger of self-proclaimed patriots, which served as a warning to other judges not to expose themselves to similar abuse. Appeals of even the most outlandish convictions were moved through the system as slowly as the rules allowed, which was very slowly indeed. The few that reached the Supreme Court typically did not do so until after the war ended. Even then they were not infrequently upheld.

  The case of Victor Berger was only one among hundreds, but it is representative enough to be worth recounting. Born into a Jewish family in Austria, Berger had immigrated to the United States in his late teens, apparently to avoid conscription into the Hapsburg emperor’s armies. He settled in Milwaukee, where he founded a socialist journal and became a founding member of the American Socialist Party. In 1910, at age fifty, he became the first socialist elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. He attracted the ire of the city fathers of Milwaukee by advocating such shocking innovations as public health programs, old-age insurance, a minimum wage, and woman suffrage. He was not reelected in 1912.

  In 1917 Berger ran in a special election to fill a U.S. senate seat vacated by death. He pledged that, if elected, he would work for “an immediate, general, and permanent peace.” He again alarmed respectable Wisconsin by getting 26 percent of the vote in a three-way race and carrying eleven counties. In short order he was indicted under the Espionage Act and was convicted in a Chicago trial. The judge presiding, future commissioner of baseball Kenesaw Mountai
n Landis, complained that “one must have a very judicial mind indeed not to be prejudiced against German-Americans in this country—their hearts are reeking with disloyalty.” The sentence was twenty years in federal prison.

  The Committee on Public Information was supposed to be, in the words of chairman George Creel, an organ of “expression rather than suppression”—a vehicle through which the truth about the war could be used to “mold the people of the United States into one white hot mass instinct with fraternity, devotion, courage and deathless determination.” The chief means by which this was to be accomplished was Creel’s most brilliant innovation, a nationwide network of volunteers who, as Four-Minute Men, made appearances at movie theaters and other places where people assembled in large numbers. In no more than four minutes, the time needed to change the reels of a feature film, they would speak on whatever subject Creel was currently seeking to push. The program was a phenomenal success, certainly in terms of its ability to attract speakers. By the end of the war, no fewer than 75,000 amateur orators had become involved.

  The Creel organization joined the Post Office Department in keeping the newspapers of America within bounds acceptable to the White House. Almost immediately upon going into operation, Creel created an organization of academics whose assignment was to monitor the ethnic and foreign-language press, searching for suspect material. The editors of newspapers of every size and kind were asked not to publish anything about peace proposals or any reports of differences among the nations at war with Germany. Few were reluctant to comply. Those few were shown why they should fear the consequences of noncompliance. When in October 1917 the president established by executive order a Censorship Board, it was inevitable that Creel would become a willing and active member.

  Intervention made things radically more difficult for the two antiwar groups that had become most visible during the period of neutrality, the Emergency Peace Federation (EPF) and the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM). The relentless hostility of the press persuaded many Americans that the less socially respectable of the two, the EPF, was synonymous with disloyalty, even with treason. The AUAM tried to find a middle path that would offend as few people as possible but succeeded only in alienating its own more militant members.

  The result was the creation, a month after U.S. entry into the war, of a new umbrella group called the People’s Council of America for Democracy and Peace. Into it moved the federation, the socialists, and others. The AUAM cautiously kept its distance, which caused many of its members to defect and sent it into terminal decline. (Its Civil Liberties Bureau, which had attracted much criticism for offering legal counsel to conscientious objectors, also severed its connections to the parent organization. It began its evolution into today’s American Civil Liberties Union.)

  In the intensely polarized environment of 1917, with superheated patriotism almost the only acceptable mode of political discourse, the People’s Council was soon marginalized and found it impossible to maintain, never mind broaden, its base. Samuel Gompers was approached about bringing his American Federation of Labor into the embattled coalition. “I prefer not to ally myself with the conscious or unconscious agents of the kaiser in America,” he replied. He set up a rival organization, the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy, with funding secretly provided by the Creel Committee.

  Limited now to a largely radical membership, reviled in all quarters including the White House, the People’s Council joined the AUAM on the road to oblivion. Friendless and alienated, its leaders adopted the slogan “Peace by Negotiation Now.” As their last suicidal act they embraced the program of the Russian Bolsheviks, which called for a settlement of the war involving no annexation of territory and no payment of indemnities. They were now so remote from mainstream American opinion, so despised, that candidates for public office saw a People’s Council endorsement as a curse to be fled. George Creel knew he would draw no rebuke from anyone he need fear when he called the council’s members “traitors and fools.” Before the end of 1917, the group had become an irrelevancy. Progressivism itself, as a political force, was disintegrating under the pressures generated by Woodrow Wilson’s war.

  The pro-war forces had no such difficulties. The Council of National Defense, funded by Congress and chaired by the secretary of war, caused much mischief—probably not intentionally—when it encouraged the creation of state defense councils to support and replicate its work at the grassroots level. Governors and legislatures were eager to comply, though their willingness to appropriate funds for the purpose varied as greatly as their views of how their councils should operate. Some state councils became instruments of patronage, dispensing favors in the interests of whoever was in power. Others were left to manage themselves, providing opportunities for local dignitaries to display their patriotic zeal by challenging the loyalty of schools, churches, labor organizations, and individuals. Some were called not councils of defense but committees of public safety, a name redolent of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. Many became weapons with which “good” Americans, the Hundred Percenters, could strike out at those they deemed not patriotic enough or simply wanted to destroy.

  Worse followed. A Chicago advertising executive named Albert Biggs, concerned about all the things he had been reading about ubiquitous enemy subversion and the need for constant watchfulness, went to the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation with a plan for a nationwide force of volunteer unpaid intelligence agents. The idea was passed along to Attorney General Gregory, who responded enthusiastically. It is understandable that he did so. The Justice Department, now fully absorbed in the policing of public opinion, was overwhelmed by reports of disloyalty, under heavy criticism for not being more aggressive, and eager for whatever help it could get.

  Gregory’s solution was the American Protective League (APL), officially a private organization, in fact an amateur adjunct of the Justice Department. It recruited thousands of untrained and often overeager would-be counterspies to snoop on their fellow citizens and report whatever they thought suspicious. The appeal of becoming a junior G-man helping to ferret out spies and traitors proved irresistible. By the end of the war, the APL would claim to have a quarter-million volunteers at work in six hundred communities. Its stationery bore the proud words “Organized with the Approval and Operating under the Direction of the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Investigation.” Members were given badges identifying them as representing the “American Protective League—Secret Service.” The main qualification for membership, evidently, was a willingness to pay dues of seventy-five cents to a dollar.

  As a final absurdity, the APL spawned youthful versions of itself: Scout-like organizations with names like the Boy Spies of America, the Sedition Slammers, and the Terrible Threateners. The parent organization was, however, not entirely unhelpful. One historian has found that it did 80 percent of the work of the Bureau of Investigation’s Cleveland office, and something similar was undoubtedly true in other cities. But the APL also became an enormous vigilante force, taking part in raids on homes and offices and enjoying implicit immunity when engaged in breaking and entering on its own initiative. Members helped to round up dissidents and break strikes and terrorized people guilty of nothing more (and sometimes less) than not being noticeably enthusiastic about government policy. In Toledo, an APL zealot submitted the names and addresses of library patrons who “read nothing but German books.” Others reported people who spoke of the hardships and dangers of frontline service, or predicted that the war would be a long one, or played German music, or played American music but failed to include “The Star-Spangled Banner.” People who failed to buy war bonds, or enough war bonds to satisfy snoopy neighbors, drew much attention. (A North Carolina clergyman, challenged on this point, replied that if anyone “could tell him how a man with twelve children drawing $800 a year could clothe, feed them, and buy Liberty Bonds, he would appreciate it.”)

  With astonishing speed, the APL grew to become the most i
ntrusive and far-reaching (and also most irresponsible) threat to free speech and the right of assembly in the history of the United States.

  War art was wall art

  Posters in infinite variety reminded Americans that the enemy was evil incarnate—and lurked under every bed.

  Writers protective of Woodrow Wilson’s reputation rarely fail to point out that, having been told by Treasury Secretary McAdoo that the APL appeared to have “very harmful possibilities,” the president asked Attorney General Gregory if it might be “very dangerous to have such an organization operating in the United States” and wondering “if there is any way in which we could stop it.” Gregory replied promptly. “The American Protective League is a patriotic organization,” he said, “organized with my approval and encouragement.”

  Gregory wrote to McAdoo as well. “There have been days when as many as one thousand letters came to my Department purporting to give more or less detailed information as to spies, disloyal citizens and plots to destroy ships, factories, railroad bridges, munitions plants, waterworks, arsenals, etc. etc. etc. In perhaps 90 percent of these cases the information furnished was of no value, but in a small number of them it proved to be very valuable indeed, and it has thus become necessary to investigate everything called to our attention. This involved the keeping under observation of a very large number of citizens and situations throughout the United States.” He added that the APL was “the largest, best organized and most effective” source of help available to the Justice Department.