Hysteria Part 7.  The Hypocrites.
In July of 1916, responding to Wilson's war cry of "Making the World
safe for Democracy" Senator La Folette quipped: "Let us look at the
company we will keep in performing this benevolent function. We will be
marching side by side with the King of Serbia; the King of Italy is our
boon companion; the King of Belgium is there; so also the King of
Roumania; the Emperor of India and the King of England, our stalwart
brother; not to mention the King of Montenegro and various other
principalities and rulers, as well as chaotic Russia-only France is a
Republic-and last but not least we are to be brothers in blood with our
dear friend the Emperor of Japan...
General Isaac R. Sherwood, a veteran of the Civil War, made a final, moving appeal to Congress in
which he reviewed the history of England's attack upon the United States during the Civil War. He
warned that the American people would be going to war "as an Ally of the only nation in Europe that
has always been our enemy and against the nation that has always been our friend." In 1917, over
forty different peace groups in the U.S.A. were agitating against involvement in the war.
Wilson asked Congress to take up what would become the Espionage Act in his April 2, 1917
address in which he asked for a declaration of war against Germany. Wilson's provision that the bill
also contain a give him power to restrain the press was struck down by the Senate. Wilson persisted,
in vain: "authority to exercise censorship over the Press to the extent that censorship is embodied in
the recent action of the House of Representatives is absolutely necessary to the public safety."
On April 16, 1917, all males older than 14 who were still “natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects” of
the German Empire became alien enemies. With the Espionage Act on June 15, 1917, "interfering
with the draft and attempting insubordination within the military" became punishable crimes, and this
was widely interpreted. On November 16, 1917, eight more regulations were added to the original
twelve, including punishment for speaking, writing or publishing anything that was critical of the
government, with a maximum penalty a $10,000 fine and/or 20 years imprisonment. On May 16,
1918, the Act was broadened again to include German women aged 14 and older as enemies.
There were very few advocates for peace after that point. Socialists and "German
sympathizers" were considered a threat, as were pacifists. The draft law exempted from
combat service, but not military service, those conscripts who came from traditional peace
churches, but only 4,000 of 65,000 drafted men who had at first claimed to be conscientious
objectors remained as such, and most of the rest did other war work for the army, many
under severe duress. 450 men who would not cooperate in any way with the conscription
system went to federal prisons.
Assistant Attorney General Charles Warren, who drafted the Espionage Act, the Trading with the
Enemy Act and the Sedition Act, was perceived as violating civil liberties, and his dictatorial powers
ended eventually, but the power to arrest then shifted to local political appointees and US Marshals,
setting the stage for an even bigger civil rights disaster. The second set of regulations for alien
enemies was proclaimed by President Wilson and included a series of exclusion zones.
These auxiliary police would detain suspects that were simply believed to be "too German" and in the
spring of 1918, mass arrests commenced and Washington was flooded with requests for warrants.
Wilson took almost totalitarian measures to enforce his will and that of his cohorts on the American
people. The people he appointed to set his policies in motion and carry them out were given nearly a
free hand in their various, and often nefarious, activities. Thousands were arrested in the spring of
1918 for minor infractions such as walking into an exclusion zone, living in an exclusion zone and
belonging to an alleged subversive group. Religious/Conscientious Objectors, socialists and others
were all subject to arrest. The Armistice of November 11, 1918 did not slow arrests which continued
until February, 1919. The Justice Department wanted the nation cleansed of the 5,000 or so German
"subversives" as soon as possible. Eventually, a third of the internees were released, and another
third took the option given them: repatriation to a Europe many of them barely knew. The rest were
not set free until the camps closed in 1920. Thousands of lives were destroyed and families shattered.
On June 16, 1918, socialist Eugene Debs made an anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio protesting World
War I, and was arrested and convicted under the Sedition Act of 1918. He was sentenced to serve
ten years in prison and lost his citizenship. Debs appealed his conviction to the US Supreme Court.
In its ruling on Debs v. United States, the Court examined statements Debs had made regarding the
war, and found he still had the intention and effect of obstructing the draft and recruitment for the
war. Again, Justice Holmes stated in his opinion that little attention was needed since Debs' case was
essentially the same as that of Schenck's. Debs went to prison.
The Dissenters
Kate Richards O'Hare, 1877-1948, was a mother of four and a
prominent Socialist activist during this time and, as the editor of a
magazine she critiqued American society and raged against the war. In
1917, she continued lecturing even though she was aware of being
watched by the government, and she voiced her opinion of the war,
depicting graphic scenes of war-torn Europe and focusing on the war's
effect upon the suffering women.
Under the 1917 law, government attorneys filed almost 2,000 prosecutions. While only a handful of
these cases reached the Supreme Court, it was only after the Armistice that the Justices heard a case
challenging the law under the First Amendment guarantee of free speech.
The Mothers Again
The song “I didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” was a big hit during this pre-war period in
America. Creel and company were frightened that such women: “might constitute a subversive
element in the nation, detrimental to wartime unity and the smooth functioning of selective
service.” Consequently, the CPI put serious effort into discrediting the views of women activists.
Pacifists were at first depicted as well meaning but misguided, and were shown as being gullible to
German propaganda. There was a spate of movies portraying "unnatural" mothers smothering their
sons with affection, thereby ruining them for life. Good mothers went home from the movies and
begged their sons to enlist and do their duty. Later, the pacifists were slandered, libeled, often
arrested and even victims of (unsolved) physical crimes.
The New World Pariah had been invented. Even Germans hated Germans. German cultural identity
in the United States would never recover from the assault.
The Minorities
Creel and Company played their dirty tricks exploiting the opinions of minorities as well, using
intimidation to pressure minority leaders to use black media to support the policies of Wilson, who in
private life quietly held an arrogant and negative view of minorities. The CPI, concerned with “Negro
subversion”, attributed racial unrest in the nation to the "influence of German propaganda" and this
led to the creation of a military intelligence unit and a movement recruiting prominent blacks to
support the war, threatening and intimidating those expressing a "dangerous" anti-war viewpoint.
"In the three Espionage Act cases (before the High Court), one finds a clear
statement of the doctrine that, in war time, the rights guaranteed by the First
Amendment cease to have any substance, and may be set aside by any jury that has
been sufficiently inflamed by a district attorney itching for higher office. . .  I find it
hard to reconcile such notions with any plausible concept of liberalism. . .  If I do
not misread his plain words, he was actually no more than an advocate of
lawmakers. There, indeed, is the clue to his whole jurisprudence.
He believed that the law-making bodies should be free to experiment almost ad libitum, that the
courts should not call a halt upon them until they clearly passed the uttermost bounds of reason, that
everything should be sacrificed to their autonomy, including, apparently, even the Bill of Rights. . . ."
She was arrested on July 29, 1917 for obstructing the enlistment/recruitment service of the US
because of her lectures. Expecting the normal six-month sentence or a fine, Judge Martin J. Wade
instead bitterly lectured her for two hours on patriotism and a "woman's place"and sentenced O'Hare
to an unprecedented five years in prison. She was torn from her family and sent to an archaic old
prison, Missouri State Penitentiary, and while in prison, she continued to write. Her experience there
caused her to spend a good part of her life after release working on prison reform. She received a
presidential  pardoned in 1920.
Creel's idea of government using private groups for domestic surveillance and encouraging
individuals to spy on their neighbors came to fruition with the American Protective League, a private
organization formed by wealthy Chicago businessmen that worked in support of the anti-German
movement and against anti-war citizens and organizations. The APL had 250,000 to 300,000
members in 600 cities at its height of power and conducted more than 40,000 citizen arrests and
uncounted lynchings, beatings and banishments. Officially condoned by the Attorney General, the
APL loaned its support to the Bureau of Investigation, the precursor to the FBI. The APL's network
of operatives ("the web") expanded and spread through the United States, focusing first on aliens and
dissenters, then eventually on many ordinary citizens, collecting domestic intelligence for the War
Department. Since it had no actual legal authority, its members acted as vigilantes running down
"Hun sympathizers" and "slackers" (draft dodgers), in the process violating the civil liberties of
thousands of American citizens, including those associated with labor, and pacifist movements.
Vigilante Justice
With increased participation in the war, anti-German hysteria grew and
ambitious marshals filled jails in the spring of 1918 without warrants. As Creel
crafted his domestic agenda, vigilante justice was subtly encouraged.
George Creel and the CPI were concerned about the level of support for the
war among women. They needed women to "contribute to the war effort by  
practicing food conservation and planting gardens" and they needed women to
unquestioningly send their sons off to die. There were some obstacles to the blind
faith they desired of America's females, such as the pre-war peace movement.
Carrie Chapman Catt and Jane Addams had helped found the Women’s Peace
Party in January of 1915. In one year, it grew to over 40,000 members.
In 1918, The journalist H.L. Mencken, who himself fell under government suspicion for his German
descent and sincere love of German culture, commented on the absurdity of trading fundamental
liberties for security. He wrote of the Oliver Wendell Holmes' “clear and present danger” opinion:
When Congress declared war against Germany on April 6, 1917, there were over 2.8 million people
of enemy (German) birth in the USA. The Wilson Administration feigned alarm at the prospect of
German born men (who by a technicality could be German reserve officers) organizing plots against
the USA, and the Secret Service and the Justice Department began surveillance of them in 1915.
With the declaration of war, presidential proclamations were targeted at "alien enemies" or Germans
who had not completed the process of naturalization. The Administration chose to selectively intern
German aliens. Within a few weeks of the declaration, the first wave of arrests was completed. 125
Germans had been interned by May,1916, and 900 by October, 1917. Three camps were established
for civilian internees and prisoners of war: Fort McPherson, Georgia, Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, Fort
Douglas, Utah with another at Hot Springs, North Carolina to follow.
Charles T. Schenck and other members of the Socialist Party in Philadelphia were convicted of
conspiring to mail circulars to drafted men.  The leaflets said that the Thirteenth Amendment, in
forbidding slavery, forbade the draft. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that "in many places and in
ordinary time, the Socialists would be within their constitutional rights. But the Bill of Rights does
not protect words creating a clear and present danger of evils that Congress has a right to prevent."
Schenck was sentenced to six months in jail.
German settled areas were under suspicion because some people were getting uncensored news from
relatives and friends in Germany. Groups like The German-American National Alliance, formed to
discourage war against Germany, were soon under attack as being "pro-German" traitors. One CPI
pamphlet reported that "The German-American National Alliance had long endeavored to weld
persons of German descent in the United States into a compact body, to be used when desirable, in
the interests of Germany. The hand of the German Government was extended to America to
influence members of Congress through German-American voters and their sympathizers."
"Military masters of Germany are sowing unsuspecting communities with vicious conspirators and spies who seek to
undermine the Government with false professions of loyalty to its principles!" Wilson
10,000 people had a peace rally in Chicago Coliseum, thousands of German-Americans demanded a
national referendum and 1,500 pacifists protested in the Capitol on the day Wilson called on
Congress to declare war.
...(England) is a hereditary monarchy, with a hereditary ruler, with a hereditary House of Lords, with
a hereditary landed system with a limited and restricted suffrage for one class and a multiple suffrage
power for another, with grinding industrial conditions for all the wage earners."