The Illusion of Victory (22 page)

Although they hoped to operate in secret, the Inquiry’s existence soon seeped through the pro-war intelligentsia’s grapevine and they were bombarded with letters from historians, political scientists, and assorted thinkers of every imaginable stripe, all eager to serve. Within a year their staff ballooned to 126, proving, if nothing else, they were a genuine government agency, with the hunger for expansion that infests the heart of every bureaucrat.
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At a late August cabinet meeting, Josephus Daniels wondered aloud if the war were popular and reported that Senator William Squire Kenyon of Iowa had told him two-thirds of the people in his state did not favor it. Wilson remarked that if the Germans captured New York, most Iowans would applaud. It was ever thus, Wilson said. People in the boondocks resented the opinions of the capital—or in New York’s case, the de facto capital—of the country. New York was ardently pro-war. Therefore, Iowa was antiwar.
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Worries about the American perception of the war were not so easily dismissed. During the summer and fall of 1917, Wilson tolerated and occasionally encouraged ferocious attacks on dissenters of every stripe, with the brunt of the public’s wrath falling on German-Americans. Wilson did not seem to realize that his denunciations of the German government added fuel to these rancorous flames. Senator La Follette had observed that the president’s distinction between the Berlin “autocracy” and its people did not make sense. Others, such as the hugely popular evangelist Billy Sunday, were even more blunt:“All this talk about not fighting the German people is a lot of bunk,” Billy said.
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At times, in his calls for all-out war, the president portrayed every German American as a potential enemy. In his June 14 Flag Day address, he accused “the military masters of Germany” of sowing “unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and conspirators.” worse, these persons “seek to undermine the Government with false professions of loyalty to its principles.”
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Coalescing with the hate propaganda spewed by Wellington House and its American collaborators, these sentiments inspired the American Protective League and thousands of other freelance patriots to join in a nationwide attack on German-Americans and the German language and culture. The
Saturday Evening Post
, already one of the nation’s biggest magazines, announced that it was time to rid America of “the scum of the melting pot.” An article in the
Atlantic Monthly
accused the German language press of mass disloyalty. The
New York Times
agreed that German-language newspapers never stopped trying to surreptitiously support Berlin’s cause. A rear admiral suggested taxing them out of business. Cartoons portrayed fat Germans waving an American flag out the window while drinking a stein of beer to “Hoch der Kaiser” (Hail the Kaiser). The Lutheran Church was attacked because its ministers refused to urge the sale of war bonds from the pulpit—a violation, they maintained, of their sacred mission.
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Soon, Lutheran schools were described as hotbeds of disloyalty, where the “Star-Spangled Banner” was never played and German heroes such as Bismarck displaced Washington and Lincoln. When a wealthy German American who had already bought a substantial amount of Liberty Bonds to finance the war declined to buy more and remarked to a pesky seller,“To hell with Liberty Bonds!” he was arrested and fined. Vigilantes set up a machine gun outside the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee to prevent the production of Schiller’s
Wilhelm Tell
, a world-famous protest against tyranny.

The German language was banned from school curriculums and German music barred from auditoriums. Famed violinist Fritz Kreisler was denounced by the Daughters of the American Revolution when he tried to take the stage in Pittsburgh. When Baltimore, Washington and Cleveland also canceled performances, Kreisler retired for the duration. Karl Muck, the Swiss-born conductor of the Boston Symphony, was arrested and interned because he declined, on aesthetic grounds, to play the “Star-Spangled Banner” at the opening of each performance. The pro-German director of the Cincinnati Symphony, Ernest Kunwald, suffered a similar fate.
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In September, Congress attached a rider to an unrelated bill, giving the government even greater control over the expression of opinion among German-Americans. Wilson signed the bill into law on October 6, 1917. Henceforth, German-language newspapers were required to supply the post office with English translations of “any comments respecting the Government of the United States . . . its policies, international relations [or] the state and conduct of the war.” the cost of providing these documents put many marginal newspapers out of business and had a chilling effect on the editorial policies of those that survived.
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The Mennonites, a German-American pacifist religious sect, refused virtually to a man to submit to conscription, but said they would be willing to serve in noncombatant roles, as long as they did not have to don uniforms. They had come to the Midwest in the 1870s, after receiving an explicit promise from President Ulysses S. Grant that they would never have to serve in the American army. Mennonite leaders rushed to Washington to ask Secretary of War Baker if he would approve their stance. Baker advised them to tell their young men to submit to conscription, on his promise that their religious beliefs would be respected.

Unfortunately, Baker, a prewar pacifist himself, had succumbed to the war will. He sent a confidential order to the commanders of army camps to make a major effort to persuade conscientious objectors to change their minds. While they were being persuaded, they were to wear uniforms, live in barracks, and undergo military training. Baker theorized that camaraderie with young men their own age, plus pressure from military superiors, would do the trick. On paper, he was proven correct: About two-thirds of the objectors—some 16,000—abandoned their beliefs and became fighting soldiers.

How this change was accomplished is not a pretty story. Harassed camp commanders, already grappling with shortages of everything, had little time to give much thought to the techniques of persuasion. At most camps, the “conchies” were left to the untender mercies of sergeants and lieutenants, who called them yellow-bellies, cowards and pro-Germans. The Mennonites, who resisted all forms of persuasion, had a particularly bad time. At one camp, officers sent a dozen of them into an open field, where they were pursued by men on motorcycles until they collapsed. At another camp, a Mennonite resister was scrubbed with brushes dipped in lye. Sadists in another camp billeted them with men infected with venereal disease. Not too surprisingly, many resisted this brutal treatment and were courtmartialed. Some 110 were sentenced to the Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, army prison for terms ranging from ten to thirty years. One martyr to his faith and conscience wrote to his parents from his prison cell:“You cant emagen how it is to be hated. If it wasent fore Christ it would be empossible.”
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The Creel-Wilson determination to create a war will meant deep trouble for the radical union, the Industrial Workers of the World. One of the opening volleys was fired by Senator Harry Ashurst of Arizona. On August 17, 1917, he told his fellow solons that IWW stood for “Imperial Wilhelm’s Warriors” and called for the union’s extirpation. Ashurst’s antipathy was sharpened by the IWW’s tendency to cause trouble in Arizona’s copper mines, whose owners were among his chief supporters. The same could be said for many other Western governors and members of Congress who regularly denounced the IWW. The union had very few friends in high places.
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The Wobblies, as they were called, were the loose cannons of the labor movement. A forerunner of the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), the IWW aimed at unionizing the unskilled and uneducated workers, people largely ignored by the craft-oriented AFL. The union had about 60,000 paid-up members in 1917, the twelfth year of its turbulent existence. The union returned with interest the violent hostility of the employers and their friends in the ruling “tendom.” wobbly rhetoric reeked with class warfare and calls for revolution. Their constitution candidly declared that they were out to “abolish the wage system.”

Not too surprisingly, the IWW took a dim view of Wilson’s war. Its stance was almost perversely designed to please no one. On May 3, 1917, a month after the United States entered the war, the Wobblies’ one-eyed president, William D.“Big Bill” Haywood, told a lieutenant,“While being opposed to the Imperial Government of Germany, we are likewise opposed to the Industrial Oligarchy of this country.”
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While Congress was arguing over the draft law, the Wobbly newspaper, the
Industrial Worker,
published a poem that was not likely to please Woodrow Wilson or anyone else in Washington:

In the spring of 1917, with the defiant sangfroid that had won it the admiration of romantic liberals, the IWW was conducting strikes in the lumber and copper industries, hampering the construction of the longpromised fleet of 50,000 (sometimes reduced to 22,000) American planes,
barracks for draftees, and the flow of weaponry to the British and French armies in Europe. It was easy for journalists and politicians to see treason in these work stoppages. Ignored was the June 8, 1917, explosion and fire in the North Butte Mining Company’s Speculator Mine, which killed 164 miners and enraged workers throughout the industry. Three days later, 10,000 Butte miners struck to demand recognition of their union and the abolition of the “rustling” card, a certificate issued by a companydominated union to blacklist Wobblies. The owners announced they would shut down the mines and flood them rather than talk to “anarchistic leaders.” Newspapers suggested that German money was behind the strike.

Montana Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, one of the Wobblies’ few friends in Washington, told the government that the miners were hoping for presidential intervention to win them a just settlement. Behind the scenes, Bernard Baruch, in frequent touch with copper tycoon John D. Ryan, blocked Labor Department attempts to mediate the strike and pushed for the preservation of the status quo.

Similar unrest threatened to shut down Arizona’s copper mines, which produced 28 percent of the nation’s ore. While the government looked the other way, shotgun-toting vigilantes organized by the Citizens Protective League, a clone of the American Protective League, rounded up some 1,200 Wobblies and other dissidents in Bisbee, Arizona, and deported them in railroad cars to the desert town of Hermanus, New Mexico, with dire warnings not to return. For the next four months, the Citizens Protective League ran Bisbee, issuing passports to local residents and deporting anyone who did not meet the league’s test of loyalty. The
Los Angeles Times
hailed the operation as “a lesson that the whole of America would do well to copy.” Theodore Roosevelt also applauded the direct action of Bisbee’s loyal citizens, saying he had no doubt the deportees were “bent on destruction and murder.”
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The president’s secretary, Joe Tumulty, with his roots in Jersey City’s working class, was appalled by the deportations and urged the president to issue a condemnation. Wilson chose to wire the governor of Arizona, urging him not to let people take the law in their own hands. He also appointed federal mediators—a move condemned by many antilabor newspapers. One editorialized that it was crazy to “confer with a mad dog.” the only sensible thing to do was “shoot the dog.”
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In Butte, Montana, vigilantes seized the IWW’s most dynamic spokesman, Frank Little, who represented the extreme left wing of the union.
After Congress declared war, Little had persisted in calling for strikes, draft resistance and sabotage to undermine the American military effort. The assailants dragged Little through the streets tied to the rear bumper of a car and hanged him from a railroad trestle. The
New York Times
deplored the lynching, but added that IWW agitators like Little were “in effect and perhaps in fact agents of Germany.”
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Similar warfare was waged on the IWW in towns around the iron mines of Minnesota. In Duluth, men carrying IWW cards were jailed for vagrancy. In Minneapolis, saloons known to be frequented by “sowers of sedition” (frequented by the IWW) were shut down by the police. The Minnesota Public Safety Commission appealed to the federal government to smash the Wobblies. Governors of Western states added their voices to the rising chorus of denunciations in Congress. Dozens of newspapers called for suppression of “the traitorous organization.” Not a word was said in the Wobblies’ defense by the already co-opted Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor.
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Attorney General Thomas Gregory decided to act. With Wilson’s approval, he launched an investigation of whether the IWW was being supported by German money. When no evidence surfaced, Gregory ordered a massive assault on IWW offices in no less than thirty-three cities. Homes and apartments of IWW leaders were also raided. Tons of records, including personal diaries and letters, were seized and studied for evidence of violations of the Espionage Act. It was almost ridiculously easy to find in Wobbly rhetoric the quotations needed to “prove” the union members’ guilt.

On September 28, 1917, 166 IWW officers were indicted using their own words to prove that they had violated eleven laws and proclamations related to the war, conspired to interfere with employers trying to fulfill vital government contracts, urged fellow Wobblies to refuse to register for conscription, and plotted to create insubordination in the armed forces. There was little doubt what the Wilson administration had in mind. The Philadelphia federal attorney stated it candidly in a letter to the attorney general:“Our purpose . . . as I understand it, [is] to put the I.W. W. out of business.”
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