Intervention Abroad, Intervention At Home

OVER HERE: THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND AMERICAN SOCIETY by David M. Kennedy. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson successfully ran for re-election under the slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War.” In April 1917, with such campaign rhetoric long forgotten, Wilson informed Congress that America's impending entry into the Great War required “the organization and mobilization of all the material resources of the country.” Furthermore, he declared, “If there should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with with a firm hand of repression.”

Politicians are rarely so forthright. “Organization and mobilization” meant war socialism and conscription. “A firm hand of repression” meant just what it sounds like. There was the Espionage Act, which authorized up to twenty years imprisonment for anyone interfering with military operations and five years' imprisonment for using the mail to further such purposes. The Trading-with-the-Enemy Act mandated that foreign language newspapers submit, in advance and in English, anything (editorials, articles, etc.) referring to the war. Loyalty oaths appeared in the nation's schools while German language classes disappeared. The words “hamburger” and “sauerkraut” were replaced by “liberty sandwich” and “liberty cabbage,” respectively.

In one of the era's more infamous events, Eugene V. Debs, the great labor leader and perennial Socialist Party candidate for President (Debs won a stunning six percent of the popular vote in 1912 in a four-way race with Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft) rotted in federal prison for 3 years after giving an anti-war speech in Ohio that “violated” Wilson's Espionage Act. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who scandalously remains a hero to many modern liberals, upheld Debs' conviction. Warren G. Harding, perhaps America's most under-appreciated chief executive, pardoned Debs in 1921, an act of human decency that the peacemaker Wilson never saw fit to grant.

In his preface to this book, David M. Kennedy cautions readers, “What follows is in many ways a sad story, a tale of death, broken hopes, frustrated dreams, and of the curious defeat-in-victory that was Woodrow Wilson's, and the nation's, bitter lot.” This is actually a significant understatement (and why the qualifier "in many ways"?), but you get the point.