It is true that some progressives thought World War I was not well-advised on the merits, and there were a few progressives—Robert La Follette, for example—who were decidedly opposed (though La Follette was no pacifist, having supported earlier progressive military adventures). But most supported the war enthusiastically, even fanatically (the same goes for a great many American Socialists). And even those who were ambivalent about the war in Europe were giddy about what John Dewey called the “social possibilities of war” Dewey was the New Republic’s in-house philosopher during the lead-up to the war, and he ridiculed self-described pacifists who couldn’t recognize the “immense impetus to reorganization afforded by this war.” One group that did recognize the social possibilities of war were the early feminists who, in the words of Harriot Stanton Blatch, looked forward to new economic opportunities for women as “the usual, and happy, accompaniment of war” Richard Ely, a fervent believer in “industrial armies,” was a zealous believer in the draft: “The moral effect of taking boys off street corners and out of saloons and drilling them is excellent, and the economic effects are likewise beneficial.” Wilson clearly saw things along the same lines. “I am an advocate of peace,” he began one typical declaration, “but there are some splendid things that come to a nation through the discipline of war” Hitler couldn’t have agreed more. As he told Joseph Goebbels, “The war...made possible for us the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times.”
We should not forget how the demands of war fed the arguments for socialism. Dewey was giddy that the war might force Americans “to give up much of our economic freedom...We shall have to lay by our good-natured individualism and march in step.” If the war went well, it would constrain “the individualistic tradition” and convince Americans of “the supremacy of public need over private possessions.” Another progressive put it more succinctly: “Laissez-faire is dead. Long live social control.”
Croly’s New Republic was relentless in its push for war. In the magazine’s very first editorial, written by Croly. the editors expressed their hope that war “should bring with it a political and economic organization better able to redeem its obligations at home.” Two years later Croly again expressed his hope that America’s entry into the war would provide “the tonic of a serious moral adventure.” A week before America joined the war, Walter Lippmann (who would later write much of Wilson’s Fourteen Points) promised that hostilities would bring out a “transvaluation of values as radical as anything in the history of intellect.” This was a transparent invocation of Nietzsche’s call for overturning all traditional morality. Not coincidentally, Lippmann was a protege of William James’s, and his call to use war to smash the old order illustrates how similar Nietzscheans and American pragmatists were in their conclusions and, often, their principles. Indeed, Lippmann was sounding the pragmatisms trumpet when he declared that our understanding of such ideas as democracy, liberty, and equality would have to be rethought from their foundations “as fearlessly as religious dogmas were in the nineteenth century.”
Meanwhile, socialist editors and journalists—including many from the Masses, the most audacious of the radical journals that Wilson tried to ban—rushed to get a paycheck from Wilson’s propaganda ministry. Artists such as Charles Dana Gibson, James Montgomery Flagg, and Joseph Pennell and writers like Booth Tarkington, Samuel Hopkins Adams, and Ernest Poole became cheerleaders for the war-hungry regime. Musicians, comedians, sculptors, ministers—and of course the movie industry—were all happily drafted to the cause, eager to wear the “invisible uniform of war.” Isadora Duncan, an avant-garde pioneer of what today would be called sexual liberation, became a toe tapper in patriotic pageants at the Metropolitan Opera House. The most enduring and iconic image of the time is Flagg’s “I Want You” poster of Uncle Sam pointing the shaming finger of the state-made-flesh at uncommitted citizens.
Almost alone among progressives, the brilliant, bizarre, disfigured genius Randolph Bourne seemed to understand precisely what was going on. The war revealed that a generation of young intellectuals, trained in pragmatic philosophy, were ill equipped to prevent means from becoming ends. The “peculiar congeniality between the war and these men” was simply baked into the cake, Bourne lamented. “It is,” he sadly concluded, “as if the war and they had been waiting for each other.”
Wilson the great centralizer and would-be leader of men moved overnight to empower these would-be social engineers, creating a vast array of wartime boards, commissions, and committees. Overseeing it all was the War Industries Board, or WIB, chaired by Bernard Baruch, which whipped, cajoled, and seduced American industry into the loving embrace of the state long before Mussolini or Hitler contemplated their corporatist doctrines. The progressives running the WIB had no illusions about what they were up to. “It was an industrial dictatorship without parallel—a dictatorship by force of necessity and common consent which step by step at last encompassed the Nation and united it into a coordinated and mobile whole,” declared Grosvenor Clarkson, a member and subsequent historian of the WIB.
More important than socializing industry was nationalizing the people for the war effort. “Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way,” Wilson threatened in June 1917. Harking back to his belief that “leaders of men” must manipulate the passions of the masses, he approved and supervised one of the first truly Orwellian propaganda efforts in Western history. He set the tone himself when he defended the first military draft since the Civil War. “It is in no sense a conscription of the unwilling: it is, rather, selection from a nation which has volunteered in mass.”
A week after the war started, Walter Lippmann—no doubt eager to set about the work of unleashing a transvaluation of values—sent a memo to Wilson imploring him to commence with a sweeping propaganda effort. Lippmann, as he argued later, believed that most citizens were “mentally children or barbarians” and therefore needed to be directed by experts like himself. Individual liberty, while nice, needed to be subordinated to, among other things, “order.”
Wilson tapped the progressive journalist George Creel to head the Committee on Public Information, or CPI, the West’s first modern ministry for propaganda. Creel was a former muckraking liberal journalist and police commissioner in Denver who had gone so far as to forbid his cops from carrying nightsticks or guns. He took to the propaganda portfolio immediately, determined to inflame the American public into “one white-hot mass” under the banner of “100 percent Americanism.” “It was a fight for the minds of men, for the ‘conquest of their convictions,’ and the battle line ran through every home in every country,” Creel recalled. Fear was a vital tool, he argued, “an important element to be bred into the civilian population. It is difficult to unite a people by talking only on the highest ethical plane. To fight for an ideal, perhaps, must be coupled with thoughts of self-preservation.”
Countless other liberal and leftist intellectuals lent their talents and energies to the propaganda effort. Edward Bernays, who would be credited with creating the field of public relations, cut his teeth on the Creel Committee, learning the art of “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses” The CPI printed millions of posters, buttons, pamphlets, and the like in eleven languages not counting English. The committee eventually had more than twenty subdivisions with offices in America and around the world. The Division of News alone issued more than six thousand releases. Just under one hundred pamphlets were printed with an estimated circulation of seventy-live million. A typical poster for Liberty Bonds cautioned, “I am Public Opinion. All men fear me!...[I]f you have the money to buy and do not buy, I will make this No Man’s Land for you!” A CPI poster asked, “Have you met the Kaiserite?...You find him in hotel lobbies, smoking compartments, clubs, offices, even homes...He is a scandalmonger of the most dangerous type. He repeats all the rumors, criticism, he hears about our country’s part in the war. He??
?s very plausible...People like that...through their vanity or curiosity or Treason they are helping German propagandists sow the seeds of discontent.”
One of Creel’s greatest ideas—an instance of “viral marketing” before its time—was the creation of an army of nearly a hundred thousand “Four Minute Men.” Each was equipped and trained by the CPI to deliver a four-minute speech at town meetings, in restaurants, in theaters—anyplace they could get an audience—to spread the word that the “very future of democracy” was at stake. In 1917-18 alone, some 7,555,190 speeches were delivered in fifty-two hundred communities. These speeches celebrated Wilson as a larger-than-life leader and the Germans as less-than-human Huns. Invariably, the horrors of German war crimes expanded as the Four Minute Men plied their trade. The CPI released a string of propaganda films with such titles as The Kaiser, The Beast of Berlin, and The Prussian Cur The schools, of course, were drenched in nationalist propaganda. Secondary’ schools and colleges quickly added “war studies courses” to the curriculum. And always and everywhere the progressives questioned the patriotism of anybody who didn’t act “100 percent American.”
Another Wilson appointee, the socialist muckraker Arthur Bullard—a former writer for the radical journal the Masses and an acquaintance of Lenin’s—was also convinced that the state must whip the people up into a patriotic fervor if America was to achieve the “transvaluation” the progressives craved. In 1917 he published Mobilising America, in which he argued that the state must “electrify public opinion” because “the effectiveness of our warfare will depend on the ardour we throw into it.” Any citizen who did not put the needs of the state ahead of his own was merely “dead weight” Bullard’s ideas were eerily similar to the Sorelian doctrines of the “vital lie.” “Truth and falsehood are arbitrary terms...there are life-less truths and vital lies...The force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little if it’s true or false.”
The radical lawyer and supposed civil libertarian Clarence Darrow—today a hero to the left for his defense of evolution in the Scopes “Monkey” trial—both stumped for the CPI and defended the government’s censorship efforts. “When I hear a man advising the American people to state the terms of peace,” Darrow wrote in a government-backed book. “I know he is working for Germany.” In a speech at Madison Square Garden he said that Wilson would have been a traitor not to defy Germany, and added, “Any man who refuses to back the President in this crisis is worse than a traitor.” Darrow’s expert legal opinion, it may surprise modern liberals to know, was that once Congress had decided on wan the right to question that decision evaporated entirely (an interesting standard given the tendency of many to assert that the Bush administration has behaved without precedent in its comparatively tepid criticism of dissent). Once the bullets fly, citizens lose the right even to discuss the issue, publicly or privately; “acquiescence on the part of the citizen becomes a duty” (It’s ironic that the ACLU made its name supporting Darrow at the Scopes trial.)
The rationing and price-fixing of the “economic dictatorship” required Americans to make great sacrifices, including the various “meatless” and “wheatless” days common to all of the industrialized war economies in the first half of the twentieth century. But the tactics used to impose these sacrifices dramatically advanced the science of totalitarian propaganda. Americans were deluged with patriotic volunteers knocking on their doors to sign this pledge or that oath not only to be patriotic but to abstain from this or that “luxury.” Herbert Hoover, the head of the national Food Administration, made his reputation as a public servant in the battle to get Americans to tighten their belts, dispatching over half a million door knockers for his efforts alone. No one could dispute his gusto for the job.
Supper.” he complained. that is one of the worst pieces of extravagance that we have in this country.”
Children were a special concern of the government’s, as is always the case in totalitarian systems. They were asked to sign a pledge card. “A Little American’s Promise’”:
At table I’ll not leave a scrap
Of food upon my plate.
And I’ll not eat between meals but
For supper time I’ll wait.
I make that promise that I’ll do
My honest, earnest part
In helping my America
With all my loyal heart.
For toddlers who couldn’t sign a pledge card, let alone read, the Progressive war planners offered a rewritten nursery rhyme:
Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn!
The cook’s using wheat where she ought to use corn
And terrible famine our country will sweep,
If the cooks and the housewives remain fast asleep!
Go wake them! Go wake them! It’s now up to you!
Be a loyal American, Little Boy Blue!
Even as the government was churning out propaganda, it was silencing dissent. Wilson’s Sedition Act banned “uttering, printing, writing, or publishing any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the United States government or the military.” The postmaster general was given the authority to deny mailing privileges to any publication he saw fit—effectively shutting it down. At least seventy-five periodicals were banned. Foreign publications were not allowed unless their content was first translated and approved by censors. Journalists also faced the very real threat of being jailed or having their supply of newsprint terminated by the War Industries Board. “Unacceptable” articles included any discussion—no matter how high-minded or patriotic—that disparaged the draft. “There is a limit,” Postmaster General Albert Sidney Burleson declared. That limit has been exceeded, he explained, when a publication “begins to say that this Government got in the war wrong, that it is in it for the wrong purposes, or anything that will impugn the motives of the Government for going into the war. They can not say that this Government is the tool of Wall Street or the munitions-makers...There can be no campaign against conscription and the Draft Law.”
The most famous episode of censorship came with the government’s relentless campaign against the Masses, the radical literary journal edited by Max Eastman, The postmaster general revoked the magazine’s right to be distributed via the mails under the Espionage Act, Specifically, the government charged the magazine with trying to hamper military recruitment. Among the “illegal” contents: a cartoon proclaiming this was a war to make the world “safe for capitalism” and an editorial by Eastman praising the courage of draft resisters. Six editors faced trial in New York but managed to “win” hung juries (jurors and lawyers commented afterward that the defendants would almost certainly have been found guilty if any of them had been German or Jewish), Of course, the “chilling effect” on the press in general was far more useful than the closures. Many of the journals that were shut down had tiny readerships. But the threat of being put out of business did wonders in focusing the minds of other editors. If the power of example wasn’t strong enough, editors received a threatening letter. If that didn’t work, they could lose their mail privileges “temporarily.” Over four hundred publications had been denied privileges by May 1918. The Nation had been suppressed for criticizing Samuel Gompers. The journal Public had been smacked for suggesting that the war should be paid for by taxes rather than loans, and the Freeman’s Journal and Catholic Register for reprinting Thomas Jefferson’s views that Ireland should be a republic. Even the pro-war New Republic wasn’t safe. It was twice warned that it would be banned from the mails if it continued to run the National Civil Liberties Bureau’s ads asking for donations and volunteers.
Then there was the inevitable progressive crackdown on individual civil liberties. Today’s liberals tend to complain about the McCarthy period as if it were the darkest moment in American history after slavery It’s true: under McCarthyism a few Hollywood writers who’d supported Stalin and then lied about it lost their jobs in the 1950s. Others were unfairly intimidated. But nothing that happened u
nder the mad reign of Joe McCarthy remotely compares with what Wilson and his fellow progressives foisted on America. Under the Espionage Act of June 1917 and the Sedition Act of May 1918, any criticism of the government, even in your own home, could earn you a prison sentence (a law Oliver Wendell Holmes upheld years after the war, arguing that such speech could be banned if it posed a “clear and present danger”). In Wisconsin a state official got two and a half years for criticizing a Red Cross fund-raising drive. A Hollywood producer received a ten-year stint in jail for making a film that depicted British troops committing atrocities during the American Revolution. One man was brought to trial for explaining in his own home why he didn’t want to buy Liberty Bonds.
No police state deserves the name without an ample supply of police. The Department of Justice arrested tens of thousands without just cause. The Wilson administration issued a letter for U.S. attorneys and marshals saying, “No German enemy in this country, who has not hitherto been implicated in plots against the interests of the United States, need have any fear of action by the Department of Justice so long as he observes the following warning: Obey the law; keep your mouth shut.” This blunt language might be forgivable except for the government’s dismayingly broad definition of what defined a “German enemy.”
The Justice Department created its own quasi-official fascist!, known as the American Protective League, or APL. They were given badges—many of which read “Secret Service”—and charged with keeping an eye on their neighbors, co-workers, and friends. Used as private eyes by overzealous prosecutors in thousands of cases, they were furnished with ample government resources. The APL had an intelligence division, in which members were bound by oath not to reveal they were secret policemen. Members of the APL read their neighbors’ mail and listened in on their phones with government approval. In Rockford, Illinois, the army asked the APL to help extract confessions from black soldiers accused of assaulting white women. The APL’s American Vigilante Patrol cracked down on “seditious street oratory.” One of its most important functions was to serve as head crackers against “slackers” who avoided conscription. In New York City, in September 1918, the APL launched its biggest slacker raid, rounding up fifty thousand men. Two-thirds were later found to be innocent of all charges. Nevertheless, the Justice Department approved. The assistant attorney general noted, with great satisfaction, that America had never been more effectively policed. In 1917 the APL had branches in nearly six hundred cities and towns with a membership approaching a hundred thousand. By the following year, it had exceeded a quarter of a million.