When Democrats were smearing socialists over war

In World War I President Woodrow Wilson used every lever of government power to marginalize and cancel progressive antiwar voices

In his message to Congress asking for a declaration of war against Germany and thereby bringing the United States into World War I, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed “The world must be made safe for democracy.” Yet a war to ostensibly save democracy abroad, resulted in it nearly being snuffed out at home.

As a result of the passage of the Espionage and Sedition Acts, supported by the progressive Democrat Wilson, the freedoms of speech, press, and assembly were heavily restricted. Government-sponsored propaganda efforts sought to boost the war and impugn its critics.

Eric T. Chester’s brisk read, Silencing ‘Fighting Bob’: The Attack on Antiwar Progressives During the First World War, brings to light efforts by government agencies to spy on, harass, and prosecute war critics like the Jewish socialists around the Yiddish “Forverts” newspaper (now known as Forward), the People’s Council of America for Democracy and the Terms of Peace (PCA), Wisconsin’s Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette, and the Nonpartisan League (NPL).

Despite the title, this is not the biography of one man, but an exposure of wartime state repression.

The Wilson Administration drafted ex-muckraker George Creel to lead the Committee for Public Information (CPI) during the war. The CPI had a dual role. Publicly, it sponsored 75,000 speakers to give four minute-long pro-war speeches. Privately, it subsidized pro-war front groups and worked with the predecessor of the FBI, the Bureau of Investigation (BI), military intelligence, and various nongovernmental organizations to suppress the war’s critics.

Creel remarked to Wilson that the socialist Forverts was the “most dangerous influence” in New York City. In order to avoid the fate of other magazines that continued to criticize the war and were banned from the mail, the Forverts agreed, under government pressure, to no longer oppose the war in its pages. This tepid support was not enough for Creel, and the CPI purchased its own Yiddish newspaper in an effort to supplant the Forverts and more forthrightly promote the war.

To better oppose the war, the Socialist Party sought allies among religious pacifists and the wider progressive movement through the PCA. Some 20,000 people attended the Council’s inaugural meeting in New York. Pro-war union chieftain Samuel Gompers (with ample CPI subsidy) created the competing front group the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy, an association of union bureaucrats, pro-war intellectuals, and ex-Socialists. The ALLD, Chester writes, was “directly controlled by” the CPI. The AALD worked to marginalize the PCA, including pressuring local governments to cancel its Minneapolis meeting in favor of an AALD meeting.

The BI and military intelligence also harried the PCA. The BI raided its San Francisco office and kept chairman Scott Nearing under extensive surveillance, leading to his prosecution for violating the Espionage Act. That San Francisco office was burglarized numerous times, which Chester attributes to military intelligence operating on US soil. By 1918, the PCA was essentially defunct.

Republican Senator Robert La Follette was the most famous elected official to oppose U.S. entry into World War I. Chester describes La Follette as a uniquely dangerous threat to the Wilson administration and pro-war forces given his national stature and appeal to all sections of the peace movement. Had he been more decisive, La Follette could have founded an independent antiwar party in time for the 1918 elections tothreaten the Wilson administration’s congressional allies.

Read the entire article on the Responsible Statecraft website.
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