An editorial in a Washington DC newspaper complained that the government "has not yet handed a prison cell" to a single wartime profiteer, while those who do sit in jail "did nothing against the war except talk."
You might think that was written about OWS protestors who were arrested, while the fascists and greedheads who lied us into and profited from unnecessary wars go unpunished, whether it's Dick Cheney or Blackwater. It could just as well refer to 99 percenters who were jailed, while the banksters who wrecked the economy are not only not in prison, but they continue their reckless ways. Tonight's 60 Minutes' feature, "Prosecuting Wall Street," poses the same question.
However, while the editorial, titled "None Was a Spy: Profiteers Still Free," sounds familiar, it is from the Washington Times in 1924. But there's no time like the present to revisit the past, in order to see where we might be headed.
Some civil libertarians believe the period leading up to and following WWI, roughly 1917 to the early '20s, was among the most repressive eras in American history. Sure, John Adams had his Sedition Act, and some of us are old enough to remember McCarthyism or the clamp down on expression during the Civil Rights and Viet Nam protests. But for sheer unconstitutional ballsiness, few laws come close to those passed during Woodrow Wilson's administration, when the fear-mongering over German spies and then revolutionary Bolsheviks convinced Congress and the American public to pass a slew of heavy-handed measures, among them the 1917 Espionage Act, 1918 Sedition Act, and 1918 Alien Act. For the most part, the Supreme Court upheld all challenges to the statutes, which, in practice, made it unlawful to "utter, print, write, or publish" most criticism of the war and national policy.
The legal history surrounding these repressive Acts, which is captured in the debates conducted in Congress, the Courts, the media, and the public sphere, sounds eerily similar to the fear-mongering and race-baiting leading up to the 2001 Patriot Act, not to mention the travesty that Congress passed last week, the National Defense Authorization Act. To preserve our democratic way of life, the defenders of these measures argue, we must limit individual liberties.
One result of the three laws mentioned above, other than creating a chilling effect, was that thousands of socialists, communists, radicals, pacifists, and clergy were imprisoned, with sentences of up to 20 years or more. Many lost their rights as citizens, including the vote. Hundreds of the most "dangerous" were deported, usually without trial or the right to counsel. Their "crime" was opposition to the war on both humane and political grounds. Soldiers were dying, many said, not to protect democracy but to benefit corporations that serviced the war machine.
In 1918, socialist Rose Stokes was sentenced to 10 years simply for saying, "I am for the people and the government is for the profiteers." Hers is just one of thousands of arrests, including the more well-known prosecutions of dissenters like anarchist Emma Goldman and socialist Eugene Debs, who famously ran for President from prison, receiving nearly a million votes (he was not the only one, Wisconsin socialist Victor Berger even won a congressional race from jail).
In addition to their police forces and government agencies, headed by young zealots like J.E. Hoover, the Feds and states formed citizen posses -- "patriots" charged with infiltrating and informing on radical groups. Beyond that, these thugs sometimes took matters into their own hands -- smashing printing presses, tarring and feathering socialists, even murdering citizens who had committed no crime other than being of German descent. Most of the public wholeheartedly supported the vigilantism, partly because the Feds created a propaganda machine to promote the war and smear activists who criticized capitalism's greed and militarism.
After the war ended the hysteria continued, in the guise of the Red Scare. The victorious doughboys who returned to the States developed into an emboldened generation of workers who soon demanded better pay and conditions. Socialism and even communism were not unpopular movements, and the socialistic, pro-worker views that influenced union activities posed a threat to the Fat Cat's profits. Corporations colluded with governments to paint union leaders and strikers, the 99 percenters of their day, as un-American Bolsheviks intent on destroying democracy. Again, many were imprisoned and more than 3,000 were deported, while states passed laws that expelled socialists from their legislatures.
Here in Arizona in 1917, in the mining town of Bisbee, Phelps Dodge hired police and Pinkerton goons to round up more than 1,000 striking Wobblies, force them into boxcars in the middle of the night, and transport them to the middle of the New Mexico desert. Similar union-busting tactics were employed nationwide, often with deadly results, as in Chicago's infamous Haymarket Riot. The strategy paid off: unions were broken, membership in the Socialist and Communist Parties plummeted, and the inequality gap between haves and have-nots grew even wider until 1929, when reality caught up with the corrupt fantasy.
Listen to Congress debate today's National Defense Authorization Act, and you hear echoes of 1917. The attacks on OWS by the financial sector, politicians, and Rightwing World mirrors the alarmist assaults by those who felt their power threatened during Wilson's administration. The goons in Wisconsin who are attacking and otherwise intimidating recall volunteers is similar to early 20th-century mobs who carried out their own warped justice. Watch FOX or listen to Limbaugh and you're reminded of the propaganda machines put in place by Wilson's Committee on Public Information. Here in Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio's "posse" of volunteer deputies, law-and-order thugs who love the badge and the power it bestows, is reminiscent of Wilson's "citizen councils" -- goon squads of an earlier era. The attack on Hispanics in the form of Arizona's SB 1070 and Alabama's draconian law is similar to the anti-German nativism expressed by elected officials during WWI. One hopes the parallels end there, and that today's inequality gap will not end in another 1929.
True, the pendulum swings, and usually after we've reached a zenith of intolerance, such as the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, we repeal these vicious laws and feel ashamed that America could act that way. I don't know which direction the pendulum is headed today, but I fear we haven't reached the limits of intimidation and repression, and I wonder if we will ever learn from some of the worst chapters in our nation's history.
[Note: I'm not a lawyer or historian. I was researching the government's attempt to stifle early 20th-century writers, activists, and artists -- like Upton Sinclair, Thorstein Veblen, Jane Addams, and John Dewey. The larger parallels seemed too striking to ignore.]