World War 1, Opposition & Repression

WORLD WAR I, OPPOSITION & REPRESSION. World War I initiated a period of immense setbacks for the Left as its opposition to US involvement was met with severe repression following the country’s entry in April, 1917. As such, that war-time repression laid the foundations for both the future of the Left and the modern surveillance state.

Wartime repression followed more than a half-century of recurring labor wars and widening class chasms, the result of unbridled capitalist expansion and related “boom and bust” economic cycles. The decade preceding the war, in turn, had witnessed intense struggles between labor and capital often championed by the then irrepressible Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in sectors soon deemed vital to the war effort. Those same years saw the growth of a diverse socialist movement and its political expression, the Socialist Party of America (SP). Both bore the brunt.

Opening in Europe in August 1914, the war stimulated a US economic boom propelled by British orders of war materiel. But while the country passed from debtor to creditor status by January 1915, and while demands for labor increased, real wages lagged far behind steep increases in the cost of living, and labor conditions declined. These developments led to a mid-1917 upsurge in organizing efforts in essential industries that resulted in militant strikes involving tens of thousands of unionized and non-union workers just as the war mobilization moved into high gear. Labor’s insurgency in turn accelerated a multi-pronged response from Washington, one readily welcomed by those employers eager to stamp out the IWW, rapidly defined as a seditious impediment to the war effort.

While vowing to make the world “safe for democracy” in his April 1917 war message to Congress, President Woodrow Wilson promised that any “disloyalty” would meet with “a firm hand of stern repression.” In June, he charged that “German masters” were using socialists and the “leaders of labor” and “employing liberals in their enterprise” to “undermine the Government.”

The Wilson administration soon unleashed an offensive that mediated concessions to the AFL’ s skilled craft affiliates in exchange for labor peace while simultaneously stepping up persecution of the IWW and the SP, quickly dubbed “pro-Kaiser” and subject to a range of war-time emergency measures” In mid-April, Wilson signed an executive order that created the Committee on Public Information (CPI) charged with molding pro-war public opinion. Through massive propaganda efforts, it promoted a climate of fear and suspicion that portrayed all anti-war and labor left activity as pro-Kaiser. Following Russia’s October Revolution, the CPI labelled any pro-Bolshevik activity the work of German agents.

In May, the Selective Service Act required all males between the age of twenty-one and thirty-one to register with local draft boards. The act proved less popular than the actual decision to go to war and led to protests, some of which, in a preview of future events, were attacked by soldier-led mobs in cities around the country.

In June, the Espionage Act, the centerpiece of a broader set of repressive legislation, outlawed any attempts to obstruct the war effort, including opposition to conscription. Aimed primarily at the Left, one section made it illegal to mail any materials “advocating or urging treason, insurrection, or forcible resistance to any law of the United States.” This provision gave the US Post Office broad discretionary powers to deny mailing privileges to hundreds of left-wing periodicals crucial for national organizing efforts and communications. Supplementing the Espionage Act, the Sedition Act basically outlawed “any language intended to incite resistance to the United States…” or that urged “any curtailment of production of any thing necessary to the prosecution of the war.”

The battery of emergency measures resulted in the exponential expansion of operatives and funding for a multi-agency repressive apparatus, a surveillance bureaucracy headed by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation (BI) and the Army’s Military Intelligence Division (MID). These agencies were soon augmented by a veritable army of state and local authorities, company police, private detectives, extra-legal vigilantes as well as, by war’s end, a vast network of civilian operatives organized in such groups as the 250,000-strong American Protective League (APL). Remaining in place until the United States signed a formal separate peace with Germany in August, 1921, the Federal enactments were soon supplemented by state-sponsored criminal syndicalist laws that targeted the IWW.

A week after war was declared, the SP issued a firm resolution voicing its “unalterable opposition” and called for “continuous, active and public opposition” to conscription, war appropriations and "vigorous resistance to all reactionary measures.” In response, party membership jumped by 12,000 in two months, and votes for its anti-war candidates in municipal and state elections spiked that November. Suppression of the party, already underway, then escalated as the BI and MID ramped up surveillance and harassment. Its national leaders, among them Eugene Debs, were soon indicted under the Espionage Act. Its public gatherings came under mob attack, the party’s Chicago headquarters was raided, some 1,500 of its 5,000 party locals were closed down. The movement’s diverse press, essential to national organizing efforts and communications, was excluded from the mails.

Three days before war was declared, the Wobbly headquarters in Kansas City was destroyed by off-duty Marines and militiamen. Similar assaults took place Duluth, Detroit and Seattle. The Chicago national office was broken into, its records stolen.

IWW membership had gone from around 40,000 to 100,00 between 1916 and later 1917 as its organizers stepped up efforts in precisely those sectors deemed vital to the war effort —copper, timber, wheat, etc. During the summer 1917, Wob “rough necks” across the West were subjected to a reign of legal and extra-legal terror. Throughout the Northwest, and in Montana and in Oklahoma following the Green Corn Rebellion, deputized vigilantes destroyed offices and print shops. Denied legal protections, those arrested were confined to bull pen stockades and subjected to violence.

In July, some 1200 IWW-led copper miners on strike at Bisbee, Arizona were forced at gun point onto boxcars and shipped into the New Mexico desert. In Butte, Montana in August, anti-war IWW organizer Frank Little was lynched. Federal troops soon occupied both copper regions and remained until the early 1920s. In the Pacific Northwest, a MID-coordinated campaign drove IWWs from the region’s timberlands; in California that fall, IWWs were jailed without charges and branch secretaries were indicted for conspiring to strike.

On September 5, 1917, nationally-coordinated BI-led raids ransacked forty-eight Wobbly halls, offices and homes in thirty-three cities. In an attempt to link the organization to the German War office, the Feds seized five tons of material from just the Chicago national office. The result was three successive mass trials at Chicago, Kansas City and Sacramento. Several hundred men were charged under the Espionage Act with hindering the war effort, inciting rebellion in the military, opposing the draft, and infringing on employers’ rights by their strike activities.

In 1918, in Chicago, during a four-month trial, the press cast the 101defendants as anarchist bomb throwers, pro-German saboteurs, and “Bolsheviki revolutionists.” All were found guilty after an hour jury deliberation and sentenced up to twenty years in prison and $2 million in fines. Meanwhile, nationwide defense committee efforts were virtually paralyzed by government harassment. Members of the Sacramento defense committee were themselves indicted. Twenty-seven of those arrested in Kansas and Oklahoma languished in a Wichita jail for two years while awaiting trial.

Significantly, the arrests, jailings, lengthy trials, costly defense efforts and prison sentences effectively dismembered the organization and set precedents for the use of indictments to dismantle radical organizations and quash movements. These developments served as but a prelude forthe post-war “red scare” to come.

Chester, Eric Thomas. The Wobblies in Their Heyday: The Rise and Destruction of the Industrial Workers of the World during the World War I Era. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2014.

Foner, Philip S. Labor and World War I 1914-1918. History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Vol. 7. New York: International, 1987.

Thomas, William H. Jr., Unsafe for Democracy: World War I and the U.S. Justice Department’s Covert Campaign to Suppress Dissent. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2009.

Weinstein, James. The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–1925. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967.

“IWW Position on War.” Anti-war resolution passed by the 1916 convention. IWW Website. https://archive.iww.org/history/resolutions/Convention_war_1916/