People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [219]
The newspapers helped create an atmosphere of fear for possible opponents of the war. In April of 1917, the New York Times quoted Elihu Root (former Secretary of War, a corporation lawyer) as saying: “We must have no criticism now.” A few months later it quoted him again that “there are men walking about the streets of this city tonight who ought to be taken out at sunrise tomorrow and shot for treason.” At the same time, Theodore Roosevelt was talking to the Harvard Club about Socialists, IWWs, and others who wanted peace as “a whole raft of sexless creatures.”
In the summer of 1917, the American Defense Society was formed. The New York Herald reported: “More than one hundred men enrolled yesterday in the American Vigilante Patrol at the offices of the American Defense Society. . . . The Patrol was formed to put an end to seditious street oratory.”
The Department of Justice sponsored an American Protective League, which by June of 1917 had units in six hundred cities and towns, a membership of nearly 100,000. The press reported that their members were “the leading men in their communities . . . bankers . . . railroad men . . . hotel men.” One study of the League describes their methods:
The mails are supposed to be sacred. . . . But let us call the American Protective League sometimes almost clairvoyant as to letters done by suspects. . . . It is supposed that breaking and entering a man’s home or office place without warrant is burglary. Granted. But the League has done that thousands of times and has never been detected!
The League claimed to have found 3 million cases of disloyalty. Even if these figures are exaggerated, the very size and scope of the League gives a clue to the amount of “disloyalty.”
The states organized vigilante groups. The Minnesota Commission of Public Safety, set up by state law, closed saloons and moving picture theaters, took count of land owned by aliens, boosted Liberty bonds, tested people for loyalty. The Minneapolis Journal carried an appeal by the Commission “for all patriots to join in the suppression of antidraft and seditious acts and sentiment.”
The national press cooperated with the government. The New York Times in the summer of 1917 carried an editorial: “It is the duty of every good citizen to communicate to proper authorities any evidence of sedition that comes to his notice.” And the Literary Digest asked its readers “to clip and send to us any editorial utterances they encounter which seem to them seditious or treasonable.” Creel’s Committee on Public Information advertised that people should “report the man who spreads pessimistic stories. Report him to the Department of Justice.” In 1918, the Attorney General said: “It is safe to say that never in its history has this country been so thoroughly policed.”
Why these huge efforts? On August 1, 1917, the New York Herald reported that in New York City ninety of the first hundred draftees claimed exemption. In Minnesota, headlines in the Minneapolis Journal of August 6 and 7 read: “Draft Opposition Fast Spreading in State,” and “Conscripts Give False Addresses.” In Florida, two Negro farm hands went into the woods with a shotgun and mutilated themselves to avoid the draft: one blew off four fingers of his hand; the other shot off his arm below the elbow. Senator Thomas Hardwick of Georgia said “there was undoubtedly general and widespread opposition on the part of many thousands . . . to the enactment of the draft law. Numerous and largely attended mass meetings held in every part of the State protested against it. . . .” Ultimately, over 330,000 men were classified as draft evaders.
In Oklahoma, the Socialist party and the IWW had been active among tenant farmers and sharecroppers who formed a “Working Class Union.” At a mass meeting of the Union, plans were made to destroy a railroad bridge and cut telegraph wires in order to block military enlistments. A march on Washington was planned for draft objectors throughout the country. (This was called the Green Corn Rebellion because