People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [220]
On July 1, 1917, radicals organized a parade in Boston against the war, with banners:
IS THIS A POPULAR WAR, WHY CONSCRIPTION?
WHO STOLE PANAMA? WHO CRUSHED HAITI?
WE DEMAND PEACE.
The New York Call said eight thousand people marched, including “4000 members of the Central Labor Union, 2000 members of the Lettish Socialist Organizations, 1500 Lithuanians, Jewish members of cloak trades, and other branches of the party.” The parade was attacked by soldiers and sailors, on orders from their officers.
The Post Office Department began taking away the mailing privileges of newspapers and magazines that printed antiwar articles. The Masses, a socialist magazine of politics, literature, and art, was banned from the mails. It had carried an editorial by Max Eastman in the summer of 1917, saying, among other things: “For what specific purposes are you shipping our bodies, and the bodies of our sons, to Europe? For my part, I do not recognize the right of a government to draft me to a war whose purposes I do not believe in.”
In Los Angeles, a film was shown that dealt with the American Revolution and depicted British atrocities against the colonists. It was called The Spirit of ’76. The man who made the film was prosecuted under the Espionage Act because, the judge said, the film tended “to question the good faith of our ally, Great Britain.” He was sentenced to ten years in prison. The case was officially listed as U.S. v. Spirit of ’76.
In a small town in South Dakota, a farmer and socialist named Fred Fairchild, during an argument about the war, said, according to his accusers: “If I were of conscription age and had no dependents and were drafted, I would refuse to serve. They could shoot me, but they could not make me fight.” He was tried under the Espionage Act, sentenced to a year and a day at Leavenworth penitentiary. And so it went, multiplied two thousand times (the number of prosecutions under the Espionage Act).
About 65,000 men declared themselves conscientious objectors and asked for noncombatant service. At the army bases where they worked, they were often treated with sadistic brutality. Three men who were jailed at Fort Riley, Kansas, for refusing to perform any military duties, combatant or noncombatant, were taken one by one into the corridor and:
. . . a hemp rope slung over the railing of the upper tier was put about their necks, hoisting them off their feet until they were at the point of collapse. Meanwhile the officers punched them on their ankles and shins. They were then lowered and the rope was tied to their arms, and again they were hoisted off their feet. This time a garden hose was played on their faces with a nozzle about six inches from them, until they collapsed completely. . . .
Schools and universities discouraged opposition to the war. At Columbia University, J. McKeen Cattell, a psychologist, a long-time critic of the Board of Trustees’ control of the university, and an opponent of the war, was fired. A week later, in protest, the famous historian Charles Beard resigned from the Columbia faculty, charging the trustees with being “reactionary and visionless in politics, narrow and medieval in religion. . . .”
In Congress, a few voices spoke out against the war. The first woman in the House of Representatives, Jeannette Rankin, did not respond when her name was called in the roll call on the declaration of war. One of the veteran politicians of the House, a supporter of the war, went to her and whispered, “Little woman, you cannot afford not to vote. You represent the womanhood of the country. . . .” On the next roll call she stood up: “I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war. I vote No.” A popular song of the time was: “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.” It was overwhelmed,