To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [175]
More than 1,000 COs were still behind bars, attendance at peace rallies was on the rise, and, to the government's dismay, the envoy to Britain of what was now known as Soviet Russia, Maxim Litvinov, was eagerly sought after as a speaker by groups on the left. Britons in such organizations could also take some encouragement from comrades in the United States. American radicals scoffed at President Woodrow Wilson's high-flown rhetoric about democracy and self-determination, insisting that the real reason the U.S. was fighting for an Allied victory was to ensure that massive American war loans to Britain and France would be paid back. The U.S. quickly began conscription, and although American war resisters were never as numerous as their British counterparts, more than 500 draftees refused any sort of alternative service and went to prison. The labor leader Eugene V. Debs, for whom Hardie had campaigned years before, left a sickbed in 1918 to give a series of antiwar speeches, for which he, too, was thrown behind bars. The judge told him he might get a lesser sentence if he repented. "Repent?" asked Debs. "Repent? Repent for standing like a man?" Still in his cell in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, in 1920, he would receive nearly a million votes for president on the Socialist ticket.
British officials feared that another "victory" as costly as Passchendaele could put their country, like Russia, at risk of upheaval. As surveillance intensified, the number of agents under Thomson's command grew to 700, though now he had competition from the army. Its own busy operatives produced a voluminous Weekly Intelligence Summary for John French's Home Forces headquarters, with eight categories including "General Public Opinion" and "Acts of Disloyalty." Reports under each heading were contributed by regional army commands around the country, one of which added a ninth category, "Movements of Irishmen." Agents dutifully recorded the graffiti in army latrines; scrawled on the wall of one in Yorkshire was "What the hell are we fighting for, only the capitalists."
At times the writers of these confidential Weekly Intelligence Summaries sounded as if they, like the Bolsheviks, expected revolution to sweep across Europe. "There is scarcely a community or group of people in England now," reported a gloomy officer of the London District Command in early 1918, "among whom the principles of Socialism and extreme democratic control are not beginning to be listened to with ever increasing eagerness.... There is no gathering of working people in the country which is not disposed to regard Capitalism as a proven failure." Accounts of speeches by Sylvia Pankhurst, Emily Hobhouse, and Charlotte Despard appeared in these files: "The whole tone of Mrs. Despard's speech was that of resistance to authority," reported one agent. Those with "sound views" were also duly noted: "Mrs. Pankhurst and Miss Christabel Pankhurst are conducting a patriotic campaign in all the major industrial centres, of which favourable reports have come to hand." With Lloyd George's approval, a group of business magnates had given Christabel £15,000 (more than $850,000 in today's money) for her anti-socialist campaigning.
Sylvia's Workers' Dreadnought was probably the most widely read of the handful of newspapers opposed to the war, and army intelligence agents busily clipped articles from it for their files. She was also involved in a new group, the People's Russian Information Bureau. In contrast to the anti-Bolshevik mainstream press, it promised to put before the public the glorious truth