Unraveling Freedom: The Battle for Democracy on the Home Front during World War I (review)

If truth is the first casualty of war, freedom of speech is interred right beside it, as Bausum discusses in this extended essay on the suspension of individual rights in the United States during World War I. She begins with the sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-boat in 1915, an act of wartime aggression that would incite a battle cry two years later for Americans in favor of entering the European war. She then goes on to examine the issues during the war itself: "Tensions over who could be trusted, whether criticism of the war effort symbolized disloyalty, what it meant to be an American, and whether one could retain connections to a motherland during wartime would dominate the American homefront for the rest of the decade." 1917 and '18 would witness the erosion of First Amendment protections, with Espionage and Sedition Acts making it easy to turn any speech critical of the war or officials into criminal activity and any citizen with enemy lineage into a suspected spy. Challenges to these acts finally reached the Supreme Court after the war itself had been formally concluded, and calmer heads began to prevail. This title begins as a cautionary tale for our own time with a comics-style foreword by Ted Rall that offers a whirlwind eight-panel tour of American civil rights violations in several wars and concludes that "today, not all that much has changed." Bausum herself draws explicit parallels between the Lusitania and the September 11th attacks, the 1917 Espionage Act and the Patriot Act. The book's conclusion is a little rosier than such material would imply, with a paragraph that could confusingly suggest such troubles are behind us; nonetheless, there's much food for thought in this tidily organized history lesson and in the appended "Guide to Wartime Presidents" that extends the discussion of national security. A timeline, bibliography, citations, and index are included.