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1 Policing Politics The Origins of Federal Countersubversion President Woodrow Wilson and his supporters presented the decision to join the war in Europe as the beginning of a great coming together—a moment when, faced with existential threats, the inhabitants of the towns, cities, and countryside would bind themselves as one in a shared commitment to liberty and independence. “As a nation we are united in spirit and intention,” Wilson declared in his December 1917 State of the Union address, eight months into the war. “I hear the voices of dissent,” he acknowledged. “I also see men here and there fling themselves in impotent disloyalty against the calm, indomitable power of the Nation.” But they “do not touch the heart of anything. . . . They may safely be left to strut their uneasy hour and be forgotten.”1 The dominant, progressive-nationalist tradition to which Wilson belonged held that a shared sense of national purpose, especially in times of crisis, transcended narrow divisions of politics, wealth, color, place of origin, and sex.2 As Herbert Croly, the foremost prophet of progressivism, had written in 1909, “We may distrust and dislike much that is done in the name of our country by our fellow-countrymen; but our country itself, its democratic system, and its prosperous future are above suspicion.” But as powerful as this rhetoric of unity was, it did not describe American life in 1917. Americans were deeply divided over the decision to go to war, with a large minority unwilling to be sent to die in a conflict they did not support and did not think necessary. Wilson knew it: many had voted for his reelection in 1916 precisely to avoid such an engagement overseas. Few Americans signed up voluntarily after Congress declared war, millions refused to register for the draft that was implemented soon after, and thousands absconded rather than face being called up. In the South, three state governors were forced to request federal troops to suppress deserter-led insurrections.3 Newspapers reported Americans fleeing across the border to 14 . the revolutionary challenge Mexico, while thousands of recently naturalized citizens gave back their papers rather than follow orders to enlist. In the North, millions of ethnic Irish, German, and Eastern Europeans opposed a conflict that saw the United States ally with Britain, France, and Russia. From coast to coast, sporadic antidraft marches and demonstrations bubbled up, occasionally surging into violence and bloodshed. As a minister in North Carolina wrote in a letter to his local representative, “Many mothers are desperate, and the thought of an unjustifiable , useless war to be backed up by conscription of our boys into a fight of which they do not approve, and the expenditure of sums, such as the world has never heard of, for War, of the people’s money, has spread like a Pall all over our country.”4 Advocates of war found themselves in a double bind: forced to strain their resources and ingenuity to manage an undercurrent of anti-interventionism that had the power to derail the war effort, yet committed to a nationalist mythology that held as axiomatic the belief that “the people” were both united behind the government and free to speak—that the war was being waged to save democracy and that dissenters were so rare that they could be “safely left to strut their uneasy hour and be forgotten.” As historian Merle Curti notes, “Former struggles by and large involved the civilian population only in minor ways. Now war required mass morale, support, and participation. Hence patriotism could hardly be left to casual education, to chance.” But if patriotism was not left to chance, then how could it be said to reflect the natural will of the people? Only power would allow the United States to “sustain righteousness, justice, and the golden rule by drawing the sword against the enemy of these virtues.”5 But would not the application of power undermine the democratic values the war was supposedly being fought for? This was not just a problem of ideology or political rhetoric; it was also a question of law. Although the United States prior to World War I had witnessed many forms of intolerance, rarely had these been translated into federal laws or institutional mechanisms capable of large-scale political policing. The classically liberal and anticolonial constitutional system strictly limited the power of the federal government to control the loyalty of its citizens. Washington was permitted to wage war to protect the nation and raise...

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