Sunflower Justice: A New History of the Kansas Supreme Court

5. Reaction in the Roaring Twenties

5. Reaction in the Roaring Twenties The Political Scene Kansas entered a period of decided political reaction in the decade of the twenties prompted by a public hysteria that was a carryover from World War I. President Woodrow Wilson once warned that if this proud nation were led into war, the American people would “forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.” This was a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the president established the Committee on Public Information (cpi) immediately after Congress declared war. To mobilize the public mind for support of the war, Wilson appointed Denver journalist George Creel to head the cpi. Creel subsequently transformed the war into a Great Crusade “to make the world safe for democracy” and “the war to end all wars” through a barrage of relentless propaganda, oral and written. He mobilized seventy-five thousand “Four Minute Men” across the nation, local patriots who presented short speeches on “why we fight,” war atrocity stories, and similar topics at public gatherings. There was also a good deal of pamphleteering, including the Why We Fight series. These activities created a frenzy in the public mind against new ideas or liberal thinking, a rejection of Progressive programs, and a retreat to what the public considered the “good old days,” which had permitted industrialists to crush labor demands with the charge of “disloyalty ” and “communism.” The public applauded spectacular raids on Industrial Workers of the World (iww) headquarters and the conviction of some two hundred persons in mass trials for sedition in connection with their struggles to improve their working conditions. A mob seized pacifist clergy- 162 Reaction in Roaring Twenties man Herbert S. Bigelow, bound and gagged him, stripped him to the waist, and lashed his back to ribbons “in the name of the poor women and children of Belgium.” (When Germany invaded and “raped” neutral Belgium by invading in 1914, many across the United States reacted with horror to this atrocity.)¹ The iww, a radical branch of socialism, opposed war in any form. It became highly unpopular in Kansas because of its importance to and alleged interference with the wheat harvest, which was vital to the war effort. Congress sought to enforce conformity in support of the war with the Espionage Act of 1917, which penalized, in broad language, anyone who aided the enemy or who interfered with the draft or operations of the military services. The iww headquarters in Augusta was raided, and evidence was illegally seized to prosecute the leaders. The twenty-six iwws arrested in Kansas suffered terribly in antiquated jails for two years, a violation of the speedy trial guarantee, while federal indictments were drawn up charging them with violating the Espionage Act. They were imprisoned along with consumptives and mental defectives in physical conditions that horrified both state and federal inspectors. Tried by federal district judge John Pollock in Kansas City, the iwws received various sentences to Leavenworth federal prison , and the organization never recovered financially from this assault.² This experience prompted the state legislature to enact a significant criminal syndicalist law in 1920. Three years later Harold B. Fiske was organizing for the Agricultural Workers Industrial Union, a branch of the iww, in the wheat fields of Kansas. He was arrested in July with iww literature in his possession and charged with violating this statute . The jury found him guilty, and he was sentenced to Lansing state prison. The state supreme court affirmed his conviction, holding that Fiske’s freedom of speech was not violated by the law and that he was properly found guilty because the preamble to the iww constitution, found in his possession, could have been interpreted by Fiske to promote violence when he explained it to recruits. The decision was appealed to the US Supreme Court in Fiske v. Kansas in 1924, and the justices unanimously reversed his conviction. The law had been applied Reaction in Roaring Twenties 163 to Fiske without any evidence that he or the iww had advocated violence , and this constituted “an arbitrary and unreasonable exercise of the state’s police power.” The justices did not rule the law invalid but insisted that its application in this instance violated Fiske’s Fourteenth Amendment rights.³ Late in the war and afterward, Kansas and the world suffered a terrible pandemic of Spanish influenza. Because of troop mobilization and transportation across the state with the location of Fort Riley in the center, this...