Commonsense Anticommunism: Labor and Civil Liberties between the World Wars

2. Spycraft and Statecraft: Surveillance before the Great War

C H A P T E R T W O Spycraft and Statecraft Surveillance before the Great War Had German spies infiltrated American unions? In the summer of 1915, Samuel Gompers worried. Nearly a year into the Great War, the European powers had spent materiel at an alarming rate. England and France relied increasingly on American munitions to resupply troops. American arms manufacturers ran their factories flat out, and East Coast ports swarmed with ships loading up rifles and cannon for the trenches in France. Then, in June, Frank Buchanan, a labor-card Democratic congressman from Illinois, called for nationalizing the American munitions industry. The “armor trust,” charged Buchanan, would drag the United States into war unless the government checked the power of “these pirates.” The government should take over all munitions factories, acquire the patents for all armaments, and stop selling weapons to belligerent nations.1 Gompers was startled. He had gone on record in opposition to the war from the beginning. But nationalizing industry sounded like a socialistic proposal. Where had Buchanan, a moderate former ironworker and reliable AFL spokesman, come up with this idea? And why had Buchanan suddenly thrown himself into antiwar agitation? Worse, Buchanan had somehow convened a group of union officials into a new lobby, Labor’s National Peace Council (LNPC), to push for his demands. Something strange was going on, Gompers thought. Were German secret agents at work? In fact, they were. Franz von Rintelen, a German Admiralty officer, had landed in New York in April with a $500,000 budget and orders to sabotage the American arms trade. Rintelen hoped to underwrite strikes in munitions factories and among longshoremen handling weapons shipments. Rintelen recruited the unwitting Buchanan to convene Labor’s National Peace Council as the vehicle for labor sabotage. Spycraft and Statecraft 33 Gompers and his old friend Ralph Easley helped crack the case. They had created their own “secret service bureau” and hired agents to investigate the LNPC. When the newspapers broke the story of Rintelen’s arrest, the prosecuting U.S. attorney approvingly noted Gompers’s quick detection of the scheme. This heady foray into international intrigue taught Gompers and the AFL leadership a valuable lesson. Several years later, radical organizers would resurface in AFL union shops urging militant strikes. This time, the AFL was ready. Hunting German saboteurs during World War I was a dress rehearsal for labor conservatives’ campaign to identify and expel Communist organizers in the interwar years. The Rintelen episode also established the AFL as the labor wing of the vigilant network mobilized on the U.S. home front before World War I. Lacking a strong federal police force, the American government relied on voluntary groups to patrol ports, factories, and public space. Ordinary citizens entered into public service when they monitored and reported on their neighbors and coworkers. Like the American Protective League and other vigilant groups, the leadership of the AFL developed a close working relationship with the nascent federal Bureau of Investigation. And like other vigilant leaders, Gompers learned how to wield his new authority against old enemies such as the IWW. Pacifism and Belligerence Labor’s National Peace Council aroused the AFL’s suspicion in part because the federation had already opposed U.S. entry to the war. In late 1914, the federation’s executive council even offered “to initiate a movement for peace at the opportune time or to assist in any effort to bring this terrible war to a close.”2 The AFL was in line with progressive activists who organized a multitude of antiwar groups, from the Women’s Peace Party to the American Union Against Militarism. The Socialist Party condemned the war, and so did the IWW at its 1916 convention. “The only ones who are ready to see us involved,” wrote Gompers to a friend in 1915, “are the captains of big business , financiers, dealers in bonds, and those who hope to reap a rich harvest by trading with the nations of Europe.” On this matter, Gompers sounded as radical as any Wobbly.3 At the outset of war, American popular opinion strongly favored neutrality, even as the United States reaped billions from sales of weapons, raw materials, and loans to Europe.4 By the spring of 1915, naval warfare between Germany and England had turned the Atlantic into a battleground, and domestic debate over U.S. neu- 34 The AFL and the Origins...