War Is the Health of the State
Excerpted from a "People's History
of the United States"
By Howard Zinn
"War is the health
of the state," the radical writer Randolph Bourne said, in the midst
of the First World War. Indeed, as the nations of Europe went to war
in 1914, the governments flourished, patriotism bloomed, class
struggle was stilled, and young men died in frightful numbers on the
battlefields-often for a hundred yards of land, a line of trenches.
In the United
States, not yet in the war, there was worry about the health of the
state. Socialism was growing. The IWW seemed to be everywhere. Class
conflict was intense. In the summer of 1916, during a Preparedness
Day parade in San Francisco, a bomb exploded, killing nine people,
two local radicals, Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, were arrested
and would spend twenty years in prison. Shortly after that Senator
James Wadsworth of New York suggested compulsory military training
for all males to avert the danger that "these people of ours shall
be divided into classes." Rather: "We must let our young men know
that they owe some responsibility to this country."
The supreme
fulfillment of that responsibility was taking place in Europe. Ten
million were to die on the battlefield; 20 million were to die of
hunger and disease related to the war. And no one since that day has
been able to show that the war brought any gain for humanity that
would be worth one human life. The rhetoric of the socialists, that
it was an "imperialist war," now seems moderate and hardly arguable.
The advanced capitalist countries of Europe were fighting over
boundaries, colonies, spheres of influence; they were competing for
Alsace-Lorraine, the Balkans, Africa, the Middle East.
The war came shortly
after the opening of the twentieth century, in the midst of
exultation (perhaps only among the elite in the Western world) about
progress and modernization. One day after the English declared war,
Henry James wrote to a friend: "The plunge of civilization into this
abyss of blood and darkness . . . is a thing that so gives away the
whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be . . .
gradually bettering." In the first Battle of the Marne, the British
and French succeeded in blocking the German advance on Paris. Each
side had 500,000 casualties. The killing started very fast, and on a
large scale. In August 1914, a volunteer for the British army had to
be 5 feet 8 inches to enlist. By October, the requirement was
lowered to 5 feet 5 inches. That month there were thirty thousand
casualties, and then one could be 5 feet 3. In the first three
months of war, almost the entire original British army was wiped
out.
For three years the battle lines remained virtually stationary in
France. Each side would push forward, then back, then forward again-
for a few yards, a few miles, while the corpses piled up. In 1916
the Germans tried to break through at Verdun; the British and French
counterattacked along the Seine, moved forward a few miles, and lost
600,000 men. One day, the 9th Battalion of the King's Own Yorkshire
Light Infantry launched an attack with eight hundred men. Twenty
four hours later, there were eighty-four left.
Back home, the
British were not told of the slaughter. One English writer recalled:
"The most bloody defeat in the history of Britain . . . might occur
. . . and our Press come out bland and copious and graphic with
nothing to show that we had not had quite a good day-a victory
really...." The same thing was happening on the German side; as
Erich Maria Remarque wrote in his great novel, on days when men by
the thousands were being blown apart by machine guns and shells, the
official dispatches announced "All Quiet on the Western Front."
In July 1916,
British General Douglas Haig ordered eleven divisions of English
soldiers to climb out of their trenches and move toward the German
lines. The six German divisions opened up with their ma chine guns.
Of the 110,000 who attacked, 20,000 were killed, 40,000 more
wounded-all those bodies strewn on no man's land, the ghostly
territory between the contending trenches. On January 1, 1917, Haig
was promoted to field marshal. What happened that summer is
described tersely in William Langer's An Encyclopedia of World
History:
Despite the
opposition of Lloyd George and the skepticism of some of his
subordinates, Haig proceeded hopefully to the main offensive. The
third battle of Ypres was a senes of 8 heavy attacks, carried
through in driving rain and fought over ground water-logged and
muddy. No break-through was effected, and the total gain was about 5
miles of territory, which made the Ypres salient more inconvenient
than ever and cost the British about 400,000 men.
The people of France
and Britain were not told the extent of the casualties. When, in the
last year of the war, the Germans attacked ferociously on the Somme,
and left 300,000 British soldiers dead or wounded, London newspapers
printed the following, we learn from Paul Fussell's The Great War
and Modern Memory:
WHAT CAN I DO?
How the Civilian May
Help in this Crisis.
Be cheerful....
Write encouragingly to friends at the front....
Don't repeat foolish gossip.
Don't listen to idle rumors.
Don't think you know better than Haig.
Into this pit of
death and deception came the United States, in the spring of 1917.
Mutinies were beginning to occur in the French army. Soon, out of
112 divisions, 68 would have mutinies; 629 men would be tried and
condemned, 50 shot by firing squads. American troops were badly
needed.
President Woodrow
Wilson had promised that the United States would stay neutral in the
war: "There is such a thing as a nation being too proud to fight."
But in April of 1917, the Germans had announced they would have
their submarines sink any ship bringing supplies to their enemies;
and they had sunk a number of merchant vessels. Wilson now said he
must stand by the right of Americans to travel on merchant ships in
the war zone. "I cannot consent to any abridgement of the rights of
American citizens in any respect...."
As Richard
Hofstadter points out (The American Political Tradition): "This was
rationalization of the flimsiest sort...." The British had also been
intruding on the rights of American citizens on the high seas, but
Wilson was not suggesting we go to war with them. Hofstadter says
Wilson "was forced to find legal reasons for policies that were
based not upon law but upon the balance of power and economic
necessities."
It was unrealistic
to expect that the Germans should treat the United States as neutral
in the war when the U.S. had been shipping great amounts of war
materials to Germany's enemies. In early 1915, the British liner
Lusitania was torpedoed and sunk t,; a German submarine. She sank in
eighteen minutes, and 1,198 people died, including 124 Americans.
The United States claimed the Lusitania carried an innocent cargo,
and therefore the torpedoing was a monstrous German atrocity.
Actually, the Lusitania was heavily armed: it carried 1,248 cases of
3-inch shells, 4,927 boxes of cartridges (1,000 rounds in each box),
and 2,000 more cases of small-arms ammunition. Her manifests were
falsified to hide this fact, and the British and American
governments lied about the cargo.
Hofstadter wrote of
"economic necessities" behind Wilson's war policy. In 1914 a serious
recession had begun in the United States. J. P. Morgan later
testified: "The war opened during a period of hard times....
Business throughout the country was depressed, farm prices were
deflated, unemployment was serious, the heavy industries were
working far below capacity and bank clearings were off." But by
1915, war orders for the Allies (mostly England) had stimulated the
economy, and by April 1917 more than $2 billion worth of goods had
been sold to the Allies. As Hofstadter says: "America became bound
up with the Allies in a fateful union of war and prosperity."
Prosperity depended
much on foreign markets, it was believed by the leaders of the
country. In 1897, the private foreign investments of the United
States amounted to $700 million dollars. By 1914 they were $3~
billion. Wilson's Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, while
a believer in neutrality in the war, also believed that the United
States needed overseas markets; in May of 1914 he praised the
President as one who had "opened the doors of all the weaker
countries to an invasion of American capital and American
enterprise."
Back in 1907,
Woodrow Wilson had said in a lecture at Columbia University:
"Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers
of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged
in the process.... the doors of the nations which are closed must be
battered down." In his 1912 campaign he said: "Our domestic markets
no longer suffice, we need foreign markets." In a memo to Bryan he
described his aim as "an open door to the world," and in 1914 he
said he supported "the righteous conquest of foreign markets."
With World War I,
England became more and more a market for American goods and for
loans at interest. J. P. Morgan and Company acted as agents for the
Allies, and when, in 1915, Wilson lifted the ban on private bank
loans to the Allies, Morgan could now begin lending money in such
great amounts as to both make great profit and tie American finance
closely to the interest of a British victory in the war against
Germany.
The industrialists and the political leaders talked of prosperity as
if it were classless, as if everyone gained from Morgan's loans.
True, the war meant more production, more employment, but did the
workers in the steel plants gain as much as U.S. Steel, which made
$348 million in profit in 1916 alone? When the United States entered
the war, it was the rich who took even more direct charge of the
economy. Financier Bernard Baruch headed the War Industries Board,
the most powerful of the wartime government agencies. Bankers,
railroad men, and industrialists dominated these agencies.
A remarkably
perceptive article on the nature of the First World War appeared in
May 1915 in the Atlantic Monthly. Written by W. E. B. Du Bois, it
was titled "The African Roots of War." It was a war for empire, of
which the struggle between Germany and the Allies over Africa was
both symbol and reality: ". . . in a very real sense Africa is a
prime cause of this terrible overturning of civilization which we
have lived to see." Africa, Du Bois said, is "the Land of the
Twentieth Century," because of the gold and diamonds of South
Africa, the cocoa of Angola and Nigeria, the rubber and ivory of the
Congo, the palm oil of the West Coast.
Du Bois saw more
than that. He was writing several years before Lenin's Imperialism,
which noted the new possibility of giving the working class of the
imperial country a share of the loot. He pointed to the paradox of
greater "democracy" in America alongside "increased aristocracy and
hatred toward darker races." He explained the paradox by the fact
that "the white workingman has been asked to share the spoil of
exploiting 'chinks and niggers.'" Yes, the average citizen of
England, France, Germany, the United States, had a higher standard
of living than before. But: "Whence comes this new wealth? . . . It
comes primarily from the darker nations of the world-Asia and
Africa, South and Central America, the West Indies, and the islands
of the South Seas."
Du Bois saw the
ingenuity of capitalism in uniting exploiter and exploited-creating
a safety valve for explosive class conflict. "It is no longer simply
the merchant prince, or the aristocratic monopoly, or even the
employing class, that is exploiting the world: it is the nation, a
new democratic nation composed of united capital and labor."
The United States
fitted that idea of Du Bois. American capitalism needed
international rivalry-and periodic war-to create an artificial
community of interest between rich and poor, supplanting the genuine
community of interest among the poor that showed itself in sporadic
movements. How conscious of this were individual entrepreneurs and
statesmen? That is hard to know. But their actions, even if
half-conscious, instinctive drives to survive, matched such a
scheme. And in 1917 this demanded a national consensus for war.
The government
quickly succeeded in creating such a consensus, according to the
traditional histories. Woodrow Wilson's biographer Arthur Link
wrote: "In the final analysis American policy was deter mined by the
President and public opinion." In fact, there is no way of measuring
public opinion at that time, and there is no persuasive evidence
that the public wanted war. The government had to work hard to
create its consensus. That there was no spontaneous urge to fight is
suggested by the strong measures taken: a draft of young men, an
elaborate propaganda campaign throughout the country, and harsh
punishment for those who refused to get in line. Despite the rousing
words of Wilson about a war "to end all wars" and "to make the world
safe for democracy," Americans did not rush to enlist. A million men
were needed, but in the first six weeks after the declaration of war
only 73,000 volunteered. Congress voted overwhelmingly for a draft.
George Creel, a veteran newspaperman, became the government's
official propagandist for the war; he set up a Committee on Public
Information to persuade Americans the war was right. It sponsored
75,000 speakers, who gave 750,000 four-minute speeches in five
thousand American cities and towns. It was a massive effort to
excite a reluctant public.
*****
Congress passed, and
Wilson signed, in June of 1917, the Espionage Act. From its title
one would suppose it was an act against spying. However, it had a
clause that provided penalties up to twenty years in prison for
"Whoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully cause or
attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of
duty in the military or naval forces of the United States, or shall
willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the
U.S...." Unless one had a theory about the nature of governments, it
was not clear how the Espionage Act would be used. It even had a
clause that said "nothing in this section shall be construed to
limit or restrict . . . any discussion, comment, or criticism of the
acts or policies of the Government...." But its double-talk
concealed a singleness of purpose. The Espionage Act was used to
imprison Americans who spoke or wrote against the war.
Two months after the
law passed, a Socialist named Charles Schenck was arrested in
Philadelphia for printing and distributing fifteen thousand leaflets
that denounced the draft law and the war. The leaflet recited the
Thirteenth Amendment provision against "involuntary servitude" and
said the Conscription Act violated this. Conscription, it said, was
"a monstrous deed against humanity in the interests of the
financiers of Wall Street." And: "Do not submit to intimidation."
Schenck was indicted, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to six
months in jail for violating the Espionage Act. (It turned out to be
one of the shortest sentences given in such cases.) Schenck
appealed, arguing that the Act, by prosecuting speech and writing,
violated the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law . . .
abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...."
The Supreme Court's
decision was unanimous and was written by its most famous liberal,
Oliver Wendell Holmes. He summarized the contents of the leaflet and
said it was undoubtedly intended to "obstruct" the carrying out of
the draft law. Was Schenck protected by the First Amendment? Holmes
said:
"The most stringent
protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely
shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.... The question in
every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances
and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger
that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a
right to prevent."
Holmes's analogy was
clever and attractive. Few people would think free speech should be
conferred on someone shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.
But did that example fit criticism of the war? Zechariah Chafee, a
Harvard law school professor, wrote later (Free Speech in the United
States) that a more apt analogy for Schenck was someone getting up
between the acts at a theater and declaring that there were not
enough fire exits. To play further with the example: was not
Schenck's act more like someone shouting, not falsely, but truly, to
people about to buy tickets and enter a theater, that there was a
fire raging inside?
Perhaps free speech
could not be tolerated by any reasonable person if it constituted a
"clear and present danger" to life and liberty; after all, free
speech must compete with other vital rights. But was not the war
itself a "clear and present danger," indeed, more clear and more
present and more dangerous to life than any argument against it? Did
citizens not have a right to object to war, a right to be a danger
to dangerous policies?
(The Espionage Act,
thus approved by the Supreme Court, has remained on the books all
these years since World War I, and although it is supposed to apply
only in wartime, it has been constantly in force since 1950, because
the United States has legally been in a "state of emergency" since
the Korean war. In 1963, the Kennedy administration pushed a bill
[unsuccessfully] to apply the Espionage Act to statements uttered by
Americans abroad, it was concerned in the words of a cable from
Secretary of State Rusk to Ambassador Lodge in Vietnam, about
journalists in Vietnam writing "critical articles ... on Diem and
his government" that were "likely to impede the war effort.")
The case of Eugene
Debs soon came before the Supreme Court. In June of 1918, Debs
visited three Socialists who were in prison for opposing the draft,
and then spoke, across the street from the jail, to an audience he
kept enthralled for two hours. He was one of the country's great
orators, and was interrupted again and again by laughter and
applause. "Why, the other day, by a vote of five-to-four-a kind of
craps game, come seven, come eleven-they declared the child labor
law unconstitutional." He spoke of his comrades in jail. He dealt
with the charges that Socialists were pro-German. "I hate, I loathe,
I despise Junkers and Junkerdom. I have no earthly use for the
Junkers of Germany, and not one particle more use for the Junkers in
the United States." (Thunderous applause and cheers.)
They tell us that we
live in a great free republic; that our institutions are democratic;
that we are a free and self-governing people. That is too much, even
for a joke....
Wars throughout
history have been waged for conquest and plunder.... And that is war
in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the
subject class has always fought the battles....
Debs was arrested
for violating the Espionage Act. There were draft-age youths in his
audience, and his words would "obstruct the recruiting or enlistment
service."
His words were
intended to do much more than that:
"Yes, in good time
we are going to sweep into power in this nation and throughout the
world. We are going to destroy all enslaving and degrading
capitalist institutions and re-create them as free and humanizing
institutions. The world is daily changing before our eyes. The sun
of capitalism is setting; the sun of Socialism is rising.... In due
time the hour will strike and this great cause triumphant . . . will
proclaim the emancipation of the working class and the brotherhood
of all mankind. " (Thunderous and prolonged applause.)
Debs refused at his
trial to take the stand in his defense, or to call a witness on his
behalf. He denied nothing about what he said. But before the jury
began its deliberations, he spoke to them:
I have been accused
of obstructing the war. I admit it. Gentlemen, I abhor war. I would
oppose war if I stood alone.... I have sympathy with the suffering,
struggling people everywhere. It does not make any difference under
what flag they were born, or where they live....
The jury found him
guilty of violating the Espionage Act. Debs ad dressed the judge
before sentencing:
Your honor, years
ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my
mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said
then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it;
while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul
in prison, I am not free.
The judge denounced
those "who would strike the sword from the hand of this nation while
she is engaged in defending herself against a foreign and brutal
power." He sentenced Debs to ten years in prison.
Debs's appeal was
not heard by the Supreme Court until 1919. The war was over. Oliver
Wendell Holmes, for a unanimous court, affirmed Debs's guilt. Holmes
discussed Debs's speech: "He then ex pressed opposition to Prussian
militarism in a way that naturally might have been thought to be
intended to include the mode of proceeding in the United States."
Holmes said Debs made "the usual contrasts between capitalists and
laboring men . . . with the implication running through it all that
the working men are not concerned in the war." Thus, Holmes said,
the "natural and intended effect" of Debs's speech would be to
obstruct recruiting.
Debs was locked up
in the West Virginia state penitentiary, and then in the Atlanta
federal penitentiary, where he spent thirty-two months until, at the
age of sixty-six, he was released by President Harding in 1921.
*****
The war ended in
November 1918. Fifty thousand American soldiers had died, and it did
not take long, even in the case of patriots, for bitterness and
disillusionment to spread through the country.
*****
With all the wartime
jailings, the intimidation, the drive for national unity, when the
war was over, the Establishment still feared socialism. There seemed
to be a need again for the twin tactics of control in the face of
revolutionary challenge: reform and repression.
The first was suggested by George L. Record, one of Wilson's
friends, who wrote to him in early 1919 that something would have to
be done for economic democracy, "to meet this menace of socialism."
He said: "You should become the real leader of the radical forces in
America, and present to the country a constructive program of
fundamental reform, which shall be an alternative to the program
presented by the socialists, and the Bolsheviki...."
That summer of 1919,
Wilson's adviser Joseph Tumulty reminded him that the conflict
between the Republicans and Democrats was unimportant compared with
that which threatened them both:
What happened in
Washington last night in the attempt upon the Attorney General's
life is but a symptom of the terrible unrest that is stalking about
the country.... As a Democrat I would be disappointed to see the
Republican Party regain power. That is not what depresses one so
much as to see growing steadily from day to day, under our very
eyes, a movement that, if it is not checked, is bound to express
itself in attack upon everything we hold dear. In this era of
industrial and social unrest both parties are in disrepute with the
average man....
"What happened in
Washington last night" was the explosion of a bomb in front of the
home of Wilson's Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Six months
after that bomb exploded, Palmer carried out the first of his mass
raids on aliens-immigrants who were not citizens. A law passed by
Congress near the end of the war provided for the deportation of
aliens who opposed organized government or advocated the destruction
of property. Palmer's men, on December 21,1919, picked Up 249 aliens
of Russian birth (including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman), put
them on a transport, and deported them to what had become Soviet
Russia. The Constitution gave no right to Congress to deport aliens,
but the Supreme Court had said, back in 1892, in affirming the right
of Congress to exclude Chinese, that as a matter of
self-preservation, this was a natural right of the government.
In January 1920,
four thousand persons were rounded up all over the country, held in
seclusion for long periods of time, brought into secret hearings,
and ordered deported. In Boston, Department of Justice agents, aided
by local police, arrested six hundred people by raiding meeting
halls or by invading their homes in the early morning. A troubled
federal judge described the process:
"Pains were taken to
give spectacular publicity to the raid, and to make it appear that
there was great and imminent public danger.... The arrested aliens,
in most instances perfectly quiet and harmless working people, many
of them not long ago Russian peasants, were handcuffed in pairs, and
then, for the purposes of transfer on trains and through the streets
of Boston, chained together... "
In the spring of
1920, a typesetter and anarchist named Andrea Salsedo was arrested
in New York by FBI agents and held for eight weeks in the FBI
offices on the fourteenth floor of the Park Row Building, not
allowed to contact family or friends or lawyers. Then his crushed
body was found on the pavement below the building and the FBI said
he had committed suicide by jumping from the fourteenth floor
window.
Two friends of
Salsedo, anarchists and workingmen in the Boston area, having just
learned of his death, began carrying guns. They were arrested on a
streetcar in Brockton, Massachusetts, and charged with a holdup and
murder that had taken place two weeks before at a shoe factory.
These were Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. They went on trial,
were found guilty, and spent seven years in jail while appeals went
on, and while all over the country and the world, people became
involved in their case. The trial record and the surrounding
circumstances suggested that Sacco and Vanzetti were sentenced to
death because they were anarchists and foreigners. In August 1927,
as police broke up marches and picket lines with arrests and
beatings, and troops surrounded the prison, they were electrocuted.
Sacco's last message
to his son Dante, in his painfully learned English was a message to
millions of others in the years to come:
"So, Son, instead of
crying, be strong, so as to be able to comfort your mother . . .
take her for a long walk in the quiet country, gathering wild
flowers here and there.... But remember always, Dante, in the play
of happiness, don't you use all for yourself only.... help the
persecuted and the victim because they are your better friends....
In this struggle of life you will find more and love and you will be
loved."
There had been
reforms. The patriotic fervor of war had been invoked. The courts
and jails had been used to reinforce the idea that certain ideas,
certain kinds of resistance, could not be tolerated. And still, even
from the cells of the condemned, the message was going out: the
class war was still on in that supposedly classless society, the
United States. Through the twenties and the thirties, it was still
on.
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