A People’s History of the United States: Chapter 14 Summary & Analysis

At the height of World War One, the radical writer Randolph Bourne wrote, “War is the health of the state.” Throughout the war, while millions died and entire cities were destroyed, the governments of the Western world “flourished,” and “class struggle was stilled.”

In 1914, the U.S. was not yet at war. Socialism was an ongoing threat to the power elite. James Wadsworth, a Senator from New York, proposed that war could prevent young people from being “divided into classes.” For the duration of World War One, socialist leaders criticized the war for being “imperialist”—an opinion as uncontroversial now as it was controversial at the time.

European governments convinced their people to fight in the war, in part by celebrating patriotism, but also by lying about the number of casualties in the war. The U.S. entered the war in 1917, despite the fact that President Woodrow Wilson had promised that the U.S. would stay neutral. Wilson claimed that he’d reversed his policy because German submarines had attacked American merchant vessels; however, historians have argued that this was a “flimsy” rationalization. It would have been incredibly naïve of Wilson to imagine that German forces would allow American merchant vessels to proceed, since they were selling war supplies to Germany’s enemies.

The real reason for Wilson’s decision to send his country to war, it’s been suggested, was “economic necessity.” In 1914, the U.S. was in the midst of a serious recession, since the conflict in Europe was threatening its foreign markets. Between 1914 and 1917, American capitalists traded with England, to the point where England became “a market for American goods and for loans at interest”—for example, J. P. Morgan loaned huge sums of money to England, knowing that he stood to make a huge profit if England prospered. Well before 1917, then, America’s economic health was tied to the victory of England in World War I.

In 1915, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote a prophetic article arguing that the war was motivated by a desire to control the immense natural wealth of Africa. Du Bois went on to argue that war was a necessary part of modern capitalist society: only through period conflict could the government unite the interests of the “rich man and the poor man” and trick the poor into forgetting about their own conflict with the upper class.

When America declared war, Americans didn’t rush to enlist. The Socialist party held a meeting in St. Louis, where it called the war an injustice. Later in 1917, Socialists held anti-war protests, some with as many as twenty thousand people. Later in the year, Socialist politicians did surprisingly well in elections: in New York and Chicago, Socialist party candidates got more than 20 percent of the vote.

In response to the opposition to the war, Congress passed the Espionage Act, which introduced a twenty-year sentence for anyone inciting insubordination or interfering with the war effort. The Espionage Act was designed to gag anyone criticizing the war. It was in this atmosphere that Oliver Wendell Holmes, the “great liberal” of the Supreme Court, introduced the famous “clear and present danger” standard and argued that the government could limit free speech if that speech could be shown to cause harm. Holmes’s famous analogy—that free speech could be dangerous in the same sense that crying “fire” in a crowded theater was dangerous—was misleading. Almost nobody who criticized World War One was causing “clear and present danger” to other Americans—if anything, the war was a clear and present danger. Eugene Debs was imprisoned for criticizing the war, and he spent more than two years in jail.

During World War One, the American government tightened its control over its own people, not only by limiting free speech but also by prosecuting draft dodgers. In 1918, the government arrested more than one hundred I.W.W. members, including Big Bill Haywood, who’d allegedly conspired to oppose the draft. In the end, Haywood was sentenced to twenty years in prison, and I.W.W. members were fined a total of 2.5 million dollars. (Haywood fled to Soviet Russia, where he lived for the rest of his life.)

In 1918, the war ended, and a mood of disillusion spread across America. Great novelists like John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway wrote bleak novels about the conflict in Europe. The American government continued to fear socialism. In 1919, the government prosecuted or deported thousands of immigrants suspected of socialist or anarchist ties. Two of the most famous such immigrants were Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Sacco and Vanzetti were prosecuted for murder—the legal record strongly suggests that they were found guilty and executed largely because they were foreigners and anarchists.

The elite in the U.S. continued to fear their own people. During World War One, they used a mixture of patriotism and prosecution to send a message to the working classes: “certain kinds of resistance could not be tolerated.” Even so, the working classes continued to fight injustice.