politics

A great book that that talks about this extensively, among other very terrible things going on in America between 1917-1921, is "American Midnight" by Adam Rothschild. It came out last year and I'm currently about halfway through - it's fantastic.

NYT Review without paywall: https://txtify.it/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/books/review/american-midnight-adam-hochschild.html

Summary:

As Hochschild vividly details, the Wilson administration and its allies pioneered the police raids, surveillance operations, internment camps, strikebreaking and legal chicanery that would become part of the repertoire of the American state for decades to come. It may be recalled how, when Donald Trump was a presidential candidate in 2016, his followers ignited a media storm when they threatened to lock up his challenger. But only Wilson went the distance: He jailed his charismatic Socialist opponent, the 63-year-old Eugene Debs, for opposing America’s descent into the carnage of the First World War, with the liberal press in lock step. “He is where he belongs,” Hochschild quotes The New York Times declaring of the imprisoned Debs. “He should stay there.”

When Wilson became president in 1913, he was hailed as a progressive visionary. He wanted to transform moth-eaten American institutions into a sleek administrative state. Despite prompt invasions of Mexico and Haiti during Wilson’s first term, the country was hardly prepared for a major war. In 1917, as Hochschild recounts, the U.S. Army was smaller than Portugal’s. An 18th-century legal corset — the U.S. Constitution — constrained the executive branch, requiring two-thirds of the Senate to ratify foreign treaties. The state’s financial coffers were heavily reliant on excise and customs revenues. Despite the booming American economy and a thriving modern culture that would soon sweep the globe, Wilson found that he had taken control of the equivalent of a creaking galleon in an age of submarine warfare. He wanted to make America the decisive player in world politics, and for its influence to match its economic might.

Aided by the news of German war atrocities, the Wilson administration whipped up anti-German hysteria. Wilson produced a great deal of can't about making the world “safe for democracy,” though by "democracy” he had in mind something like an international clinic for political delinquents with America as supervisor. Internal enemies ultimately proved more reliable than high ideals in sustaining the country’s war fever. German-speaking Americans and other immigrant groups made for obvious targets. “I want to say — I cannot say it too often,” Wilson declared in 1919, “any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic.” But the grander enemy was American socialists, who publicly opposed entering a war in which they would kill fellow workingmen at the behest of their ruling classes.

Standard histories of the first “Red Scare” tend to tell it as a largely domestic story. Hochschild insists on filling out the international dimension. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 features in “American Midnight” like a flare against the dark sky that captures the imagination of the left wing of the American labor movement. “Lenin and Trotsky were the men of the hour,” Debs declared, as members of the Industrial Workers of the World — known as the Wobblies — organized actions across the country. In 1919, one in five American workers walked off their jobs. In Seattle, in what later became known as the “Soviet of Washington,” a motley group of labor unions succeeded in conducting the first general strike in U.S. history — the only time American workers have taken over a city.

Yet neither the Wobblies nor any of the other American socialist outfits were a pincer party, unlike the Bolsheviks in Russia, who were led by a determined group of brilliant strategists and had a crumbling empire in their sights. Instead, the Wobblies, whose American membership never numbered more than 100,000, were a thinly organized movement fighting against business groups, which financed vast armories, many of which still squat at the center of American cities. These, in turn, were backed by a fledgling surveillance state that did not hesitate to outsource its violence to officially sanctioned vigilante groups. “Force, force to the utmost, force without limit,” Wilson said on Flag Day in 1918, the year his administration began overseeing the banning of small radical magazines like The Masses, and the hounding of any publication not on board with the war.