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WorldWarIpartII20225.pptx

World War I: Part II

Professor Mindi Sitterud-McCluskey

The US and World War I

Having achieved a declaration of war, Wilson and other proponents became tasked with selling the war to an American public that remained staunchly against it.

Wilson drew upon familiar, hypocritical, and essentially meaningless platitudes:

Example: “a war to make the world safe for democracy?”

Women, African Americans, and many Mexican Americans did not enjoy democracy at home.

The American working class enjoyed very little real democracy at home

Germany was more democratic than Britain. Unlike Britain, Germany had universal male suffrage.

How democratic is a nation that manipulates and coerces its public into war?

Example: “a war to end all wars.”

WWI laid the groundwork for WWII and most of the global conflicts that humanity has waged since.

WWI: American Home-Front

Legal Challenges

Groups of Americans responded to their government’s declaration of war with legal challenges. The Supreme Court struck-down each attempt. Arguments included:

The 13th Amendment abolishing slavery- Is not conscription a form of involuntary labor?

The Constitution defines the purpose of the military as “to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrection, and repel invasion.” Put another way, the US military was intended to be oriented toward the home-front, not foreign wars, interventionism and imperialism (though, numerous pieces of legislation subsequently shifted that orientation)

Opposition to entering “Europe’s War” remained so thick among the American people that bending the public to Washington’s declaration of war and raising an army would require an unprecedented propaganda campaign and unprecedented violations of civil liberties as state-policy.

The US & WWI

Propaganda and Manipulation

Committee for Public Information

(CPI), aka- Creel Committee

Created in 1917 by the US government

Purpose: Generate propaganda and emotional manipulation with which to move the American public toward support for the US entrance into WWI.

It was headed by journalist, George Creel, partnered with Walter Lippman and Edward Bearnaise (Sigmund Freud’s nephew). These men subscribed to the idea that the average American was not intelligent enough to make responsible choices; therefore, the “better classes” must herd them into consent.

The Creel Committee recruited journalists, academics, advertisers, businesses, and politicians to gin-up “patriotic” war sentiment and suppress dissent.

According to George Creel, his job was to whip American emotions into a mindless patriotic fervor (“one white hot mass of instinct”).

Propaganda films and sheet music.

Creel received support from elements with tremendous sway over the public mind:

18,000 newspapers and 11,000 advertisers,

10,000 chambers of commerce (representing businesses)

30,000 manufacturers as well as stores, banks, libraries, YMCAs, and Red Cross chapters.

Early film studios also signed-on

Campaigns included rallying the population around changing the names of, and even banning, things associated with Germany:

Sauerkraut = Liberty Cabbage

Dachshund: Liberty Dogs

Music by Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert were banned

14 states prohibited the speaking of German in public schools

Despite the massive propaganda campaigns and brokering of deals, American men did not initially enlist in numbers sufficient to meet military quotas.

WWI American Home Front

As much of the American public continued to oppose a US entrance into the war, pro-war elements escalated methods of perception management and efforts to raise an army…

Perception Management: Ever more extreme forms of propaganda and manipulation:

Early stages: Feel-good patriotism and platitudes of “freedom,” “democracy,” “duty, “honor.”

Next: Terrorize the public with demonic and villainous characterizations of Germans and atrocity stories.

The Germans were allegedly bayonetting babies, crucifying Christians, and enslaving women, though no evidence of these things has been presented.

Next: Denigrate and vilify those Americans who do not support the war: as “Anti-American” subversive, cowardly, mentally/morally defective, dangerous… Americans became turned against one another.

Claims upon American lives and bodies: Low enlistment numbers moved Congress to pass the Selective Service Act to conscript (draft) young men to fight.

The US and World War I

Criminalize Anti-War Dissent: Congress passed a series of acts that essentially outlawed voicing opposition to the war under the pretexts that:

Germany is manipulating public opinion– therefore, those who speak against the war must be German agents.

To speak out against the war is treasonous, never-mind the possibility that those who send American men to fight and die for non-national defensive reasons might better suit the charge of treason.

[This pattern of criminalizing and denigrating anti-war sentiment and declaring those who oppose Washington’s behaviors abroad to be “foreign agents” continues to the present time]

WWI Home Front

Even as conscientious objectors bravely endured torture in American prisons for their beliefs and commitment to non-violence, propaganda denigrated them as “unmanly” and more.

Anti-war graphic pointing to the profound truth that Americans were being imprisoned under the Espionage Act for making statements akin to those of the New Testament Jesus Christ. What can be said of a nation in which peace-making is treason?

June 1917: Espionage Act – Banned certain newspapers and magazines from mail service and made it illegal to interfere with military recruitment. What does that mean?

Publicly expressing opposition to the war was considered interfering with military recruitment = treason.

1918: Sedition Act- Made it illegal to utter, print, or write anything disloyal about the US government. What does that mean?

Publicly expressing dissent regarding any government policy, agenda or action, or the mainstream of American society, including capitalism.

To enforce the Espionage and Sedition acts and suppress out dissent, Washington dramatically expanded the size and authority of a new agency called the FBI

FBI: Founded in 1908 to investigate white collar crimes such as banking and land fraud, the FBI became dramatically expanded in size and power during WWI under the pretext of hunting German spies and agents. The FBI, however, did not use the Espionage and Sedition acts, and newly expanded authorities to target Germans spies and agents, however. It used them to target Americans who opposed the war and challenged the profit-driven basis of western society.

World War I: US Home Front

There are "millions of men and women of German birth and native sympathy who live amongst us… If there should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with a firm hand of repression."

Woodrow Wilson

Thousands of Americans- both well-known and ordinary people, became arrested and imprisoned for expressing opinions opposed to the war and the status quo.

Eugene Debs:

Socialist, anti-war activist

Stated that he would rather be shot as a traitor than go to war for Wall Street.

Arrested and imprisoned under the Espionage Act of 1917 for speaking against the war

Debs spent two years behind bars during which time he ran for president from behind bars, receiving a million votes

Ricardo Magon:

Mexican Revolutionary and labor leader

Also arrested and imprisoned in San Antonio under Espionage Act for writing contrary to the war

Sentenced to 20 years in prison

Died in Leavenworth, blind and penniless for a speech crime.

World War I: Home Front

“In the homes of those on the bottom, there are laments about a son gone off to war. These boys confront, gun in hand, another youth who is, like him, the light of his home, and whom

he doesn’t hate and can’t hate,

because he doesn’t even know him.”

Ricardo Magon

“Three of our most loyal comrades are paying the penalty of their devotion to the cause of the working class. They have come to realize that it is extremely dangerous to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a country “fighting to make democracy safe in the world.”

Eugene Debs

A government-driven disinformation and manipulation campaign, the suppression of dissent, and patriotic virtue signaling, fear, paranoia, and suspicion provided fertile soil for the development of ultra-nationalism: A cult-like, hyper-militaristic, supremacist, and xenophobic form of nationalism that rarely functions to the benefit of the nation and its people.

“100% American” Campaigns

Militaristic patriotic committees rallied schools, churches, and chambers of commerce to promote “English-only” public spaces and “respect” for American institutions, at the expense of rational dissent and critical thought

They flooded communities with American symbols, ceremonies, oaths, rituals, and historical mythologies.

Business leaders mandated Americanization classes for immigrant workers. Ethnic, regional, and racial diversity = “un-American”

Basic history: The United States was founded by immigrants, mostly British. It remained a nation of mostly first and second generation Americansby World War I, largely first generation. Who gets to determine what an American is, let alone “100% American.”

World War I Home Front

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Even as mostly conscripted American men became mobilized for the trenched of Europe, a type of war was made upon the home-front which turned ordinary people viciously, and sometimes violently, against one another.

Under the banner of 100% Americanism and the invention of a “German Menace” with which to scare the public into compliance and criminalize opponents, the FBI and various state and local agencies rallied the “good Americans.”

Law enforcement, “patriotic” informants and organizations, vigilante mobs, and gun-wielding militias became mobilized to hunt-down “disloyal” Americans and “foreigners.”

In Texas, the Texas Rangers became expanded to include the Loyalty Rangers to hunt down alleged draft dodgers, disloyal folk and refugees from the ongoing Mexican Revolution. The murder of ethnic Mexicans skyrocketed.

The American Protective League became created by business leaders as a quasi-vigilante network of goon-squads (violent thugs/ mercenaries) and citizen informants: Neighbors spied upon and monitored neighbors, beat fellow humans suspected of being “disloyal,” and reported to the FBI and local law enforcement. Sometimes, members became deputized to suppress protest and dissent.

World War I Home Front

People were beaten and killed for alleged disloyalty, including making demands for freedom of speech. Overwhelmingly, the suppressions targeted the working-class.

Butte, Montana: Labor organizer, Frank Little, was lynched after giving an emotional speech in the wake of a mine disaster which killed 300+ miners in Butte.

Little had pointed out that the real enemy is not the Germans but the capitalists who drove men into wage dependency, stole the fruit of their labor, and sent them into mines without investing in reasonable safety measures.

He was beaten, tied to a car, dragged down the street, bludgeoned in the head. His dead body was found hanging near a railroad.

Little was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a special target for destruction by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and reactionary politicians and organizations.

“One Big Union!”: The IWW fought to unite “all the workers of the world”- all skill levels, all races, religions, ethnicities, genders, and eventually bring about a cooperative commonwealth.

They fought for free-speech before and during the war.

They opposed the war on the basis of being a war for Wall Street that sent working class men to kill other working-class men.

World War I: United States

Green Corn Rebellion- (August 1917)

Southern and Western Oklahoma-A region populated by mostly poor tenant farmers: Seminole and Muscogee Creeks, displaced by the 1830 Indian Removal Act, African American, and Anglo-American.

Native American, black, and white farmers relied upon the labor of their young men. Thus, conscription into war threatened family survival.

They rejected the US government’s claim upon the lives and bodies of their young men.

The rebellion was initiated during Native American Green Corn ceremony, The plan was to gather the green corn, march south, amass a larger force, and march to Washington.

The farmers engaged in sabotage in an attempt to create a protected zone for themselves.

They were overtaken by police and a vigilante mob, beaten, killed or imprisoned.

World War I: Home Front

“The full moon of late July, early august it was, the Moon of the Green Corn. It was not easy to persuade our poor white and black brothers and sisters to rise-up. We told them that rising up, standing up, whatever the consequences, would inspire future generations…That has been the Indian way for centuries, since the invasions”

Green Corn rebels

World War I: American Home-Front

The domestic climate that became generated to coerce the public into alignment with a US role in World War I proved conducive to the nation-wide expansion of the Ku Klux Klan…

Second Ku Klux Klan:

The KKK was founded in the aftermath of the Civil War. It became dismantled by a federal military occupation of the former Confederate states during Reconstruction.

The second KKK became founded in the aftermath of the nation’s first blockbuster film, DW Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”

The movie glorified the first Ku Klux Klan as an alleged force of extralegal justice, order and security. It imagined the post Civil War South as beset by criminal newly freed people and Yankee opportunists.

President Woodrow Wilson had the movie screened in the White House and invited members of his cabinet and their families to watch it. He later endorsed it.

This new KKK was ultra-nationalist, racist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, and anti-Left, meaning anti-labor union, anti-socialist, anti-anarchist, anti-communist. It also opposed immigrants, progressives, pacifists, suffragists and feminists.

World War I: American Home-Front

Contrary to popular portrayals of the KKK, its ranks were not filled by the ignorant, poor and laboring classes. Rather, the average Klansman was of the “respectable” middle class and, especially, the business class.

KKK chapters were generally considered respectable, patriotic, Christian middle class organizations.

Leaders tended to be the most prominent community members. It was store and company owners, clerks, teachers, police, sheriffs, judges, politicians, large land-owners, etc.

Chapters beat, lynched, raped, castrated, vandalized, burned homes and churches, and murdered, even as they portrayed themselves as for “law and order.”

KKK chapters terrorized the underclasses and the Left with the goal of reinforcing economic and political subordination, and the supremacy of a certain kind of white people. It was a tool of suppression, economically and racially.

They dubbed themselves, “100% American.”

50,000+ Klansmen (and women) march on Washington

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World War I: American Home-Front

In essence, the KKK and the American Protective League (organized during this period) had much in common.

Both tended to be organized and administered by business leaders (including large land-owners) at local levels.

“Good Americans”: Both were numerically dominated by a respectable middle class who used vigilante violence against other Americans under the pretext that they represented a threat to the nation.

Both usually had the support of the FBI and local law enforcement even as the perpetrated crimes against other Americans.

Both overwhelmingly targeted Americans and immigrants who threatened, not the American people, but the profits of certain business interests.

KKK: African Americans who sought to be more than a docile, deferential, cheap pool of labor.

Both: Workers- Black, White, and Brown, who organized labor unions, joined the IWW, expressed dissent against a war that proved very lucrative for certain businesses, and socialists who questioned the compatibility between capitalism and the high ideals of the American Revolution (life- self ownership, liberty- freedom from domination, exploitation, and suppression, and pursuit of happiness- existing in a place from which one can achieve self-actualization)

Both were “fascistic” in the original sense of the concept: Merger of state and big business to amass the greatest profits possible, by any means necessary, draped in the flag.

“the roots of [American] fascism show themselves in the activities of the Ku Klux Klan. This is, without a doubt, the most native, 100% American, expression of the fascist movement…. The KKK is a curious mixture: one factor of the traditions of the post-Civil War days, when the Klan originated as a weapon for the subjugation of the Negro…; added to this is a crude anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, and general “anti-foreigner,” 100% American propaganda. A vaguely defined but militant anti-communist spirit is woven throughout its agitation and becomes, in practice, anti-labor union.”

Andreas Nin, 1923

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The Russian Revolution

WWI

Even as the American public became bombarded with “patriotic” war propaganda, disinformation, 100%-Americanism, and the criminalization of anti-war dissent, European soldiers in the trenches became ever more war weary and mutinous. Indeed, much of the determination among the ruling class to get the Americans into the war had to do with a fear that the European soldiers would end the war, themselves.

In 1917, the Allied armies became beset by rebellion:

Western Front: Repeated episodes of French soldiers walking out of the trenches in mass and being shot on the order of superiors.

Eastern Front: The Russian Army disintegrated, first through desertions to care for the starving families they left behind; then, amid mass fraternization & informal truce with German and Austrian soldiers, and finally, in a mass march home to overthrow the Tsarist regime, leading to revolution.

The Central Powers became beset by rebellion:

Austria-Hungry: Partially inspired by the Russian revolt, the laboring masses of the Austro-Hungarian Empire rose and collapsed their monarchy and, hence, the nation’s inability to continue the fight.

Russian Revolution: Background

By WWI, Russia remained an economically underdeveloped nation amid an abundance of natural resources.

Having failed to bring about a revolution akin to those that erupted across the West during the Age of Revolution, Russia retained a monarchy, closely intertwined with the state church and feudal landowning nobles. This was the aristocracy.

Under Catherine the Great, Russia had produced an intellectual Enlightenment and outpouring of literature, art and culture. There was a small intellectual class and university scene.

Most Russians, however, remained poor, illiterate peasants. A lesser number were wage-workers who confronted hardships similar to those endured by wage workers in the West.

A combination of population growth, lack of agricultural modernization and poor harvests generated reoccurring famines.

The Russian Enlightenment had not brought about even liberal reforms such as representative government, constitution, and basic liberties.

Across the 19th-century and early 20th-century, the Russian underclass and intellectuals engaged in periodic revolt and protest. They were brutally suppressed.

Russian Revolution

Russian peasants, early 1900s

Example: 1905- Bloody Sunday Massacre: 100s of unarmed protesters were killed or wounded by the tsars troops. Workers responded with crippling strikes throughout the nation, leading to more suppression and death.

World War I

Russia became allied with Britain and France and, thus, deployed its men to the carnage of the Eastern Front against Austria-Hungary.

Disrupted trade routes led to munitions shortages, which left the Russian army poorly equipped for battle.

Many Russians were sent to the frontlines unarmed and expected to retrieve weapons from dead countrymen.

Russian casualties were greater than those sustained by any nation in any previous war.

On the Russian home front, high army conscriptions left families without the agrarian muscle of sons. Harvest shortages led to food shortages among peasants. The kulaks (a privileged class that owned the land upon which the peasants worked) opportunistically raised the price of food. This also impacted the working class, who had also lost many of their young men to the war.

Russian Revolution

“In recent battles a third of the men had no rifles. These poor devils had to wait patiently until their comrades fell before their eyes and they could pick up weapons. The army is drowning in its own blood.”

General Alexei Brusilov

The Russian home-front further experienced high inflation, as the government printed money to pay for the war

War debt and economic stagnation placed Russia on the verge of economic collapse. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers began to abandon their army posts to help their families.

By 1916, mutinies were erupting across both the Western Front and Eastern Front. It was the Russian soldiers, however, who left the trenches in overpowering numbers and marched home to confront the government that had sent them into a non-defensive war, ill-equipped to survive, while their families starved and suffered.

The soldiers’ revolt coalesced with an industrial workers’ revolt and a peasants’ revolt to create a people’s revolt

Russian Revolution

1917- February Revolution:

Men, women, and children went into the streets of Saint Petersburg demanding bread. Initially, they were fired on and several were killed.

Increasingly, however, when ordered to shoot, the tsar’s soldiers disobeyed and, instead, joined the protest.

Tsar Nicholas abdicated the throne.

As in the larger Age of Revolution in western Europe and the Americas, a bourgeoise (capitalist) class seized control and formed a provisional government.

Also like the west, this bourgeoise provisional government legislated liberal reforms such as freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the legalization of Unions. It did not, however, intend to truly liberate and uplift the laboring masses upon whom the it amassed profits

The new bourgeoise government did not pull Russia completely out of WWI. Thus, food shortages, protests and riots continued.

Russian Revolution

October 2017- Bolshevik Revolution: Leftist revolutionaries led by the Bolsheviks launched a nearly bloodless coup.

In urban centers and villages, “Soviets”– or, councils of soldiers, workers, and peasants became elected by the people to oversee local affairs.

The Bolshevik vision was that of Karl Marx: A worker’s state, where workers owned and controlled the means of production, either independently or collectively as cooperative, and filled government seat until government one day withered away as unnecessary. There would be no nonlaboring owning and investing class, no generational aristocracy. At the same time, the Bolsheviks did not intend to become separated from the world and global exchange- just to approach it differently.

The Bolsheviks pulled Russia out of World War I and made a separate peace with Germany.

Russia fell into a civil war. The Red Army fought for the Bolshevik’s vision of a workers’ state. The White Army represented a large group of loosely allied forces, including he Russian nobility, monarchists, capitalists, feudal estate owners, and misc liberals.

Russian Revolution

As the Russian Revolution surged, the ruling classes of Western Europe and United States looked-on in horror, knowing that the same resentments and potential for revolution from below simmered within their own populations.

Thus, even as fighting on the Western Front continued, Britain responded to the Russia’s revolution by organizing a coalition of western nations- which included the US, for the purpose of invading Russia, overthrowing the people’s revolution, reinstalling the tsarist monarchy, and putting Russia back into World War I

Western Invasion of Russia

Russia has never invaded western Europe or the United States but it has experienced repeated and brutal invasions from the West..

July 1918: Against the advice of the US Department of War, President Woodrow Wilson diverted nearly 15,000 US troops from the Western Front of WWI to Russia at the request of Britain.

Though enlisted and drafted to fight the Central Powers in World War I, these soldiers were turned over to the British Empire for use against the Russian people.

Russian Revolution

Russian Revolution

Historian, William Blum:

“What was there about this revolution that so alarmed the most powerful nations in the world? What drove them to invade a land whose soldiers had recently fought alongside them for over three years and suffered more casualties than any other country on either side of the World War?

The Bolsheviks had the audacity to make a separate peace with Germany in order to take leave of a war they regarded as imperialist and not in any way their war, and to try and rebuild a terribly weary and devastated Russia. But the Bolsheviks had displayed the far greater audacity of overthrowing a capitalist- feudal system and proclaiming the first socialist state in the history of the world…This was the “crime” the Allies had to punish, the “virus” which had to be eradicated lest it spread to their own people.”

Put another way, the revolutionary government of Russia, left the war against Germany because it understood WWI to be an imperialist war which benefitted not the Russian people. The western Allies wanted Russia back in the war. They also feared that Russia’s socialist experiment might succeed and inspire their own working-classes to rise-up, as well. A successful socialist experiment could not be allowed to take shape, lest the western ruling become overthrown like the Russian ruling class.

Revolutionary women and former members of the Russian Army hold up a plaque reading 'The tyranny has collapsed and the chains are broken' in March 1917

Polar Bear Expedition:

1918-1919: Around 5,000 US Army soldiers were deployed to North Russia (Arkhengelsk, “Archangel”) as part of the Allied “intervention” in the Russian Civil War on the side of the monarchists.

8,000 additional US soldiers were sent to Siberia

Initial ambition: Raise an anti-Bolshevik counterinsurgency among Russian civilians. This failed. The Russian peasants and villagers were on the side of the revolution.

US soldiers participated in a few battles against the Red Army. Most of its orders dealt with burning villages and the fields of peasants suspected of siding with the Red Army.

Discontent, disenchantment, and resistance flourished among the American soldiers, and several mutinies took place.

The Russian climate and the determination of the Red Army and Russia civilians to have their revolution, doomed the Polar Bear Expedition and larger coalition effort to failure.

American Casualties- Polar Bear Expedition: 410-553

110 killed in battle, others from disease, climate, accidents

Russian Revolution

Russian Revolution

Consequences of the Allied invasion of Russia:

Hundreds of US soldiers were killed (and many more western Europeans), for no national defensive purpose.

The invasion prolonged and deepened Russia’s bloody civil war and contributed greatly to the eventual death count of over 7 million. It made life more difficult for an already battered society, also struggling under the weight of the WWI economic crisis.

The invasion initiated a perpetual menacing of Russia’s western borderlands and infiltration of its government, backed by Britain and, later, by the US. Defeated and bitter White Russians (and later fascists) engaged in raids and sabotage, such as burning fields, for decades.

The inability to establish security and feel secure undermined Russia’s revolutionary ambitions for human liberation. Western “freedoms” become security liabilities in the context of a nation that feels perpetually threatened.

The consequences of the Allied intervention “were to poison East-West relations forever after, contribute significantly to the origins of WWII and the later Cold War, and to fix patterns of suspicion and hatred on both sides.”

Historian, Frederick L. Shulman

Were they [the Allies] at war with Soviet Russia? Certainly not; but they shot Soviet Russians at sight. They stood as invaders on Russian soil. They armed the enemies of the Soviet Government. They blockaded its ports and sunk its battleships. They earnestly desired and schemed its downfall.”

Winston Churchill

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Russian Revolution

The invasion initiated a western-imposed isolation of Russia. Whereas the Bolsheviks had intended to continue doing business with the rest of the world and having social/cultural engagement, western nations initiated an economic freeze and filled the heads of their citizenry with scary and disturbing stories about the “Red Menace” (Soviet communists).

All things considered, the new Soviet socialist republic did elevate, to a remarkable degree, the average Russian above where he/she was in 1917. Was the average Russian better feed, educated, and empowered in 1937 than in 1917? Absolutely.

The Allied Powers withdrew in 1920 in defeat, though the Red Army fought until 1925 to fully dislodge a Japanese invasion and occupation on Russia’s eastern flank.

Although relations between the US and Russia/USSR improved under President Franklin D. Roosevelt and through the World War II alliance, fear of socialism among American elite and a “need” for perpetual enemies in the world to justify the advent of the US’s Permanent War Economy beget decades of dangerous Cold War.

US dead leaving Siberia, 1919

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The War at Home

Red Scare

Even as American men became conscripted and deceptively deployed to assist in Britain’s invasion of Russia, with the objective of overthrowing Russia’s revolution, a barrage of disinformation and propaganda regarding the revolution and the Bolshevik Party became conjured to manipulate the American mind.

The same Morgan and Rockefeller-controlled newspapers and politicians which “scared” the American people into war with Germany commenced to publish lurid “atrocity stories” and disinformation targeting Russia. According to these sources, the victorious “Reds” were poised to invade the world.

As will also be true after World War II, Russia had no verifiable inclination, let alone ability, to commence invading other nations.

Even so, readers of the New York Times were asked to believe that all these invasions were to come from a nation that was shattered as few nations in history have been; a nation still recovering from a horrendous world war; in extreme chaos from a social revolution that was barely off the ground; engaged in a brutal civil war against forces backed by the major powers of the world; and a country in the throes of a famine that was to leave many millions dead before it subsided.

Even beyond the Russian Civil War, the same Hearst newspapers that helped to gin-up the Spanish American War with fabrications and emotional appeals, published “shocking,” though mostly false, screeds about the alleged horrors and debauchery of the workers state.

A sampling of propagandistic and patently untrue headlines from the New York Times:

30 Dec. 1919: "Reds Seek War With America"

9 Jan. 1920: "'Official quartets' describe the Bolshevist menace in the Middle East as ominous"

11 Jan. 1920: "Allied officials and diplomats [envisage] a possible invasion of Europe"

13 Jan. 1920: "Allied diplomatic circles" fear an invasion of Persia

16 Jan. 1920: "Britain Facing War With Reds, Calls Council In Paris."

7 Feb. 1920: "Reds Raising Army To Attack India“

11 Feb. 1920: "Fear That Bolsheviki Will Now Invade Japanese Territory"

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Members of the political class proved willing to parrot whatever narrative was fed to them by dubious sources, if it got attention and impressing wealthy donors:

Between February and March 1919, the US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee rolled-out a parade of baseless Bolshevik atrocity stories (such as the nationalization of women and the cannibalization of babies).

So baseless were these scare stories, the State Department eventually became compelled to denounce them as fraud. The damage had already been done.

As with the overt lies and disinformation peddled by members of the political and media classes, today, no retractions were made, at least not vocal enough to rectify the falsities that became embedded in the American mind. Accountability and restitution were not required.

The vitriol and extremes of manipulation expressed by western ruling class toward Soviet Russia can only be explained as fear and alarm.

Not fear that Soviet Russia would invade the west.

Fear that the Soviet socialist experiment might succeed

Fear that the western working class might become inspired to rise-up, also, or at least demand reforms, if not a cooperative organization of large-scale worksites.

The Red Scare was an expression of fear and anxiety among the American ruling class, and this class aimed to scare the American people into destroying the source of that fear: The labor movement and the socialists.

The War at Home

Hence, to scare the American people into supporting a US entry into World War I, a “German Menace” had been conjured amid a barrage of disinformation and propaganda. As fear is incompatible with the use of the rational functions of the human mind, Americans became terrorized into turned viciously upon other Americans and immigrants.

With the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, the “German Menace” steadily shape-shifted and morphed into the “Red Menace.” The intent was, likewise, to strategically terrorize, manipulate, and turn the people against one another.

The Red Menace became narrowly attached to the Left (not the same as liberals nor Democrats!): The previously surging socialist movement, labor unions, and workers organizations, especially the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The insinuation became that socialists and worker activists were Bolshevik agents– that they worked for Russia!

As with the “German Menace” and other tactics intended to shift public opinion toward support for the war and against its opponents, the authors of the “Red Menace” trope included the FBI, among other government agencies, media outlets, and big business. The so-called “good Americans” eagerly fell in-line, yet again.

The War at Home

Socialism and the labor movement portrayed as “foreign,” stopping industrial development, deceiving and corrupting labor, and changing everything the US allegedly stands for.

Here. we must ask ourselves, “who benefits?” If the mobilized working class and socialists become embedded in the American mind as “un-American,” “foreign,” “menacing,” and a threat to the United States, who benefits?

Essentially, the same class of people who conjured the “German Menace” because they had something to gain from a US entry into WWI, conjured the “Red Menace” because they had something to lose if the socialists and mobilized working class achieved social and labor reform, such as better pay and safer labor conditions, … never-mind democratic cooperatives.

World turned upside-down:

In the context of the US allegedly “fighting to make the world safe for democracy” abroad, those who fought to uphold basic liberties and human rights on the American home-front became criminalized, terrorized, and targeted with suppression and murder. Their fight for freedom was one against their own government and the flag-waving, “100% American” “good Americans.”

In the context of keeping America safe from “the Reds,” who allegedly sought to seize all property, create a global totalitarian dictatorship and enslave the world, those who demanded some degree of democracy in the workplace and restraints placed upon the social, political, and economic power of the plutocrats, became cast as “Reds” and, thus, agents of a foreign government– Bolshevik Russia!

The War at Home

Breaking the IWW (Wobblies)

1917: Immediately following the US entry into the war, the IWW became targeted for destruction.

Initially, the IWW became targeted for expressing opposition to a US entry into World War I. The legal premise for arresting and imprisoning the IWW then evolved into accusations that the organization had conspired (with Germany?) to undermine war production, using sabotage and strikes. After the Russian Revolution, the IWW became labeled “Red” and an agent of Bolshevik Russia.

The historical record confirms that these charges were utterly false. No evidence was presented of actively conspiring with a foreign government, neither German nor Russian.

Coast to Coast, the FBI raided IWW offices and homes, seized paperwork, including membership lists, and assets. The national office of the IWW in Chicago was raided, its records seized. 

Based on materials seized, and drawing upon the Espionage Act, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI arrested 166 IWW leaders and members, including Ben Fletcher. 10 of the IWW members who went to trial, including Ben Fletcher and Big Bill Haywood, were sentenced to 20 years in prison and fined $30,000.

The War at Home

Hundreds of IWW members became rounded-up, arrested, and made political prisoners as a means of silencing anti-war dissent and blunting a vibrant and growing working class movement.

The disinformation spread about the IWW encouraged violence, abuse and even murder at local levels.

Example: Tulsa, Oklahoma: 17 IWW members were arrested at their headquarters and convicted of vagrancy. Local authorities turned them over to a local vigilante “patriotic” society called the Knights of Liberty, along with 5 non-IWW’s who had testified in their defense. The 22 men were beaten, whipped, and had boiling tar poured on their bodies.

Roger Baldwin, a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU),  later explained that in no case did the IWW resort to violence, but “the violence used against them was colossal.” He estimated that 25 Wobblies were killed and two thousand jailed in the free speech fights, alone.

The Palmer Raids- November 1919: In twelve cities, federal FBI agents and a motley assortment of local police and American Legionnaires (American Legion) descended on the offices of trade unionists and arrested over a thousand people. Over the next two months, the onslaught continued and expanded to target leftists of various stripes all over the country. The largest assault came on January 2, 1920, with raids in some thirty-three cities.

The War at Home

Representations of the IWW:

Failing to find evidence of collusion with foreign agents, the courts “moved to goal post,” crated a new crime and began prosecuting under Criminal Syndicalism:

Under the “criminal syndicalism” laws, the courts deemed criticism of capitalism and the advocacy of an economic model that differed from the prevailing corporate capitalist model (such as a cooperative workplace) to be tantamount to conspiring to overthrow the United States.

Thus, the American Plan (Americanism IS capitalism) formulated by business leaders became codified in law.

The laws criminalized anti-capitalist speech and belonging to an organization that could be to advocating the sabotage of industrial capitalism (by platform or the opinions of an individual member)

The number of detained individuals became so great that even places such as Ellis Island, quite ironically, became transformed into holding-pens for political prisoners.

All told, the raids resulted in the arrest of some ten thousand leftists, hundreds of whom were ultimately deported or criminally prosecuted.

Industrial Workers of the World: Testament to the power and potential of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW/ Wobblies), the criminal syndicalist trials did not stop until the Wobblies had been destroyed.

By 1925, some 2,500 Wobblies had been charged, at least informally, with criminal syndicalism. This was on top of the federal cases and tens of thousands of arrests and prosecutions of Wobblies for vagrancy.

The War at Home: Red Scare I

“Radicals” rounded up in New York City in a nighttime raid wait for deportation proceedings at Ellis Island on January 3, 1920. 

Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco:

Two Italian immigrants who became anarchists in response to the condition of the working class in the US.

They were charged with crimes they most likely did not commit and executed. Such was the ruling class’s fear of the working class, represented, here, by a shoe-maker and a fish-seller.

Both men had alibis. The charges against them lacked any real evidence. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn had traveled the nation rallying mass support for their release. On the night of their slated execution, protests and riots broke out around the world. They were executed, anyway.

With so many political prisoners- including the IWW and various socialists, anarchists, pacifists, and conscientious objectors, the US prison system became a virtual university of radicalism. It also became a hotbed of exploitation, violent suppression, state-murder, and individual and collective resistance.

Radical convicts of all skin shades and ethnicities became shuffled into convict leasing and chain gangs.

Shut-away from the public, radical inmates engaged in strikes, often in defense of their fellow inmates, well-aware that their actions would result in their being beaten, chained to the bars, or thrown in prison units with monikers like the “dungeon,” the “slaughterhouse,” or the “dark hole.” Many died while locked up- untreated illness, malnutrition, overwork, and beatings/ murder by prison guards and staff; many others went insane.

The War at Home: Red Scare I

“In America things are going very badly. There is a great deal of unemployment and enough misery to soften the heart of a tiger. Those responsible could not care less. You are not aware of the present condition of this nation. This is no longer the America that excited your imagination. America, dear sister, is called the land of liberty, but in no other country on earth does a man tremble before his fellow man like here.”

Bartolomeo Vanzetti

The “Russian Menace” (round one) provided a pretext for “super patriots” to wrap themselves in the flag and engage in criminal behavior under the pretext of “law and order” Rivaled only by the Klan, the newly organized American Legion proved to be one of the most violent and aggressive “patriotic organizations” of the period.

American Legion (Legionnaires)

The American Legion was established in 1919 by officers of the American Expeditionary Force in France (WWI).

These men were, overwhelmingly, sons of privilege. Most had joined Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. preparedness organizations to promote a US entry into WWI. Most arrived from the investing class and entered the corporate world and/or politics after the war.

During the 1920s and 1930s (and in some places, longer), the American Legion generally functioned as a violent vigilante organization, openly aligned with rising fascism in Europe.

World War I: Home Front

“When the IWW person got up to make a speech that was the signal to all the American Legion people in the audience to arrest one or two people who were beside them, as they had been deputized to do so. Mother was one of the people arrested...

It was harassment.”

Grace Verna Silver, IWW, Oral History Interview

American Legion with a 100% Americanism rifle for a bat and a note from “Teddy Jr.,” to beat-up rather than debate “Reds.”

“The American Legion was created not as a space for former soldiers to meet and swap stories, but to bring together shock troops of the counter-revolution — an authoritarian mass movement of combat veterans.”

Joe Allen The American Legion Is Not Your Friend (jacobinmag.com)

Because most of the men drafted to fight in World War I were from the poor and working class, many conscripts entered military service with a strong sense of class consciousness, “radical” affiliations, and resentments regarding their fate as “fighting other working-class men for Wall Street.”

The general disposition of the conscripts alarmed the founders of the American Legion, especially in the context of:

The Russian Revolution

The fact that those who survived the war would return with military training.

A lack of compensation for military service.

The US government had up until WWI compensated war veterans with land grants. By 1919, however, there was not land to give away as compensation for military service.

If returning soldiers- largely working-class, become resentful over a lack of compensation, what will they do? Will they turn to socialism? Many were already Lefties. Will they foment revolution?

World War I: Home Front

“The American Legion was in no sense a spontaneous expression… it was intended to circumvent any spontaneous organization on the part of ex—servicemen… The morale of the American Army after armistice was unsatisfactory.”

“The American Legion is a potential force in the direction of fascism in the US… In the American Legion program of suppression [of free speech, labor rights, minoritis, books, public assembly, strikes, etc] we see fascism in its incipient states. The American Legion is irritated by those movements in American society which seem to threaten the status quo.”

Professor William Gellermann,

“The American Legion as Education,” 1923

Of Legion opposition to the struggle for worker’s rights, Prof. William Gellermann observed:

“They always pin the red flag on it, call it vile names, denounce it in the corrupt commercial newspapers, and organize all the forces of wealth and power against the desire of the majority of the people for higher wages, a better standard of living, a truer democracy.”

Thus, the initial goals of the American Legion was to funnel veterans into a patriotic organization (the American Legion) and redirect their frustration and energy toward:

Advocating compensation for service

Snuffing-out disloyal “Reds” (aka the mobilized working class). In a very real sense, they were intended to be turned against a sizable portion of the American public.

Contrary to the intentions of its founders, the American Legion did not initially attract a substantial number of working-class veterans.

Veterans that arrived from the working class generally returned to their working-class communities, coal camps, mill towns, family farms, etc., to find conditions deteriorated by the war and the loss of sons.

During their military service, their essential labor and wages had been withheld from their families.

Many of these veterans were among the most determined to ensure that Woodrow Wilson kept the promise he made to the working-class during wartime mobilization:

Wilson: If American workers refrained from protest and dutifully continued mining coal, manufacturing steel, and performing other labor essential to the war effort, he will support working class demands for the right to unionize and bargain collectively with employers for better conditions/pay after the war had ended.

World War I: Home Front

The final showdown in the Mine Wars documentary corresponds with the violent suppressions of 1919.

1919: The working class marked the end of the war by applying pressure to the Wilson Administration to make-good on its wartime promises to support the legalization of labor unions. Wilson had avoided publicly addressing the issue. Therefore, the working class made themselves heard.

3,360 strikes involving over 4.6 million workers went forward in 1919

American Legion chapters, dominated by veterans from the business class and middle class, partnered with big business in violently suppressing the strikes. Even as they beat and shot fellow veterans of the Great War, the Legion championed itself as defending America “foreigners” and “Reds.”

They working-class was betrayed. Wilson and the greater Washington establishment did not come-out in support for legalizing unions. Rather, the federal government joined with state and local governments and law enforcement in violently breaking the strikes. This occurred simultaneous to the repressions of the larger Red Scare campaign.

The labor movement, even as it comprised a great many veterans became targeted as an “un-American” threat to the nation and in need of destruction. Draped in the flag, “patriotic” organizations, including the American Legion, American Protective League, and Ku Klux Klan figured prominently in these campaigns as well as the upsurge of racial violence during this period.

The newly organized American Civil Liberties Union listed the American Legion as the #1 threat to civil liberties.

World War I: Home Front

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One of the Legion’s most notorious episodes occurred in Centralia, Washington, 1920:

By this time, thousands of IWW members had been jailed, others had been killed or deported. The IWW was, in practice, extinct.

What few IWW Halls remained were persistently attacked and looted by American Legionnaires.

In Centralia, once of site of great IWW victories in organizing lumbermen, members reopened their hall among the flophouses and shacks in an out-of-the-way section of town.

Lumber owners and the American Legion conspired to use an upcoming Armistice Day parade as cover to raid the IWW hall. Hearing of the plot, the IWW men prepared to defend themselves

A journalist reported:

World War I: Home Front

“…the patriots’ march set off from the town center, led by the American Legion, all in fine regalia. The Legionnaires passed the IWW hall, held back, then reversed, returning to the hall, where they joined the town’s postmaster and a minister, each dangling a noose in his hands. Shouts came from the mob: “Come on boys! Let’s get them!” The marchers paused, then dashed toward the hall and rushed the door, pushing their way in. They were met with gunfire… Four Legionnaires were killed and several more wounded. In a fury, the Legionnaires swarmed the hall, overcame the IWWs, and dragged them out — all except Wesley Everest, an ex-serviceman, a sharpshooter. Everest escaped, killing two of the invaders on his way, but was chased by the mob, some firing. They caught him as he attempted to ford the nearby river. They knocked his teeth out, then dragged him through the streets to jail with a belt around his neck. That night, the town lights went out. A group of men forced their way into the jail and wrested Everest from his cell. They threw him into the back of a car and castrated him there. “For Christ’s sake, men,” Everest appealed, “shoot me, don’t let me suffer this way.” At the bridge, he was dragged out and hanged, but he still was not dead. He was then hanged again until dead. The killers amused themselves by shooting at the swaying body. In the morning, they retrieved the body and displayed it in front of the prisoners to terrorize them.”

Westley Everest: WWI veteran and IWW member, beaten, castrated, tortured and lynched by an American Legion-led mob in Centralia, Washington.

Well after Everest had been beaten, castrated, tortured, and murdered by the American Legion-led mob, the imprisoned IWW members continued to be tortured.

Across the state, over thousand people suspected of being IWW members were arrested

Calls rang out: “exterminate the IWW”; “forget due process.”

Senator Miles Poindexter and representative Albert Johnson, both of Washington state, asked Congress how much longer the government would wait before crushing “this miserable human vermin which seeks to destroy civilization.” Johnson demanded all-out war on “these damnable traitors”

In Seattle, the labor council’s widely read Union Record bravely defended the Centralia prisoners on the basis of self-defense- In retaliation, the Justice Department raided the paper, seizing the plant and arresting its editorial staff, all on sedition charges.

The jury found seven of the nine defendants guilty of second-degree murder, though none were found to have fired the shots that killed the invaders. Those convicted were sentenced to prison terms of twenty-five to forty years. Six of the jurors would later testify under oath that they had been terrorized by the Legionnaires into finding the verdict of guilty.

Those who murdered Everest were never charged with a crime.

Thus, we see the selectivity with which “Americanism” and “worthy veterans” have been conceived and the extremes to which disinformation and propaganda can drive emotions and institutions against certain Americans.

World War I: Home Front

“One Big Union—that is their crime. That is why the IWW is on trial. In the end, just such an ideal shall sap and crumble down capitalist society. If there were a way to kill these men, capitalist society would clearly do it; as it killed Frank Little, for example — and before him, Joe Hill . . . So, the outcry of the jackal press, “Treason!” — that the IWW may be lynched on a grand scale.”

John Reed

 “In Washington State . . . ‘IWW’ members have been arrested without warrants, thrown into ‘bull-pens’ without access to attorney, denied bail and trial by jury, and some of them shot.” 

Helen Keller, writing for the Liberator

Across the 1920s and 1930s, the American Legion championed itself as 100% Americans in opposition to a working class which mobilized to change labor relations and a capitalist system which rendered them unfree in the sense of disempowering poverty wages, economic insecurity, and conditions infused with domination, exploitation and suppression.

For this, the labor movement was labeled “un-American” by “patriotic” organizations, even as members of these organizations, including the American Legion, openly aligned themselves with rising fascist movements abroad.

Example: Alvin Owsley of Texas:

Lawyer and politician in Denton, 36th Division Army, later diplomat

While commander of the Legion, he invited Italian fascist, Benito Mussolini, to speak at a San Francisco Convention. He openly admired Mussolini.

In an interview with Edward Thierry, he asserted:

“If ever needed the American Legion stands ready to protect our country’s institutions and ideals as the Fascisti dealt with the deconstructionists who menaced Italy (mass murder, assassination, arson, concentration camps, etc)

Thierry: By taking over the government?

“Exactly that. The American Legion is fighting every element that threatens our democratic government, Soviets, anarchists, IWW’s revolutionary socialists, and every other “red.” Should the day ever come when they menace the freedom of our representative government, the Legion will not hesitate to take things into its own hands.”

World War I: Home Front

A beast, drunk on war profits and swinging the American Legion as a bat, leaving lynched victims and prison sentences in his wake. What is the beast? Fascism

Fascism:

Corporatism: The merger of big business and big government until they become one in the same

A willingness to sustain and/or increase profits by any means necessary

Cult-like “super-patriotism” or ultra-nationalism

Corporatism advances the extremes of profit-seeking behind the banner of ultra-nationalism, mobilizing “super-patriots” as a battering ram. Ultimately, the corporatists do not care about the nation beyond its use in amassing wealth

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