On July 26, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson
condemned mob rule. Almost four months had passed since Robert Prager, a
German American coal miner, had been lynched. Wilson was angered that the
enemy German press had used the killing of Prager in its wartime
propaganda, and he felt increasing pressure from civil libertarians at
home. In a widely reprinted proclamation, Wilson insisted on the rule of
law. He claimed that "no man who loves America, no man who really cares
for her fame and honor and character, . . . can justify mob action while
the courts of justice are open and the governments of the States and the
Nation are ready and able to do their duty." The mob spirit, Wilson
averred, was irreconcilable with American democracy.
|
1 |
|
| I say plainly that every American who takes part
in the action of a mob or gives it any sort of countenance is no
true son of this great Democracy, but its betrayer, and does more to
discredit her by that single disloyalty to her standards of law and
of right than the words of her statesmen or the sacrifices of her
heroic boys in the trenches can do to make suffering peoples believe
her to be their savior.1 |
|
| In the early twentieth century, there was far
less consensus about the nation's "standards of law and of right" than
Wilson suggested. During and after World War I, Americans debated the
place of extralegal violence in American political life. Through words and
actions, they negotiated the boundaries of legitimate political coercion.
These ongoing debates shed light on the relationship between voluntarism
and state authority in twentieth-century American political culture. |
2 |
| Woodrow Wilson's
proclamations notwithstanding, violence has been a persistent feature of
American political life, especially in the tumult of World War I.
Political violence claims a central place in many narratives of the
American past. To read them is to learn that violence is as American as
apple pie, a point that would not have been lost on the crowd that strung
Robert Prager up on the branch of a lone huckleberry tree on the outskirts
of Collinsville, Illinois, and then dropped his body three times, in the
words of one participant, "one for the red, one for the white, and one for
the blue."2 |
3 |
| But if violence is
integral to American history, why were Wilson's words so compelling to
many readers in 1918? Why did the "lawless passion" that Wilson decried
strike George Creel, the nation's leading war propagandist, as so
un-American that he could explain it only as the work of German spies?
Why—or, more important, how—did incidents of violence in 1918 lead so
readily to a ritual of denunciation? The years surrounding World War I
mark a high point of one kind of political violence in American history as
the actions of repressive state institutions, private organizations, and
spontaneous crowds left dozens of Americans dead and led to temporary
detainment of thousands on war-related charges. Yet those years also
witnessed the invigoration of political arguments that questioned all
extralegal authority and laid the groundwork for the legal and political
dismantling of vigilantism in the twentieth century.3 |
4 |
| One key to
understanding this debate turns on the distinction between vigilance and
vigilantism made during this period. On the World War I American home
front, citizens proudly called themselves vigilant and believed that they
were doing work needed—and explicitly requested—by the national
government. In that assumption, they were not wrong. Leading public
figures, drawing on long-standing traditions equating citizenship with
obligation, did call on Americans to stand vigilant during the war.
Appealing to habits of voluntary association, they supported the
organization of vigilance movements nationwide: committees of safety,
women's vigilance leagues, home guards. State actors depended on the
voluntary work of such groups for the success of the nation's war
mobilization effort. |
5 |
| Yet some of those
figures also spoke out against vigilantism, few more eloquently than
Wilson in his July 1918 statement. When they did so, they did not have the
vigilance societies in mind. What Wilson and those who shared his outlook
meant was something more specific and rarer: the mob, conceived as a
violent, spontaneous, and extralegal public group. As national leaders
denounced the mob in ever more frequent calls for "law and order," they
attempted to separate vigilance and vigilantism. They cast the former as a
valuable work of service and voluntarism that embodied American democracy
and delegitimated the latter as incompatible with what Wilson had called
the nation's "standards of law and of right." |
6 |
| The distinction
took on great significance. Americans who engaged in extralegal actions to
support the war effort insisted that they were exemplars of vigilant
citizenship. Their victims denounced them as lawless vigilantes unworthy
of the nation's honor. The sudden preoccupation with the distinction
between legitimate and illegitimate political coercion marked a partial
revision of the place of law in the system of political obligation. The
attack on the mob and vigilantism gave new energies to civil libertarians;
the wartime events that made political violence possible and visible also
undermined its legitimacy. |
7 |
| The line between
vigilance and vigilantism was contested throughout the war and postwar
years. Government officials who denounced lawless vigilantism also praised
vigilance organizations' policing. They insisted that only uncontrolled
physical violence was politically illegitimate—precisely because it
subverted the spirit of a nation of laws. The wartime and postwar concern
with mob violence led many to ignore legal and nonviolent forms of state
and private coercion that arose alongside, and outlasted, crowd actions.
The distinction obscured the way political violence was woven into
American political culture during this period. |
8 |
|
The Obligation of Vigilance in Peace and War
|
| The concept of vigilance as a form of collective
self-defense has long accompanied claims to self-rule; in the early
American republic it was intimately tied to concepts of popular
sovereignty. But vigilance as an obligation of citizenship has been not
just a rhetorical flourish, but a political practice in which collective
policing by private citizens contributed to community defense. By the time
of the United States' entry into World War I in April 1917, Americans were
accustomed to the idea that citizens had a positive obligation to police
one another. Such policing could involve coercion, many believed. "Mob
violence," that is, uncontrolled physical coercion, was largely (although
never entirely) denounced. But drawing the line of legitimacy between
controlled and uncontrolled physical coercion created political
difficulty.4 |
9 |
| Vigilantism too
has played a recurrent role in American history. Vigilantism is often
equated with mob violence and thought to consist of political terror and
violent coercion. Use of the term conjures up images of night riders and
frontier justice. The historian Richard Maxwell Brown has documented more
than 5,400 deaths by organized and unorganized groups between 1767 and
1951. But while vigilantism could and often did become deadly, neither
killing nor physical violence is necessary for vigilantism. Rather,
vigilantism is fundamentally about law. Political arguments about
vigilantism articulate relationships between the political behavior of
citizens and the system of law in which they operate. Vigilante actions
are undertaken by citizens who are not public officials, even if they
sometimes cooperate with officials or claim to act in the name of the
state. Vigilantes operate outside the strictures of law as articulated by
the legitimate regime, but they typically aim to establish social order,
whether defense of the state, control of crime, or maintenance of racial,
class, or gender hierarchies. "What is paradoxical about the vigilante
position is, of course, that it seeks to perpetuate the existing order,
but without law and without accepting the actions of the society's
political institutions," according to the political scientist Edward
Stettner.5 |
10 |
| American
traditions of citizen vigilance and vigilantism in 1917 fall into four
main categories, each of which long predated the war but was transformed
by it: citizen policing, antilabor vigilance, moral vigilance, and racial
vigilance. The traditions of Anglo-American common law had long demanded
that citizens—particularly male citizens—participate in defending the
community. Self-defense could be seen in forms of community policing:
Individuals could initiate a citizen's arrest or be deputized by local
authorities; those who heard the "hue and cry" of distressed persons were
obliged to come to their aid; militias gathered most able-bodied adult men
for service; the common-law rule of posse comitatus gave sheriffs
the power to summon the same men to preserve the public peace. In the
years immediately preceding World War I, those practices appeared to be on
the decline. The tasks of policing had been partly professionalized,
particularly in urban areas, and the newly reorganized National Guard had
largely replaced state and local militias. But while the institutions of
law enforcement had displaced the posse and the hue and cry in most of the
United States by 1917, the process was hardly complete and universal, as
extralegal actions in the Jim Crow South demonstrated. Nor were myths and
memories of colonial days and the western frontier far from the minds of
either the national elite or the general public.6 |
11 |
| In 1917 labor
relations were dominated by private and community methods for the
maintenance of order. Corporations regularly employed private policing
forces such as the Pinkertons to break up strikes and infiltrate unions.
To supplement such mercenary forces, business leaders seeking to maintain
surveillance over labor activities recruited volunteer citizen groups.
State and federal officials, who saw little active role for the state in
economic life, generally supported antilabor vigilance groups. From time
to time, state actors disputed the methods of vigilance groups, and labor
organizations consistently challenged their extralegality. But in the
pre-World War I era, when the courts were no more sympathetic to labor
than were other arms of the American government, workers often saw little
to gain by appealing to the rule of law.7 |
12 |
| The obligation of
vigilance also made Americans the guardians of the moral welfare of their
fellow citizens, as in the national prohibition campaigns that gathered
force before World War I. Similarly, efforts to curtail prostitution
coalesced in the 1910s into a movement to abolish it. Supporters of the
prohibition and purity movements did not restrict their efforts to
legislative campaigns but established vigilance societies. Anthony
Comstock's New York Society for the Suppression of Vice sought to purify
the city's night life for over thirty years. Beginning in 1910, the
Progressive reformer Maude Miner recruited working-class young women into
the New York Girls' Protective League, a volunteer police force meant to
discipline young women. Across the country massive networks of volunteers
surveyed and apprehended suspected prostitutes. Anti-vice activists had an
ambivalent relationship to the law. Often, frustrated by what they saw as
a corrupt policing and legal system, they chose to work outside it. At
other times they cooperated with the police and the courts, either using
the law to crack down on prostitutes, madams, and pimps or seeking to aid
the women they patrolled through special courtroom procedures and the
reform of women's prisons. Their actions, both inside and outside the
legal system, were rarely challenged, except by accused prostitutes
themselves.8 |
13 |
| A similar
tradition of collective policing, active predominately in the South, was
dedicated to suppressing African American militancy and controlling
African American labor. White vigilance groups enforced white racial
supremacy. They enjoyed the support of formal state institutions at every
level of American government, which consistently declined to intervene in
what they deemed local or wholly private matters. The number of lynchings
had peaked in the 1890s, but the war years saw an increase in racial
violence and the formation of new white supremacist citizen groups,
including the Ku Klux Klan, reorganized in 1915. Although leading black
reformers strongly challenged the methods and even the existence of such
groups, they had made little headway by 1917. 9 |
14 |
| In many areas of
everyday life, therefore, Americans were accustomed to participating in or
enduring citizen vigilance, and they were already debating how to rein in
extralegal coercion. As part of the war mobilization effort, citizen
vigilance movements expanded. The relationship of those movements to the
state changed as private policing efforts were enfolded in state agendas:
vigilance organizations gained force and authority as they spoke in the
name of the wartime state, but their new position also gave new weapons to
those who denied their legitimacy. The wartime debate about political
violence, while not entirely new, was conducted on an altered terrain. |
15 |
|
|
| Mobilization for war against Germany changed the
significance of citizen vigilance. Government officials and other leading
public figures called on American citizens, male and female, to stand
vigilant for the duration. A poster from New York's Conference Committee
on National Preparedness urged defense against spies and traitors: "Men of
America, be of clear vision! . . . Promptly deliver up these advance
agents to public scorn and to the law, so that when you go to your home at
night you can look into the innocent eyes of your children and be
unafraid." A similar poster printed by the New Hampshire Committee on
Public Safety urged "promptness in recognizing and reporting suspicious or
disloyal actions to your local authorities or to us" and "helping your
local Committee on Public Safety in every way." In his 1917 Flag Day
speech, President Wilson warned that "vicious spies and conspirators" had
"spread sedition amongst us" and "sought by violence to destroy our
industries and arrest our commerce," and throughout the war he
consistently encouraged private citizen vigilance. "Woe be to the man or
group of men that seeks to stand in our way," Wilson ominously
concluded.10 |
16 |
Americans who
wanted to do their part found explicit instruction in a not unusual
editorial in New York State's Albany Journal:
|
17 |
|
| If you ever, on the street or in a trolley car,
should hear some soft-shell pacifist or hard-boiled but poorly
camouflaged pro-German, make seditious or unpatriotic remarks about
your Uncle Sam you have the right and privilege of taking that
person by the collar, hand him over to the nearest policeman or else
take him yourself before the magistrate. |
| You do not require any official authority to do
this and the only badge needed is your patriotic fervor. The same
thing applies to women. Every American, under provisions of the code
of civil procedure, has the authority to arrest any person making a
remark or utterance which "outrages public decency."11 |
|
| Hundreds of thousands of men and women responded
to calls for national defense on the home front by forming voluntary
vigilance associations. They varied widely in their aims, structures, and
membership, from elite societies such as the National Security League and
American Defense Society to more menacing organizations such as the
Sedition Slammers and the Terrible Threateners to the Boy Spies of
America. Over 250,000 men, and some women, enrolled in the largest such
organization, the American Protective League.12 |
18 |
| Not a single
German spy was uncovered during World War I thanks to the work of these
vigilant citizens, and much of what they did was ineffectual or even
absurd. Volunteers in New Haven, Connecticut, kept a round-the-clock watch
at an antiaircraft device they had installed to protect the city against
an (unlikely) aerial invasion from Germany. The earnest patriots of a
vigilance group in Portland, Maine, seized a suitcase abandoned in
downtown Longfellow Square. They "gingerly" brought the bag to police
headquarters, where it was "carefully examined and was found to contain a
quantity of men's soiled underwear."13 |
19 |
| Other stories,
however, offer little comic relief. During the war, vigilance societies
targeted pacifists, suffragists, ethnic minorities, religious
fundamentalists, trade unionists, and socialists. Incidents of violent,
spontaneous prowar crowd action abound, but organized groups working with
the institutions of government and civil society already in place in local
communities conducted most political coercion. Those organizations
repeatedly glossed over or ignored issues of legal process and wasted
little energy on establishing with precision their authority to make
arrests—on what grounds and consistent with, or despite, what specific
structures of law. They were not thoughtless mobs who believed the
Constitution a meaningless scrap of paper, even as they appeared to treat
it as such, but organized men and women deeply concerned about the
survival of American democracy as they understood it. |
20 |
| The wartime
context mattered. Calls for citizen vigilance raised the demand for
volunteer policing, and wartime rhetoric and fear of subversion heightened
its significance. The war also altered the relationship between private
political coercion and the state. Americans were accustomed to private
citizens' policing their neighbors' ideas and behaviors, their labor and
leisure, before World War I. Yet it was only during the war—as ideas,
behaviors, labor, and leisure had to be mobilized, regulated, and governed
in order to defeat the enemy—that the practices of citizen policing came
to be state projects, even when they were not conducted under state
auspices. As the needs of modern war blurred the line between state and
society, between mobilization and social control, the war tied private
coercions to state interests. |
21 |
| This essay takes
up four episodes that demonstrate the vitality of the four traditions of
vigilance outlined above. In each case, wartime vigilance societies drew
from, and altered, existing patterns of coercion, and each demonstrates
the interpenetration of vigilance and vigilantism. Wartime groups both
used and ignored legal institutions, as they engaged in practices ranging
from persuasion to coercive persecution. Finally, the essay examines how
the postwar debate about mob violence and law and order responded to
events on the wartime home front and how it attempted to reconcile the
conflicts between vigilance, obligation, and the law in national
citizenship. |
22 |
|
Defending the Connecticut Home Front
|
| The war obliged American citizens to serve in
the nation's defense. Those who did not go to the trenches of France would
fight the war at home. Against the imagined dangers of German attack and
domestic subversion, vigilance against invasion, disloyalty, and sabotage
became basic tasks. Members of the Citizens' Protective League in
Covington, Kentucky, stockpiled arms while other townspeople volunteered
as public speakers. Their patriotic counterparts in New Jersey formed
espionage committees and a women's gun club as they knitted socks and
scarves. Whether federal or state governments had legally authorized the
groups was not always on their minds. Good citizenship for the wartime
civilian required voluntary service for the war effort and vigilance in
all matters. Events in the industrial state of Connecticut demonstrate the
role of volunteer policing in war mobilization.14 |
23 |
| On March 9, 1917,
nearly a month before the United States declared war on Germany, the
Connecticut legislature authorized the formation of the Connecticut Home
Guard, "a body of armed troops for constabulary duty within the state." By
the time of the armistice, 19,336 citizens had worn its makeshift
secondhand uniforms. All were men, mostly above draft age or otherwise
exempt. The guard's leaders were bankers, lawyers, and doctors, but its
rank and file included small businessmen, farmers, traveling salesmen, and
clerks. Most were experienced members of fraternal organizations; only a
few were military veterans. Nearly all were native-born white Protestants
in a state deeply divided by ethnic and religious tensions.15 |
24 |
| The Connecticut
Home Guard was dedicated to the defense of the state and its industries,
especially munitions. Charles Burpee, a local historian and himself a
colonel in the Home Guard, later wrote, "Though the mass of the so-called
'foreign' population was devoted to Connecticut principles, Germans
included, a very contrary socialistic element . . . had organized, and the
Deutschland genius for working mischief behind the lines had been
evidenced, as was to be expected." The Home Guard's authorizing
legislation limited its power: it had no legal authority for much of its
work, and its members were specifically forbidden to make arrests. The
guardsmen, however, regularly disregarded legal formalities.16 |
25 |
| The Home Guard
quickly got to work, in close collaboration with other voluntary
associations, industrial corporations, and the federal government. The
first task was to coordinate the state's military census of May 1917,
which aimed to record vital data on every adult man in the state in
preparation for military conscription. The guard later stood watch during
the registration calls of the Selective Service System and showed its
strength in Home Guard parades in towns across the state just before the
registration day. As the guard noted in its official report, the parades
"gave to certain inhabitants of the State a salutary object lesson and
warning which they needed" at a time when many of Connecticut's young men
were surely considering draft evasion. The Home Guards also vigilantly
protected the state's railroad bridges and power installations from
enemies foreign and domestic. In January 1918, acting on a spurious tip
that the radical unionists of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)
were planning to set fire to industrial facilities and to bomb the bridges
of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, four thousand guardsmen
stood watch through the cold winter night.17 |
26 |
In April 1917,
after the federal government ruled that enemy aliens could not live near
munitions manufacturers, the Home Guard forcibly evacuated New Haven
residents from homes near the Winchester Repeating Arms factory. The guard
also collaborated with other wartime organizations, particularly the
American Protective League. Together, the two groups invaded the weekly
meeting of a Hartford socialist group in April 1918 after the U.S.
attorney's office had refused to indict the radicals for sedition. Seizing
the stage, Charles Burpee demanded that the socialists pledge allegiance
to the flag and warned them of the dangers of their disloyalty:
|
27 |
|
| This city must be purified. The law will act
according to the law's own course. In this city we have plenty of
citizens ready to back up the law and show the law its course. . . .
All law depends on public opinion. Public opinion makes law. No law
can be supported without public opinion. When the people enter a
great war like this, they are the law.18 |
|
| Here was the vigilant citizen's attitude: not
bald-faced disrespect for the law (although it must have seemed that way
to the assembled socialists), but a theory of citizenship that located
sovereignty in the people and would not separate the power of the state
from that of the citizens who constituted it and had been authorized to
act in its name. |
28 |
| The men of the
Connecticut Home Guard described themselves as the descendants of the
minutemen who had defended the New England countryside more than a century
before, and the work they did was unexceptional in Connecticut's long
history of industrial strife and ethnic tension, in which the
technicalities of law had frequently been ignored in the interests of
order. The men of the Home Guard, fearing revolution or subversion and
preoccupied with the needs of the nation during war, viewed the law as a
tool to manipulate, rather than a set of institutional constraints to
obey. Nor, it appears, did they deem violent coercion illegitimate, as
their summary evictions and their raid on the Hartford socialists
demonstrate. As Burpee later noted, the guardsmen "were comfort and
satisfaction especially to the munitions plants and the managers of the
railroads." Not only corporate bosses, but the thankful crowds who filled
Hartford's streets on Armistice Day cheered them, and Gov. Marcus Holcomb
decorated them in front of the state capitol. Their coercions were not
unknown in prewar industrial centers such as urban Connecticut, but they
were shaped by the war effort and folded into the national war project in
ways that highlighted their ambiguous legal status. In Connecticut there
was little public opposition to that ambiguity. Elsewhere the actions of
vigilance organizations led some critics to try to disentangle the
interwoven threads of public and private that these groups
represented.19 |
29 |
|
Keeping Vigil over Labor in the Arizona Copper Mines
|
| Connecticut was not the only state in which
quasi-military organizations formed and dedicated themselves to citizen
policing and the suppression of labor militancy. In Bisbee, Arizona, a
small copper-mining city on the Mexican border, the summer of 1917
witnessed a crisis of coercion, authority, and political legitimacy that
demonstrates the contested barrier between vigilance and vigilantism in
the wartime era. The rule of law did not have a firm hold in Arizona in
1917. Mining companies wielded enormous power at their own mines, and they
employed both private police forces and groups formed by citizen
volunteers. State and local government officials regularly sided with the
corporations against the workers. But in the summer of 1917, the state was
in political crisis, as the sitting Democratic governor G. W. P. Hunt had
refused to turn over the reins of power to Republican Thomas E. Campbell
after a heated and almost certainly corrupt election. The crisis in the
statehouse left the day-to-day governance of much of the state almost
entirely in the hands of the mining bosses.20 |
30 |
| War mobilization
changed both the copper industry and the significance of anti-labor
vigilance. Every bullet used at the front required almost a quarter ounce
of pure copper, sending the price of the mineral (and corporate profits)
skyrocketing, while a wartime inflationary spiral left workers feeling
pinched. Labor shortages caused in part by draft call-ups made the workers
at the Phelps-Dodge mines in Bisbee more confident about unionizing. Some
chose the more moderate International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter
Workers, a branch of the American Federation of Labor, but most workers in
Bisbee chose the radical unionism of the Metal Mine Workers Industrial
Union no. 800, affiliated with the IWW.21 |
31 |
|
|
| |
 |
On July 12, 1917, over two thousand
members of two vigilance groups, the Citizens' Protective
League and the Workmen's Loyalty League, used organized
force to expel nearly twelve hundred residents (most of them
striking members of the Industrial Workers of the World)
from the copper-mining town of Bisbee, Arizona. Courtesy
Arizona Historical Society/Tucson, AHS 2768.
| |
|
| |
|
| On June 27, 1917,
more than half of the forty-seven hundred workers at the Copper Queen mine
in Bisbee walked off the job. A bitter strike dragged on for weeks, and
production of copper for the war effort reached a near standstill.
Mineowners, town leaders, and the national press interpreted the strikers'
actions as disloyal and outrageous. Bisbee residents formed two
organizations to oppose the strike: the Citizens' Protective League
gathered business leaders and middle-class locals, while the Workmen's
Loyalty League organized nonstriking mine workers. |
32 |
| Early in the
morning on July 12, 1917, over two thousand members of the two leagues, as
well as hundreds of privately hired detectives and the president of the
Phelps-Dodge Corporation (who "happened to be in Bisbee on the day of the
deportation"), were deputized by Sheriff Harry E. Wheeler of Cochise
County, a former Rough Rider. Wheeler told the men that the federal
government had authorized them to deport the strikers (although they had
not been so authorized), gave his new deputies white armbands, and set
them to work rounding up "on the charges of vagrancy, treason, and of
being disturbers of the peace of Cochise County all those strange men who
have congregated here." The deportation itself was a political circus that
indiscriminately detained men, women, and children, regardless of their
opinions on the war or their actions during the strike. By midday,
approximately twelve hundred townspeople were held under armed guard in a
baseball park in a neighboring town. By late afternoon, they were marched
at gunpoint onto trains provided by the El Paso and Southwestern Railroad
and deported to New Mexico, where they were unceremoniously dumped in the
desert town of Hermanas.22 |
33 |
|
|
| |
|
Residents of Bisbee, Arizona, volunteered
to aid Sheriff Harry E. Wheeler in the deportation. One of
their white armbands, symbols of voluntarism and of an
assumed legal authority, can be seen on the right arm of the
man in the middle distance. Courtesy Arizona Histoorical
Society/Tucson, AHS 43171
| |
|
| |
|
| For the next four
months, the Citizens' Protective League and the more patrician Chamber of
Commerce in nearby Douglas effectively ruled Bisbee from a building owned
by the copper companies. The league issued "passports" to town residents
after oral examinations that mingled questions about the war with
questions about the strike. No one could enter or leave Bisbee without a
pass; no one found work—or got a draft exemption—without one either. Men
and women who failed the league's loyalty tests were excluded from the
city, deported, or imprisoned and sent to work at the copper mines in
convict labor gangs. The rule of the Citizens' Protective League continued
until late November 1917, despite the pleas of President Wilson and orders
from Arizona's attorney general. The competition between the state's two
competing governors left a power vacuum in which the corporations and the
vigilance organizations held control.23 |
34 |
| The Citizens'
Protective League claimed that its work was vital to the war. Its
spokesmen argued that they had taken the law into their own hands to
defend law, not to violate it. In a telegram to the president,
Governor-elect Campbell noted that "citizens in the many mining
communities affected, feeling that peace officers cannot afford adequate
protection, are acting, . . . meantime praying for federal intervention."
Campbell, Wheeler, and the corporations insisted that it was the IWW
strikers who were lawless. As Wheeler told the state attorney general, "If
we are guilty of taking the law into our own hands, I can only cite to you
the Universal Law that necessity makes. . . . I would repeat the operation
any time I find my own people endangered by a mob composed of eighty per
cent aliens and enemies of my Government." The leaders of the raids sought
to claim the mantle of lawful vigilance and to distance themselves from
lawless vigilantism. Across the country, many Americans cheered their
work. The Los Angeles Times congratulated the posse, noting that
"the citizens of Cochise County, Arizona, have written a lesson that the
whole of America would do well to copy." Former president Theodore
Roosevelt insisted that "no human being in his senses doubts that the men
deported from Bisbee were bent on destruction and murder."24 |
35 |
Critics of the
Bisbee deportations placed the leagues on the other side of the divide
between vigilance and vigilantism. They distinguished between legitimate
and illegitimate political coercion and insisted on the need for legal
process. From Florence, Arizona, J. Sheik claimed that the copper
companies "had taken, as it were, the government from out of [the
governor's] hands and were running it to suit their needs." Samuel
Gompers, the president of the American Federation of Labor, also blamed
the leagues:
|
36 |
|
| I assume it is not necessary for me to give any
assurance of how utterly out of accord I am with the I.W.W. and any
such propaganda; but some of the men deported are said to be
law-abiding men engaged in an earnest effort at improvement of their
condition. . . . There is no law of which I am aware that gives
authority to private citizens to undertake to deport from the state
any man. If there be lawlessness, it is surely such conduct.25 |
|
| Robert Bruere, an
investigative labor journalist, observed events in Bisbee after the
deportation. In the midst of World War I, even Bruere could not
countenance subversion of the war effort by striking workers, and he
echoed the copper corporations in his criticisms of IWW radicalism. But
Bruere questioned the entire system of vigilance when he insisted that the
wartime need for order did not outweigh the value of legal process. The
citizens' leagues, he suggested, were the dangerous and lawless elements
in southern Arizona. "When . . . we look more closely at the things which
the copper companies did, we are startled to find their policy inspired by
the same distrust of the State, of the constituted authorities of Arizona
and the Federal Government, for which they themselves condemned the I.W.W.
as an 'outlaw' organization."26 |
37 |
The Bisbee raids
prompted a conflicted response from officials in Washington. Immediately
after the workers walked out, Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson was
pleased that the secretary of war had decided not to dispense "troops or
secret service men" to deal with the situation in Bisbee. But the federal
government encouraged citizen vigilance through its support for Arizona
Home Guards. Writing from Camp Sevier in Greenville, South Carolina, the
Arizona native Clifford C. Faires noted that:
|
38 |
|
| The Loyalty League of Globe [another Arizona
mining town] was organized for the purposes of preserving law and
order and of fostering patriotism in a community where it was sadly
lacking. The outgrowth of this organization has been the formation
of a Home Guard, which has been drilling since August, to preserve
order after the troops are withdrawn. Very recently notice was
received from Washington that this effort at safeguarding the peace
is to be rewarded by Federal recognition and supervision.27 |
|
| Faires perceptively identified the complicated
and contradictory response of a government that depended on citizen
vigilance yet actively tried to rein in vigilantism. |
39 |
| As the details of
the Bisbee deportation reached the White House, key figures in the
administration came to regret their slow response to the raids. Hours
after the raid, President Wilson assured Governor-elect Campbell that
federal troops were on their way to quiet the town but added, "Meantime
may I not respectfully urge the great danger of citizens taking the law in
their own hands as you report their having done. I look upon such action
with grave apprehension. A very serious responsibility is assumed when
such precedents are set."28 |
40 |
| Wilson assigned
the President's Mediation Commission (PMC), a board of lawyers and labor
bureaucrats generally liberal and sympathetic to labor, to investigate
events in Bisbee. The PMC, under the direction of Felix Frankfurter,
worked in southern Arizona throughout fall 1917 and issued a report highly
critical of the deportations. The report also condemned the
postdeportation reign of law and order by the Citizens' Protective League
and the Chamber of Commerce; as a cure for industrial strife, it urged
greater cooperation between labor and management, to be facilitated by the
federal government. But the PMC's greatest concern was that the leagues
had undermined the effectiveness of other wartime loyalty organizations:
"Such agencies of the 'public' as the so-called 'loyalty leagues' only
serve to intensify bitterness, and, more unfortunately, to the minds of
workers in the West serve to associate all loyalty movements with partisan
and anti-union aims."29 |
41 |
| The wartime
mobilization of American industry had changed the context of the tense
relations between labor and management. Accustomed to maintaining order
through citizens' groups and private police forces, the copper companies
and the town leaders who supported them turned to long-standing traditions
of antilabor vigilance in Bisbee in summer 1917. In part, the war was a
pretext to continue prewar labor battles on new terms. But it was more.
League members tied their work—and the actions of the strikers—to the
fortunes of the war effort, claiming to speak with the authority of the
state in their ongoing contests over power. Sheriff Wheeler justified the
July 12 raid by saying of the strike, "This is no labor trouble. We are
sure of that; but it is a direct attempt to embarrass the government of
the United States." The wartime need for industrial mobilization made the
government dependent on such organizations even as some of its officials
questioned their legitimacy. Most of the leagues' actions were supported,
even in the United States Supreme Court, which heard a challenge to the
deportations on the grounds that it infringed freedom of movement. The
Court dismissed the claim as a state issue in which the federal government
had no interest.30 |
42 |
| By making a labor
dispute into a high-stakes matter of war mobilization, the leagues also
opened the door for workers to use that formulation as a weapon and to
call on state institutions in their own defense. The leagues' more violent
forms of coercion were debated in the press and condemned within the
Wilson administration. The fundamental idea that citizens had a duty of
vigilance—which had prompted the formation of such organizations as the
Citizens' Protective League—was never fully discredited. But the court
challenges and federal investigations laid the groundwork for new
approaches that would come to the fore in later decades. |
43 |
|
Moral Vigilance around Military Camps
|
| The importance of moral vigilance was also
heightened during the war, particularly in communities adjacent to the
nation's military camps. There, the large congregations of soldiers
gathered in hastily constructed military installations had a sudden impact
on local communities. Many residents welcomed their presence and organized
recreational and social service opportunities; others worried that the
popularity of the camps with young women from town betokened imminent
moral collapse. Some of the young women were commercial prostitutes, but
most were guilty only of offending middle-class understandings of proper
female behavior. Military police operating with the authority of law
undertook much of the anti-vice work of the World War I era; the Selective
Service Act had made it a federal offense to sell alcohol or operate a
house of ill repute within five miles of a camp. But the enforcement of
that legislation folded into—and dramatically transformed—patterns of
moral vigilance and citizen policing of personal behavior and female
sexuality. The war raised the stakes for those who saw women's personal
freedom as a subversive assault on the effectiveness of U.S. troops. As D.
J. Poynter of Albion, Nebraska, wrote to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker:
"Shoot the lewd women as you would the worst German spy; they do more
damage than all the spys." The work of moral vigilance societies reveals
the outer limits that coercion could reach when legal authorities
cooperated closely with private policing and few organized to oppose
it.31 |
44 |
|
|
| |
|
The Bisbee deportation was not a
spontaneous crowd action, but a carefully coordinated event
that required the mobilizaiton of volunteers and their
automobiles. The events also drew crowds of onlookers, some
of whom can be seen here. Courtesy Arizona Historical
Society/Tucson, AHS 42669.
| |
|
| |
45 |
| Soon after the
passage of the Selective Service Act, the War Department established, in
conjunction with its Commission on Training Camp Activities, a Committee
on Protective Work for Girls (CPWG) to patrol the areas around military
establishments in order to protect soldiers from the dangers of
prostitution. The suppression of vice was a federal policy, and women and
men in official positions dominated the bureaucracy that oversaw it, but
volunteers conducted the nightly work of surveillance, investigation, and
internment in communities nationwide. In every city that had a military
training camp, the CPWG established a Protective Bureau. Conceived as
official police forces, the bureaus were in practice staffed largely by
volunteers, due mostly to the CPWG's insistence that the enforcers be
female, for, in the words of one War Department official, "it is a woman's
job to work with women."32 |
46 |
| The state
endeavors of the CPWG intersected with the private initiatives of
middle-class women's clubs in military communities. The convergence of
governmental and private policing brought the structures of coercion down
hard on allegedly loose women. As Henrietta S. Additon, the program's
assistant director, noted, "all the resources of occupation, education,
health, recreation and religion in the community are brought into play."
During the war Maude Miner transferred her energies from volunteer
protective work to government service. In a lecture to the War Work
Council of the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) National Board,
Miner urged the women of the Y to practice vigilance, and she tolerated no
slackers: "Every one who has been around can help. At times you are too
busy at work and too tired to do anything. Combine a little trolley car
ride with some scouting work. You will find you cannot help but follow
some of these youngsters home and help them." When asked after the lecture
how women could get authority for the patrols, she told her listeners,
"Just by asking for it. . . . All of us have a certain amount of power. We
can stop a little girl and find out about her and learn of the danger and
start the work, and then go to the Chief of Police and to the different
officials of the city." Miner gave voice to her understanding of women's
obligations, but she also exerted agency and thereby claimed a space for
vigilant women in the coercive work of the war effort.33 |
47 |
| Antiprostitution
squads already existed in some communities; in others, the war led to
their formation. Women's patriotic leagues could be found on the streets
of cities across the country. In Massachusetts, the social worker Helen
Pigeon and her colleagues hid in the bushes of Boston Common at night to
spy on and detain women who were consorting with soldiers. In Chillicothe,
Ohio, just outside Camp Sherman, an army captain found the patrols
effective: "The worst kind of women do not parade the streets as the
Girls' Protective League operates under the 'arrest on suspicion' rule,
and strangers are not in town long before being picked up."34 |
48 |
| Women suspected of
prostitution were detained, interned, and frequently forced to submit to
medical examination, often without any legal charges being pressed against
them. At best, women were quickly released; others, particularly those
infected with venereal disease, languished indefinitely in the nation's
hospitals, prisons, or makeshift detention centers—some behind barbed
wire—where they performed manual labor under the watchful eye of armed
guards. The vigilance societies' definition of prostitution was frequently
vague: Juanita Wright, a young woman originally from Spartanburg, South
Carolina, was committed indefinitely to the Sherborn Reformatory for Women
in Massachusetts after word reached the Protective Bureau there that she
was living with a soldier without benefit of marriage.35 |
49 |
| Moral vigilance
and state power intersected with the emerging discipline of psychology, as
suspected prostitutes were subjected to psychological examinations. Women
found to be "feebleminded" were regularly turned over to institutions
without their consent and with no public hearing. Further complicating
matters, between 1910 and 1917, sixteen states had passed laws authorizing
the sterilization of the feeble—minded, and some of the presumptive
prostitutes were sterilized. It is unclear how many women faced the strong
arms of the law, of medicine, and of the nation's moral vigilance groups
during the war. Official documents from the period report as few as 15,000
women arrested as prostitutes, but the historian Allan M. Brandt suggests
that 30,000 were held in federal facilities alone, excluding an even
greater number who encountered local laws and organizations but were not
formally arrested.36 |
50 |
| That the policing
of women's sexuality was considered a specifically female obligation
demonstrates the distinctly gendered aspects of citizenship in the World
War I United States. Men's service in the military posited a direct
equation between manhood and full citizenship, one that the state home
guards mimicked through their exclusionary membership patterns. But
patriotic women on the home front could choose from options that ranged
well beyond women's moral vigilance societies. Women formed gun clubs for
armed self-defense. Within days of the declaration of war, the American
Defense Rifle club, under the leadership of June Haughton, "an expert
rifle shot," established a rifle range on the roof of the Hotel Majestic
in New York City. The women of the Albany Colony of the National Society
of New England Women learned how to use rifles in self-defense under the
direction of a staff member from the nearby armory. In Bayonne, New
Jersey, nineteen women formed the Women's Revolver League and, using
borrowed weapons and an instructor borrowed from the local police station,
trained at the police practice ranges at the Bayswater Yacht Club. Through
their actions, these women reworked the gendered structure of obligation
and embedded themselves in the institutions and rhetoric of self-defense
and citizen vigilance.37 |
51 |
| Women formed
patriotic leagues, surveillance societies, and women's auxiliaries to
all-male militias and guards. Connecticut women, for example, could not
enroll in the Home Guard, but the Minute Women of New Haven and Bridgeport
formed a quasi-military uniformed alternative that drilled and paraded
just as men did. Some women even joined men's vigilance organizations. A
few women were members of the American Protective League, and women were
among the perpetrators of the Bisbee deportations, even as Bisbee's
morning paper on July 12, 1917, urged, "All Women and Children Keep off
Streets Today." The obligations of citizenship were gendered, but the
barriers between the gendered variants of citizenship were permeable.
Women's wartime vigilance also demonstrates the divisions among women
along lines of race and class. In Utica, New York, the elite members of
the National Society of New England Women helped guard the Utica Gas and
Electric Company, the Savage Arms Corporation, and nearby bridges against
sabotage by German spies and striking workers. But the radical socialist
Ella Reeve Bloor also spent much of the war in Utica, organizing women
workers at Savage Arms, who struck in an effort to obtain equal pay for
equal work.38 |
52 |
| The work of the
moral vigilance societies on the World War I home front represents another
aspect of wartime citizen policing. Nothing that occurred, from the
formation of vice squads to forced sterilization, was entirely new. But
moral vigilance took new forms during the war, as ongoing campaigns for
citizen vigilance were incorporated into war mobilization efforts. Moral
vigilance work also had new meanings for the citizens who undertook it, as
women folded private policing efforts into state institutions. Questions
about coercion were answered differently in this instance than in others.
Radicals in Connecticut and elsewhere had vigorously protested the Home
Guard's breakup of the socialist meetings in Hartford. In the wake of the
Bisbee deportations, national labor unions and liberal intellectuals
called for defending labor against the leagues. But few organizations or
individuals spoke out on behalf of the working-class women who were
interned as feebleminded prostitutes, and a far wider range of state and
voluntary activities were deemed legitimate forms of coercion. With
governments, laws, voluntary associations, psychologists, and reformers
arrayed against them, and the relative political powerlessness of their
gender and class and sometimes race as well, these Americans bore a heavy
burden of political coercion on the World War I home front.39 |
53 |
|
Keeping Vigil over the Racial Order
|
| World War I had a profound impact on African
American life. Many black veterans, concurring in W. E. B. Du Bois's
strident claim "we return from fighting, we return fighting," began to
agitate for political rights both in the South and in the urban North,
where African Americans had migrated in large numbers during the war. But
white vigilance organizations in the South had dedicated much effort to
enforcing African American participation in the draft and suppressing
black militancy. Tensions boiled over in the summer of 1919, with at least
twenty-five episodes of racial violence in cities nationwide, from
Washington, D.C., and Knoxville, Tennessee, to Birmingham, Alabama, and
Longview, Texas. In Chicago, at least 38 people died in two days of
rioting that began on July 27, 1919. In Omaha in late September 1919, a
crowd of six thousand attempted to lynch the city's mayor when he defended
Will Brown, an African American packinghouse worker who was the target of
the mob; federal and state troops had to intervene to end the episode. In
the year following the armistice, at least 76 African Americans were
lynched, 10 of them still in their military uniforms. African Americans
found that they could affirm their loyalty and lawfulness and plead for
the rule of law, or they could form their own vigilance societies for
self-defense. They attempted both approaches.40 |
54 |
| Some tried to stop
the lynchings and race riots of 1919 by convincing white Americans that
black people needed state and legal protection from the rule of mob
violence. This was an old technique in the antilynching movement, but the
message was made clearer and more urgent by pointing to African Americans'
loyalty during and after the war. The National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in its annual report for 1919,
called for law and order and affirmed the rights of black Americans by
insisting that the fact that "lawabiding colored people are denied the
commonest citizenship rights, must be brought home to all Americans who
love fair play." Writing in the Independent, W. S. Scarborough,
president of Wilberforce University, a historically black college in
Xenia, Ohio, appealed to the rule of law and concluded by asking, "Will
not the American white people come halfway—put aside their prejudices and
play fair with this people that has done so much to help win this war?"
Such positions were the culmination of over two decades of organized
antilynching activity, much of it drawing on the extensive networks of
voluntary association among African American clubwomen. Hopes for a
vigorous response from the government foundered in the White House, where
President Wilson dismissed a petition bearing thirty thousand signatures
and protesting the treatment of African Americans in the Washington riots.
Wilson insisted that the fight for the League of Nations treaty required
all his attention.41 |
55 |
| In the Mississippi
River Delta, however, where patient appeals to law and fairness were
ignored by white listeners, another version of fair play arose. Citizens
of Phillips County, Arkansas, formed an organization to keep watch over
their fellow citizens and maintain peace and order in their community.
They met in secret, swore oaths of allegiance to "defend this Government
and her Constitution at all times," and perhaps stockpiled arms for
self-defense. These were not the night riders of the Klan. These vigilant
Americans were the black sharecroppers of the Progressive Farmers and
Householders' Union of America. Their story demonstrates the multiple uses
of citizen vigilance in the early-twentieth-century United States and the
contest about its significance.42 |
56 |
| On October 1,
1919, black sharecroppers filled the pews of a small church in Hoop Spur,
Arkansas, near the town of Elaine, to hear about the work of the
Progressive Farmers. Although accounts of the earliest incidents are
conflicting, the sharecroppers ended up in a gun battle with a group of
white men outside the church, triggering three days of violence across
Phillips County. Crowds of local whites roamed the countryside, and
African Americans returned fire; 200 people may have died. U.S. Army
forces restored order, but they turned over control of the county to the
Committee of Seven, a privately organized white vigilance organization
composed of local business and political elites. The Committee of Seven
quickly established its own rule of law in Elaine, launched an
investigation of the riots, and arrested 79 African American men. In the
wake of the committee's investigations, the trial that followed can hardly
be dignified with the name: deprived of counsel and forbidden to call
witnesses on their own behalf, every one of the black defendants was
convicted by the all-white jury, some after just seven minutes of
deliberation. Twelve men were sentenced to death and 67 others to lengthy
prison terms in what Mary White Ovington, chairman of the board of the
NAACP, called a "lynching by law." The Progressive Farmers and
Householders' Union was seen no more in Phillips County.43 |
57 |
| Coming at the end
of a months-long wave of racial violence in the "red summer" of 1919, the
riots in Elaine contributed to a movement by African American activists to
put a stop to lynching and mob violence. The NAACP called a Conference on
Lynching and Mob Violence in 1919, while Ida B. Wells-Barnett publicized
the violence in Phillips County through a fund-raising campaign, articles
in the Chicago Defender, and a pamphlet that she circulated in
Arkansas. Public criticism of the violence in Arkansas was supplemented by
courtroom challenges. Speaking in Columbia, South Carolina, in the summer
of 1919, Moorfield Storey, a distinguished former president of the
American Bar Association, told his audience that "there never was a time
in the history of the world when it was more important to teach the
knowledge of and respect for the law." Like other critics of mob violence,
Storey insisted, "that all men must obey the law is the doctrine on which
free governments rest"; he argued that "there is no more dangerous
tyranny" than "mobocracy." Storey would later collaborate with the NAACP
on court cases resulting from the 1919 Arkansas riots that eventually
brought questions of legal authority and mob violence before the nation's
highest court.44 |
58 |
In his brief to
the Supreme Court, Storey argued that the formal mechanisms of law were
insufficient protections when the entire atmosphere of social life was
pervaded by coercion: "If any juror had had the courage to investigate
said charge, with any spirit of fairness, and vote for acquittal he
himself would have been the victim of the mob." The legal system, claimed
Storey, might be an insufficient safeguard against the mob, even when it
operated according to its rules. In a dramatic departure from earlier
decisions, the Court agreed, ruling in 1923 to overturn the verdicts. As
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in the majority opinion in Moore v.
Dempsey:
|
59 |
|
| If the case is that the whole proceeding [of a
trial] is a mask—that counsel, jury, and judge were swept to the
fatal end by an irresistible wave of public passion . . . neither
perfection in the machinery for correction nor the possibility that
the trial court and counsel saw no other way of avoiding an
immediate outbreak of the mob can prevent this Court from securing
to the petitioners their constitutional rights.45 |
|
| The law, in other words, could itself be a form
of mob violence. In such a situation, said Holmes, the Court could
intervene to guarantee a fair trial. The ruling in Moore v. Dempsey
demonstrates how widespread postwar concerns about mob violence and
legitimate authority found one resolution in the judicial process. It held
out the possibility, eagerly hoped for by civil libertarians and African
American activists, that the law might act as the arbiter of the
boundaries of political coercion. |
60 |
|
The Postwar Debate over Law and Order
|
| Even as they marched in Armistice Day parades in
November 1918, few of the nation's vigilance societies felt that their
work was done. The Connecticut Home Guard, for example, petitioned
Governor Holcomb to forestall his attempt to disband the organization.
Members noted that "the State should have at its command during the time
of reconstruction and readjustment of public and private affairs, a
well-disciplined and reliable military force of sufficient strength to
protect life and property within its borders in any emergency." The
governor granted their request, and guard members probably helped quell
the town-gown battle of New Haven of May 28, 1919, when three hundred
soldiers and five thousand townspeople, outraged by student catcalls at a
military band concert, stormed the Yale University campus and beat
students until they were forcibly disbanded.46 |
61 |
|
|
| |
 |
African Americans defended themselves
against organized violence in personal confrontations,
including the one pictured here in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921,
and through legal channels: The National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People succeeded in persuading the
Supreme Court to overturn the convictions of twelve black
men condemned to death after riots in Elaine, Arkansas, in
1919 (Moore v. Dempsey, 1923). Courtesy Tulsa Race
Riot Collection, McFarlin Library, University of
Tulsa. | |
|
| |
|
| The largest
postwar vigilance organization was the American Legion. Founded soon after
the war as a veterans' organization, the legion jumped wholeheartedly into
the tumultuous conflicts of the postwar period, and legionnaires
frequently attempted to impose their vision of Americanism and social
order through extralegal means. The legion worked closely with public and
private espionage and surveillance organizations, as in Cleveland, Ohio,
on May 1, 1919, when legionnaires and former members of the American
Protective League broke up the city's May Day parade and tore red flags
from the hands of socialist veterans who dared march in their own
uniforms. Later in the year, Armistice Day brought violence to Centralia,
Washington, where legionnaires stormed the local IWW hall and exchanged
gunfire with the men inside. They then captured local IWW leader Wesley
Everest, castrated and killed him, and dragged his body through the city
streets wrapped in an American flag.47 |
62 |
| Despite calls from
across the political spectrum to rein in the postwar violence, the
continuing power of the American Legion and similar groups, including the
Ku Klux Klan, which made over two hundred appearances in twenty-seven
states and added one hundred thousand names to its membership rolls in the
year after the armistice, demonstrates that extralegal political coercion
persisted after the war. Throughout the 1920s, the legion and the Klan
continued to exercise forms of political coercion, ranging between the
legitimate and the illegitimate, that reflected wartime precedents.48 |
63 |
In response to the
violence of the war and postwar years, many called for the rule of law. In
Oklahoma City, where an aggressive state council of defense and groups
such as the Knights of Liberty acted with the support of the state
government, Harlow's Weekly editorialized on the dangers of
suspending the rule of law:
|
64 |
|
| Armed with the great authority of public opinion,
the Councils rapidly assumed judiciary and almost legislative
rights. In some instances, the same men acted as accuser,
prosecutor, judge and jury. . . . No autocratic government in the
past century ever suspended the great fundamental principle, that a
person charged with an offense against the law must have the right
of trial, to face his accusers or to have the counsel of one versed
in the law.49 |
|
Or, as the
Omaha World-Herald editorialized in October 1919 in the wake of the
riot there:
|
65 |
|
| We have learned how frail is the barrier which
divides civilization from the primal jungle, and we have been given
to see clearly what that barrier is. It is the law. It is the might
of the law wisely and fearlessly administered. It is the respect for
and obedience to the law on the part of the members of society. When
these fail us, all things fail. When these are lost, all will be
lost.50 |
|
| Such a vision—that legal process, not violence,
divides legitimate from illegitimate political coercion—rested on a
different characterization of mob violence and vigilantism and different
views of the place of law in political life from those held by members of
vigilance societies.51 |
66 |
| For most
Americans, the call was for "law and order," for a strengthening of
constituted legal authorities' control of political coercion. The 1918
"slacker raids"—in which American Protective League members circulated on
streets, in ballparks, and in other public places demanding that men show
their draft cards and detaining those who did not comply—prompted a
flareup of dissent that brought the league's ambiguous legal status into
focus. The APL was quickly shut down, but the Justice Department was
simultaneously hiring a dozen new federal agents a week. Postwar
legislation similarly took power to regulate prostitution away from
women's volunteer vigilance societies while it dramatically expanded the
reach of state power by authorizing the intervention of boards of health
and local police. Harlow's Weekly, which had spoken out
passionately for the rule of law, hoped that it would be used to rein in
lawless German Americans "because they failed to use the caution so
necessary in this time of stress." In the wake of the Washington, D.C.,
riots, some sought to use law to control, not white rioters, but African
American citizens. "Already a bill before the Senate seeks to separate the
races on street cars," noted the Independent. In the wake of the
events of 1919, Congress considered a bill making lynching a federal crime
but did not adopt it. The nationwide May Day violence of 1919 led one
senator to state that he would "at once introduce a bill in Congress
making it unlawful to advocate, among other things, by a 'general
cessation of industry,' the 'overthrowing of the Government of the United
States, or any other Government.' In California the wholesale arresting of
'undesirable aliens' is already under way."52 |
67 |
| In the immediate
aftermath of the war, the political situation was presented as a choice
between law and order and social chaos. Among the growing community of
civil libertarians, a stark picture of American politics also prevailed,
but viewed from a different angle. The activists of the National Civil
Liberties Bureau-like their opponents, the law-and-order conservatives who
clamored for stricter loyalty laws—wanted more laws, and they wanted them
more consistently enforced.53 |
68 |
Another area in
which civil libertarians and conservatives concurred was in their
denunciation of "mob violence." Where one side saw jingoistic
superpatriots, another feared subversive anarchist strikers, but both
understood the mob to be made up of the same social types, and both
thought mob rule posed similar dangers to American democracy. As one
commentator wrote of the July 1919 race riot in Washington, D.C.:
|
69 |
|
The mobs that broke the long record of good
order in the National capital . . . were made up almost wholly of
boys between eighteen and twenty-five years of age. In part these
were composed of young roughs of the city. The rest were soldiers
and sailors, either discharged or from near-by camps, and from their
appearance doubtless of the hoodlum element of their home
towns.54 |
|
| Such statements attributing social disorder to
spontaneous, disorganized gatherings of lower-class men were common
throughout 1919. |
70 |
| Some leading
postwar intellectuals contributed to this vision of the mob as they
reformulated their thoughts on crowd psychology and mass politics.
European sociologists at the turn of the century considered the
significance of mob psychology in an extended debate that gave voice to
their concerns about mass democracy. Prewar American thinkers often
challenged the antidemocratic assumptions of this literature. Writing
before the war, the historian Allan Nevins chastised a European theorist
of crowd psychology for ignoring "the immense hopefulness in the gradual
rationalization of the crowd which is going on all around us" and
suggested a progressive interpretation of the crowd. "Not even in the
backward parts of the world is the crowd, in any sense of the term, so
excitable and blind as it once was." That view would not prevail in the
postwar years. By then, intellectuals had come to fear the mob instinct
and its power over the American mind; Walter Lippmann worried that "at the
present time a nation too easily acts like a crowd."55 |
71 |
| In their
sociological and intellectual assumptions, the critics of mob violence—who
had witnessed the violence of the American home front firsthand—were not
entirely wrong. But such a viewpoint acted to make the workings of
American political coercion invisible, in two ways. First, it obscured the
central role played by organized groups and local elites in the narrow
category of events called "mob violence." Second, by focusing on violent
passion and ignoring the ways that vigilance groups had exercised their
powers with the consent of the government, this literature helped sweep
the more systematic, organized, and passionless coercions under the rug of
political legitimacy.56 |
72 |
|
|
| In fall 1917 Bisbee witnessed what the city's
Daily Review called "a splendid gathering of high-class, patriotic
business men and workers and professional men of the district." Sheriff
Harry Wheeler, who had led the deportations that July and who was
viciously rebuked in the President's Mediation Commission report, was the
guest of honor. Accepting the accolades of his fellow community leaders,
Wheeler said, "My friends, you pay me too much honor in this matter. There
were scores of men in that drive the morning of July 12 who are entitled
to more honor than I, who did more than I that day for the district and
our home fires. I merely did my duty. I couldn't shirk."57 |
73 |
| On the World War I
American home front, there were many men and women who, like Sheriff
Wheeler, felt they could not shirk the duty of vigilance in service of the
war effort. And so they responded, drawing on social practices they knew
and creating others as they went along. During the war Americans policed
their fellow citizens as part of a mobilization effort that pervaded
nearly every facet of national life. At the factory and at school, in
churches and in dance halls, on the streets and on the telephone, ordinary
Americans were watched and governed by their fellow citizens. The
apparatus of surveillance would not have been constructed had not many
Americans viewed vigilance as basic to good citizenship and had not
officials at all levels of government tolerated and even encouraged that
vision of political obligation. |
74 |
In May 1919 the
Public, a reform-minded magazine, editorialized on the role of law
in American life:
|
75 |
|
| This is a country of law. If it is not that it is
nothing at all. And being a country of law those who assume to set
up private judgment are undermining its foundation. Every word
spoken and every act committed is subject to law, and men have been
appointed to see to its enforcement. . . . If this system is not
self-sustaining then democracy itself is at fault.58 |
|
| Events on the
World War I home front demonstrate that the system was not self-sustaining
as the editorialist had suggested. Those who called for the rule of law
while they oversaw a system of coercion that continued to operate outside
the law were neither devious, duplicitous, nor hypocritical. They were
obedient citizens trapped in a paradox of their own making, dedicated to a
nation of laws that asked them to ignore laws. In the postwar push for law
and order, the worst manifestation of citizen vigilance—mob violence—had
been denounced, and even as it persisted into the postwar years, the
intellectual, legal, and institutional weapons wielded against it would
grow more powerful. But the vast structures of citizen vigilance remained
in place; vigilance societies that had done the work of the state outside
its boundaries now saw those actions folded within it. The mob, narrowly
defined, had been publicly renounced. But the coercion had not. |
76 |
|
Notes
Christopher Capozzola is a visiting instructor in the
Department of American Literature and Civilization at Middlebury College.
This essay received the Louis Pelzer Memorial Award for 2001.
This essay was first presented at the Workshop in
Twentieth-Century American Politics and History at Columbia University.
For comments, I would like to thank Alan Brinkley, Elizabeth Blackmar, and
Ira Katznelson; Joanne Meyerowitz, Susan Armeny, Kevin Marsh, the Pelzer
Prize committee, and the staff of, and an anonymous reader for, the
Journal of American History; and my graduate student colleagues in
the Columbia University Department of History, without whose support this
essay would not have been written. Funding has been provided by the
Columbia University Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy,
the Social Science Research Council Program on Philanthropy and the
Nonprofit Sector, and the Sophia Smith Collection and Smith College
Archives.
Readers may contact Capozzola at <cjc32@columbia.edu>.
1 Woodrow Wilson, "A Statement to the American
People," July 26, 1918, in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur
S. Link et al. (69 vols., Princeton, 1966-1994), XLIX, 97, 98. On the
killing of Robert Prager, see Donald R. Hickey, "The Prager Affair: A
Study in Wartime Hysteria," Journal of the Illinois State Historical
Society, 62 (Summer 1969), 117-34; Frederick C. Luebke, Bonds of
Loyalty: German-Americans and World War I (DeKalb, 1974), 3-26; and
Carl Weinberg, "The Tug of War: Labor, Loyalty, and Rebellion in the
Southwestern Illinois Coalfields, 1914-1920" (Ph.D. diss., Yale
University, 1995), 452-521.
2 Weinberg, "Tug of War," 484. See also Richard
Hofstadter and Michael Wallace, eds., American Violence: A Documentary
History (New York, 1970). On the history of citizenship, see Gary
Gerstle, "Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans," Journal of
American History, 84 (Sept. 1997), 524-58; and Rogers M. Smith,
Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History
(New Haven, 1997). On World War I-era repression, see Stephen M. Kohn,
American Political Prisoners: Prosecutions under the Espionage and
Sedition Acts (Westport, 1994); H. C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite,
Opponents of War, 1917-1918 (Seattle, 1968); and William Preston
Jr., Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals,
1903-1933 (Urbana, 1994). For a heated exchange on the place of
violence in African American history, see "What We See and Can't See in
the Past: A Round Table," Journal of American History, 83 (March
1997), 1217-72.
3 Responses from Wilson's readers include Robert
Russa Moton to Woodrow Wilson, July 27, 1918, in Papers of Woodrow
Wilson, ed. Link et al., XLIX, 113-14; and George Foster Peabody to
Wilson, July 29, 1918, ibid., 125. George Creel, "Unite and Win,"
Independent, April 6, 1918, pp. 5-6. For historians' debate on the
significance of Wilson's statement in relation to the issue of lynchings
of African Americans, see Henry Blumenthal, "Woodrow Wilson and the Race
Question," Journal of Negro History, 48 (Jan. 1963), 4, 10-12;
Stephen R. Fox, The Guardian of Boston: William Monroe Trotter (New
York, 1971), 221; and Robert L. Allen with Pamela P. Allen, Reluctant
Reformers: Racism and Social Reform Movements in the United States
(Washington, 1974), 98.
4 Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American
Republic, 1776-1787 (New York, 1967), 319-28; Richard Maxwell Brown,
"The History of Vigilantism in America," in Vigilante Politics, ed.
H. Jon Rosenbaum and Peter C. Sederberg (Philadelphia, 1976),
103-4.
5 Here I am borrowing and modifying definitional
categories suggested by H. Jon Rosenbaum and Peter C. Sederberg,
"Vigilantism: An Analysis of Establishment Violence," in Vigilante
Politics, ed. Rosenbaum and Sederberg, 3-29. Richard Maxwell Brown,
the leading historian of vigilantism in the United States, never fully
defined the term, using as a working definition "taking the law into one's
own hands." See Brown, "History of Vigilantism in America," 79; and
Richard Maxwell Brown, Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of
American Violence and Vigilantism (New York, 1975), 95-96. For a
definition from political anthropology, see Ray Abrahams, Vigilant
Citizens: Vigilantism and the State (Cambridge, Eng., 1998), 4-10.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a vigilance committee as "a
self-appointed committee for the maintenance of justice and order in an
imperfectly organized community," highlighting voluntarism, the organized
nature of the undertaking, and its relationship to institutions of law.
Oxford English Dictionary, 2d. ed., s.v. "vigilance committee." The
term "vigilante" was not widely used in American discourse until the
Virginia City movement in the Montana Territory in 1863-1865, according to
Brown, "History of Vigilantism in America," 85. For the figures, see
ibid., 80-81. Edward Stettner, "Vigilantism and Political Theory,"
in Vigilante Politics, ed. Rosenbaum and Sederberg, 70.
6 Eric H. Monkkonen, The Police in Urban America,
1860-1920 (New York, 1981); Sidney L. Harring, Policing a Class
Society: The Experience of American Cities, 1865-1915 (New Brunswick,
1983). For Theodore Roosevelt's engagement with the romance of the Old
West, see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History
of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago, 1995),
170-215. In 1915 Roosevelt claimed that the work of vigilantes in the
nineteenth-century West was "in the main wholesome." Brown, "History of
Vigilantism in America," 105. The philosopher Josiah Royce explored the
impact of vigilantism on community in his writings on the American West;
see Robert V. Hine, Josiah Royce: From Grass Valley to Harvard
(Norman, 1992), 151, 169.
7 On private policing, see Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones,
Violence and Reform in American History (New York, 1978), 6. Even
the U.S. Department of Justice relied on Pinkertons as its investigators
prior to 1893; see Joan M. Jensen, The Price of Vigilance (Chicago,
1968), 12. On citizen voluntarism in the maintenance of industrial order,
see Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial
Workers of the World (Urbana, 1988), 376-97; Eugene E. Leach, "The
Literature of Riot Duty: Managing Class Conflict in the Streets,
1877-1927," Radical History Review (no. 56, Spring 1993), 23-50;
and Steven C. Levi, Committee of Vigilance: The San Francisco Chamber
of Commerce Law and Order Committee, 1916-1919: A Case Study in Official
Hysteria (Jefferson, 1983). On the cooperation of the federal
government in the suppression of strikes, see Jerry M. Cooper, The Army
and Civil Disorder: Federal Military Intervention in Labor Disputes,
1877-1900 (Westport, 1980). On the relationship between labor and the
legal system, see William E. Forbath, Law and the Shaping of the
American Labor Movement (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 59-127. Many
advocates for workers placed their faith in the legal system despite
repeated failures. Mother Jones wrote that the courts "are the bulwark of
our institutions and their integrity must be preserved." Mother Jones to
Sara J. Dorr, Dec. 16, 1918, in The Correspondence of Mother Jones,
ed. Edward M. Steel (Pittsburgh, 1985), 185.
8 Anti-vice activity reached its peak in the 1910s,
according to Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America,
1900-1918 (Baltimore, 1982), 12-15. See also John D'Emilio and Estelle
B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America
(New York, 1988), 208-15. On Anthony Comstock, see Timothy J. Gilfoyle,
City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of
Sex, 1790-1920 (New York, 1992), 185-96; on Maude Miner, see Barbara
Meil Hobson, Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the
American Reform Tradition (Chicago, 1990), 173. On antiprostitution
campaigns, see Mark Thomas Connelly, The Response to Prostitution in
the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill, 1980); and David J. Langum,
Crossing over the Line: Legislating Morality and the Mann Act
(Chicago, 1994). On the experiences of working-class women who ended up in
the wartime net, see Joanne J. Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent
Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (Chicago, 1988); and Kathy Peiss,
Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New
York (Philadelphia, 1986). On Progressives' involvement in moral
vigilance and social reform, see Estelle B. Freedman, Their Sisters'
Keepers: Women's Prison Reform in America, 1830-1930 (Ann Arbor,
1981).
9 W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South:
Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 (Urbana, 1993); W. Fitzhugh Brundage,
ed., Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South (Chapel Hill,
1997); Crystal Nicole Feimster, "'Ladies and Lynching': The Gendered
Discourse of Mob Violence in the New South, 1880-1930" (Ph.D. diss.,
Princeton University, 2000); Robert P. Ingalls, Urban Vigilantes in the
New South: Tampa, 1882-1936 (Knoxville, 1988); Leon F. Litwack,
Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New
York, 1998). For the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan, see David Chalmers,
Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan (Chicago,
1968); Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the
1920s (Berkeley, 1991); Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry:
The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York, 1994); and Leonard J.
Moore, Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921-1928
(Chapel Hill, 1991).
10 Conference Committee on National Preparedness,
The Advance Agents of the Hun, broadside, [1917], portfolio 315,
no. 2, Broadside Collection (Rare Book Division, Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.); New Hampshire Committee on Public Safety, People of
New Hampshire, Wake Up! We Are at War!, broadside, [1917], portfolio
98, no. 3, ibid.; Woodrow Wilson, "A Flag Day Address," June 14,
1917, in Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Link et al., XLII, 499,
504.
11 "Citizens May Arrest Disloyal Persons," Albany
Journal, April 17, 1918, clipping enclosed with Dudley Paul Babcock to
American Union against Militarism, April 17, 1918, American Civil
Liberties Union Archives: The Roger Baldwin Years, 1917-1950
(microfilm, 293 reels, Scholarly Resources, 1996), reel 5, vol. 35. The
Albany editorialist's claim is oversimplified: only a felony justified a
citizen's arrest. Espionage Act violations were felonies; breaches of
peace or outrages of public decency were generally misdemeanors. Few
vigilant Americans bothered with such procedural distinctions, and even
civil libertarians such as Roger Baldwin did not apparently understand, or
insist upon, them until very late in the war.
12 Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, 18.
On the American Protective League, see Harold M. Hyman, To Try Men's
Souls: Loyalty Tests in American History (Westport, 1981), 267-97; and
Jensen, Price of Vigilance.
13 Rollin G. Osterweis, Three Centuries of New
Haven, 1638-1938 (New Haven, 1953), 404; Portland Telegram,
quoted in Clark T. Irwin Jr., "From a Gilded Age onto a World War," in
Greater Portland Celebration 350, comp. and ed. Albert F. Barnes
(Portland, Me., 1984), 124.
14 Edward F. Alexander to Roger N. Baldwin, Sept.
16, 1918, American Civil Liberties Union Archives, reel 12, vol.
72; A History of the New Jersey State Federation of Women's Clubs,
1894-1958 (Caldwell, 1958), 54; Kimberly S. Jensen, "Minerva on the
Field of Mars: American Women, Citizenship, and Military Service in the
First World War" (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1992), chap. 1.
15 "An Act Concerning the Home Guard," in
Connecticut Home Guard, Regulations for the Connecticut Home Guard
(Hartford, 1917), 1; Connecticut Military Emergency Board, Report to
the Governor: November 1, 1918 (Hartford, 1918), 1. On the makeup of
the Home Guard, see Bruce Fraser, "Yankees at War: Social Mobilization on
the Connecticut Homefront, 1917-1918" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University,
1976), 97-99, 351-60; Connecticut Home Guard, Register of Officers
([Hartford], 1917). Hartford and New Haven had some reserve units in which
all the officers had Italian surnames. African Americans, who numbered
fewer than 20,000 in the state's population in 1917, are mentioned nowhere
in the publications of the Home Guard or other records of the home front
vigilance organizations, which leads me to the tentative conclusion they
were completely excluded from service.
16 Charles W. Burpee, Burpee's the Story of
Connecticut (New York, 1939), 958; "An Act Concerning the Militia," in
Connecticut Home Guard, Regulations, 3. Home Guards were active in
dozens of states during the war. Many were initiated after the
federalization of the National Guard made those units unavailable to state
governors. In Portland, Maine, the Sons of Veterans collaborated with the
Cumberland County Power and Light Commission to guard against German
sabotage. Clark T. Irwin Jr., "WWI Galvanizes Region's Activities," in
Greater Portland Celebration, comp. and ed. Barnes, 136. On similar
work in Maryland and Texas, see Maryland War Records Commission,
Maryland in the World War, 1917-1919: Military and Naval Service
Records (Baltimore, 1933), 99-101; Mrs. Ralph E. Randel, ed., A
Time to Purpose: A Chronicle of Carson County (4 vols., Hereford,
Tex., 1966-1972), I, 280, IV, 293; and Roy Eddins, ed., History of
Falls County, Texas ([Marlin, Tex.], 1947), 212-13. The Texas Rangers
spent most of World War I along the Mexican border. Charles M. Robinson
III, The Men Who Wear the Star: The Story of the Texas Rangers (New
York, 2000), 269-79.
17 "Connecticut's Military Census," Review of
Reviews, 55 (May 1917), 534; Marcus H. Holcomb, "Connecticut in the
Van," ibid., 57 (May 1918), 520; Connecticut Military Emergency
Board, Report to the Governor, 3-4. The report notes that the tip
was provided by the U.S. Secret Service, but it probably came from the
volunteer operatives of the American Protective League.
18 Osterweis, Three Centuries of New Haven,
403-4. Some 6,300 aliens nationwide were arrested in enforcement of
enemy alien legislation; see Luebke, Bonds of Loyalty, 255-56; and
Harry N. Scheiber, The Wilson Administration and Civil Liberties,
1917-1921 (Ithaca, 1960), 14. Charles Burpee, "Connecticut in the
Wars," in History of Connecticut in Monographic Form, ed. Norris
Galpin Osborn (5 vols., New York, 1925), V, 127; "Socialist Meeting Packed
by Patriots," New York Tribune, April 8, 1918, clipping in
American Civil Liberties Union Archives, reel 8, vol. 70; "Home
Guards Break Up Socialist Rally," New York Call, April 8, 1918,
ibid. For Burpee's statement, see Fraser, "Yankees at War,"
307.
19 Fraser, "Yankees at War," 107; Burpee,
"Connecticut in the Wars," 127.
20 "A State with Two Governors," Independent,
Jan. 15, 1917, p. 96.
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