
Donald Trump has always felt the need to end many things, even the last election. I must admit that I found it amusing that the FBI entered Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate under a warrant. authorized by1917 Espionage Act. History is full of strange ways of returning in our world, as well as of finding crushing alternatives. Trump’s actions, whatever they may have been, have a poor track record both in its own time as well as ours. been usedIncludes by his administrationTo silence government information leakers. My latest book. American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and America’s Forgotten Crisis, is about the crushing of alternatives a century ago in this country, in the midst of all this, I couldn’t help thinking about a part of our history that The Donald would undoubtedly have been the first to crush, if he had the chance.
Let me start with something more personal. I was recently in Denmark when I contracted an infection in my hand. I was directed to a local hospital by the hotel in the city where my stay was. I was quickly taken into a consultation room. A nurse asked me some questions and told my to wait. A physician arrived in the room and examined me. It took only a few minutes before he said that I needed an antibiotic. He quickly swiveled in his seat, pulled out a box of pills from the cabinet behind him, and instructed me to take two per day for ten days. When I thanked him and asked where I should go to pay for the consultation and the medicine, he responded simply, “We have no facilities for that.”
There are no facilities for this.
It’s a phrase that comes back to me every time I’m reminded how, in the world’s richest nation, we still don’t have full national health insurance. And that’s far from the only thing we’re missing. In a multitude of ways, we’re known for having a far weaker social safety net than many other wealthy countries and behind that lies a history in which the Espionage Act played a crucial role.
A Danish friend visited me recently, and was shocked to discover hundreds of homeless people living under tents in Berkeley and Oakland, California. This is a progressive and prosperous state. The poor are more susceptible to fall through the cracks (or chasms), in many other states.
International visitors are equally shocked to learn that American families often pay outrageous college tuitions from their own pockets. And it’s not only well-off European countriesThose who do more for their citizens are better. The average Costa Rican will live with one-sixth of the annual per capita income of their North American counterpart. two years longer, thanks largely to that country’s comprehensive national health care system.
Why hasn’t our country done better, compared to so many others? There are certainly many reasons, not least among them the relentless, decades-long propaganda barrage from the American right, painting every proposed strengthening of public health and welfare — from unemployment insurance to Social Security to Medicare to Obamacare — as an ominous step down the road to socialism.
This is absurd, as socialism, as defined by the classic definition, is public ownership over the means of production. This agenda item is not on any American political horizon. In another sense, however, the charge is historical accurate in that significant advances in health care and welfare have often been made by socialist parties, both here as well as abroad.
The globe’s first national healthcare system, in Imperial Germany, was, for example, muscled through the Reichstag by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1883 precisely to outflankThe German socialists, who have long advocated similar measures, were not surprised. Nor was it surprising that Britain’s National Health Service was installed by the Labour Party when it took power after the Second World War.
And in the United States, early in the last century, some of President Theodore Roosevelt’s modest moves to regulate business and break up trusts were, in fact, designed to steal a march on this country’s socialists, whom he feared, as he wrote to a friend, were “far more ominous than any populist or similar movement in times past.”
Back then — however surprising it may seem today — the American Socialist Party was indeed part of our political reality and, in 1904, it had come out in favor of compulsory national health insurance. A dozen years after that, New York Socialist Congressman Meyer London introduced a bill strikingly similar to the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act of more than a century later. In 1911, another socialist congressman, Victor Berger of Wisconsin, proposed a national old-age pension, a goal that wouldn’t be realized for another quarter of a century with the passage of the Social Security Act of 1935.
The United States was not home to as strong a socialist movement as other countries. But it was once a force to be reckoned. Socialists were elected mayors in cities as diverse as Toledo, Pasadena and Schenectady. Oklahoma alone had more than 175 local and state offices held by party members. People commonly point to 1912 as the party’s high-water mark. Its candidate for president was elected that year. Eugene V. Debs, won 6% popular vote, even beating the Republican candidate in many states.
Still, the true peak of American socialism’s popularity came a few years later. The charismatic Debs decided not to run again in 1916, mistakenly accepting President Woodrow Wilson’s implied promise to keep the United States out of the First World War — something most Socialists cared about passionately. Wilson, infuriating them, brought the country into what had until then been primarily a European conflict. He also repressed dissidents who voted against his decision. That fall, however, the Socialists made impressive gains in municipal elections, winning more than 20% of the vote in 14 of the country’s larger cities — more than 30% in several of them — and 10 seats in the New York State Assembly.
During that campaign, Wilson was particularly dismayed by the party’s popularity in New York City, where Socialist lawyer Morris Hillquit was running for mayor. The president asked his conservative Texan attorney general, Thomas Gregory, what could be done about Hillquit’s “outrageous utterances” against the war. Gregory responded that he feared prosecuting Hillquit “would enable him to pose as a martyr and would be likely to increase his voting strength. I am having my representatives in New York City watch the situation rather carefully, and if a point is reached where he can be proceeded against it will give me a great deal of pleasure.” Hillquit lost, but did get 22% of the vote.
Socialists were jubilant because they knew that if they did well in the 1918 midterm election, their national vote total would rise to the millions for the first time. Wilson, whose Democrats held the House of Representatives by the smallest of margins, was terrified at the prospect of Socialists gaining the balance of the power. And so, already at war in Europe, his administration in effect declared war on the Socialists at home as well, using as its primary tool Wilson’s sweeping criminalization of dissent, the new 1917 Espionage Act. It would be a terrible loss.
The Government’s Axe Falls
Already the party’s most popular woman, the fiery Kansas-born orator Kate Richards O’Hare — known as Red Kate for her politics and her mass of red hair — had been sentenced to five years under the Espionage Act for speaking out against the war. Still free on appeal, O’Hare, who knew the hardships of farm life firsthand and had run for both the House and the Senate, continued to draw audiences in the thousands when she spoke in the prairie states. Her appeal was denied soon after and O’Hare was sent to Jefferson City, Missouri penitentiary. There, she was reunited with Emma Goldman, anarchist firebrand. They would be lifelong friends.
In 1918, Debs was pursued by the government. The pretext was a speech that he had given in a Canton, Ohio park bandstand following a state convention for his beleaguered party. “They have always taught you that it is your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command,” he told the crowd. “But in all the history of the world you, the people, never had a voice in declaring war.”
This was more than enough. Two weeks later, he was indicted and swiftly brought before a federal judge who just happened to be the former law firm partner of President Wilson’s secretary of war. Debs’ words at that trial would be long remembered:
“Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest of the earth. I said then, I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
As the judge sentenced the four-time presidential candidate, spectators gasped. He was sentenced to a $10,000 fine and 10 year imprisonment. In 1920, he would still have been in Atlanta’s federal prison when he received more that 900,000.
The government didn’t merely prosecute luminaries like O’Hare and Debs however. It also pursued rank and file party members, including the former Socialist candidates for governor of Minnesota, New Jersey, South Dakota, and South Dakota. Almost all of them would be sentenced for their opposition to the war or draft under the Espionage Act.
The Wilson administration would also attack Socialists on other fronts, not content with this. There were then more than 100 socialist dailies, weeklies, and monthlies and the Espionage Act gave Wilson’s postmaster general, segregationist Albert Burleson of Texas, the power to deem such publications “unmailable.” Before long, Burleson would bar from the mail virtually the entire socialist press, which, in the prewar years, had a combined circulation of two million. Some dailies survived, though they did not require the Post Office to reach their readers. However, for most, such a ban was a fatal blow.
The government also weakened the socialist movement in other ways. For instance, Burleson’s post office simply stopped delivering letters to and from the party’s Chicago headquarters and some of its state and local offices. Staff members of a socialist newspaper in Milwaukee noticed that they were not receiving business correspondence. Even their mail subscriptions were not being received by the socialist paper in Milwaukee. New York Times The Chicago TribuneThey stopped arriving. Advertising income started to decline. Oscar Ameringer, a writer, called upon a long-standing supporter, a baker, who had suddenly stopped buying advertising. According to Ameringer, the man “slumped down in a chair, covered his eyes and, with tears streaming through his fingers, sobbed, ‘My God, I can’t help it…They told me if I didn’t take my advertising out they would refuse me… flour, sugar and coal.’”
Local politicians and vigilantes also took cues from government in the wartime assault. They attacked socialist speakers and denied them access to meeting rooms. Following an antiwar march by progressives and labor union members on Boston Common, vigilantes broke into the Socialist Party office nearby and smashed its windows and doors. They then threw furniture, papers and the suitcase of a traveling activist from the windows onto a bonfire.
In January 1918, the mayor of Mitchell, South Dakota, ordered the party’s state convention broken up and all delegates expelled from town. One party leader was seized “on the streets by five unknown men and hustled into an automobile in which he was driven five miles from town,” a local newspaper reported. “There he was set out upon the prairie and… told to proceed afoot to his home in Parkston [an 18-mile walk] and warned not to return.”
The Big “What if?” Question
The Socialists were far from alone in suffering the wave of repression that swept the country in Wilson’s second term. Other targets included the labor movement, the country’s two small rival Communist parties, and thousands of radicals who had never become American citizens and were targeted for deportation. The Socialist Party was the most influential of all the victims. It never recovered.
After being released in 1921 from prison, Debs was forced to travel again. He was denied many of the venues he had booked. In Cleveland, the City Club cancelled its invitation. In Los Angeles the only place Debs could speak was at a city zoo. He had a better time than Upton Sinclair, the socialist writer who was arrested in 1923 while reading the First Amendment aloud.
Debs’ death in 1926 meant that the party that had previously elected 33 state legislators and 79 mayors and well over 1,000 municipal officials had shut down most of its offices. It was left with less then 10,000 members nationwide. Kate Richards O’Hare wrote to her friend Emma Goldman, who had been deported from the United States in 1919, that she felt herself a “sort of political orphan now with no place to lay my head.”
Despite being a minority, the Socialists were a significant part of American politics before patriotic war hyperstyria brought about an era that was filled with repression. Until then, Republican and Democratic legislators had voted for early-twentieth-century reform measures like child labor laws and the income tax in part to stave off demands from the Socialist Party for bigger changes.
What would they have voted for if that party had not been so brutally crushed? This remains one of the biggest “what ifs” in American history. If the Socialist Party hadn’t been so damaged, might it at least have pushed the mainstream ones into creating the sort of stronger social safety net and national health insurance systems that people today take for granted in countries like Canada or Denmark? In a world where so much could have been different, would Donald Trump have been left to rot in Mar-a-Lago without the Espionage Act?
The last time you tried to pay a medical bill, might you, in fact, have been told, “We have no facilities for that”?