[On June 9th, 1954 laywer
Joseph Welch famously asked Senator Joseph McCarthy, “Have
you no sense of decency?” So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of
contexts for McCarthyism, leading up to a weekend post on that moment and
historical turning points!]
On the
governmental overreach that extended the worst of war into its aftermath.
As I detailed in this
post, few presidents, or national leaders of any kind, have had as vexed a
relationship to war as did Woodrow Wilson. With World War I raging across
Western Europe, Wilson ran for reelection in 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out
of war”; the phrase was in its moment entirely accurate and yet in hindsight
cannot help but be reflected in a funhouse mirror by the fact that Wilson would
lead the US into that war only two months after his second inauguration. And
yet, having reversed course so dramatically (and for complex and perhaps
entirely justifiable reasons, as I wrote Monday), Wilson would end his
presidency and political career fighting ceaselessly
for the creation of the League of Nations,
an international peacekeeping organization that could make real his pledge that
World War I would be “the
war to end all wars.” That the League failed, and that another world war
would commence not two decades later, provides yet another tragically (and
possibly unfairly) distorted reflection of Wilson’s aims and efforts.
Given all of those contradictory
or at least conflicting elements of Wilson’s wartime foreign policy, it might
become slightly easier to wrap our heads around a particular—and particularly
contradictory—member of Wilson’s administration: A.
Mitchell Palmer (1872-1936). Palmer was a Quaker who in 1912 turned
down a chance to serve as Wilson’s Secretary of War, arguing that to be “a
Quaker war secretary” would be to become “a living illustration of a horrible
incongruity.” Yet when the US entered the war, Palmer took on, and performed
with a diligence that is both impressive and disturbing, two of the most
warlike roles within Wilson’s second administration: first from 1917 to 1919 as
the Alien
Property Custodian, an agency responsible for seizing and reallocating
property belong to domestic “enemies”; and then, most famously and
controversially, from 1919 to 1921 as Attorney General, a role in which Palmer
(under the auspices of the Sedition Act) engaged in an increasingly overt and
extraordinary war against “radicals,” conducting the so-called Palmer Raids on
numerous political organizations and rounding up thousands of members for
arrest and possible deportation (many of whom were not deported only due to the
efforts of an under-secretary of labor, Louis
Freeland Post, who opposed the raids).
World War I ended with the
Armistice in November 1919, but the Palmer Raids continued well beyond that
month, exemplifying just how fully Palmer carried over these wartime activities
into other domestic efforts as Attorney General. These included extremely
hostile responses to labor protests and strikes and a series of doomsday warnings about radical
uprisings (to overthrow the federal government) on May Day (May 1st)
of 1920 (warnings that would help commence the decade’s hysterical and
repressive Red Scare). Palmer would also run for the
Democratic nomination for President in that year, and his campaign rhetoric
was as extreme as his actions had become: he noted
in one speech that “I am myself an American and I love to preach my
doctrine before undiluted one hundred percent Americans, because my platform
is, in a word, undiluted Americanism and undying loyalty to the republic.” Many
historians, including Christopher Capozzola in his excellent Uncle Sam Wants You: World War One and the
Making of the Modern American Citizen (2008), have traced the rise of
our modern military-industrial, surveillance, Patriot Act-creating state to
developments around World War I, and in that view there can be few Americans
more responsible for helping originate those trends than Palmer.
Next context
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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