How Woodrow Wilson Crushed The Anti-War Left

Historian Adam Hochschild joins the program to discuss how Woodrow Wilson suppressed the left in America during World War I. Wilson signed the Sedition Act of 1918 and the Espionage Act of 1917 into law as a way to suppress dissent and punish those who spoke out against the government or the war effort during World War I. The Sedition Act made it illegal to use "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the government, the flag, or the military. At the same time, the Espionage Act criminalized the disclosure of information about national defense. Wilson used these laws to aggressively target left-wing groups and individuals, including socialist, anarchist, and labor organizations, as well as journalists and pacifists. Many people were arrested, imprisoned, and fined under these laws, and the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech was significantly curtailed.

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And this is when we had the Advent of the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act which I've made a comeback over the past couple of you know a decade or two. But the wait gives me your sense of just having you know with that metaphor out there of pouring the gasoline on these different fires what was the impetus for Wilson to get into the war and how much was what was happening domestically how much of what was happening domestically was sort of like what's the relationship between that. I mean you know because he should remind people too this is also the time we had no income tax until around I guess 1917. And how much talk about the Dynamics there because you know why he wanted to enter this War you made the point in the book that I think our army at that time was our military was the size of maybe it was Portugal's. and so we weren't a military power but there was some semblance of like this is our way this is our ticket to become one. I think that I think you've hit something there with the idea of the ticket. Wilson was a very ambitious man. a paradoxical man. and I think he from the beginning felt that the United States in some way or other had to make use of this enormous crisis. This was the largest War the world had ever seen which began in 1914. You know it would, unfortunately, be surpassed several decades later. But at that point history had never seen something so murderous. and he felt like the United States had a sacred Mission. At first, he thought to stop the war and somehow impose peace. Then he came to feel when he saw that the war was completely deadlocked in late 1916 or early 1917 that it was time for the United States to enter the war because we couldn't put our stamp on the world unless we had helped end this war. From the beginning, it really was a myth that the U.S. was neutral. because we were selling huge amounts of arms and Munitions Industrial Supplies to the Allies. principally Britain and France but also Russia and Italy who were on the Allied side. Huge amounts. You know bullets, machine guns, parts that would be assembled into submarines and destroyers, artillery pieces, all kinds of stuff. 40 percent of the British military budget was being spent in the United States. so the U.S was not really neutral theoretically American Business was equally free to sell to Germany in Austro-hungry.