To be with you because really there is no kind of person i more enjoy talking with than teachers of history. Teachers of history have been tremendously important in my life from high school, from college, and also people who are involved in teaching public history by working in museums and historical sites, and so forth. All of that has had a huge influence on my life. I dont think i would be writing History Today were it not for two very good history teachers that i had when i was in high school. Let me tell you a little bit about how i came to the subject that im going to talk about today. I have, for a long time, as long as long as i can remember, been obsessed with the First World War. I had relatives on both sides of my family who fought in several different armies. And it has always sort of seemed to me, as one historian put it best when he described the First World War as the original sin of the 20th century, and so much of what has afflicted us in the last 100 years comes directly out of that war. So i have always been fascinated by it. I did a book called to end all wars that came out about 10 years ago which was about the First World War, focused on the british experience, because that is where the conflict was sharpest between people who thought the war was a noble and necessary crusade and the people who thought, correctly i think, that it was absolute madness and would make the world turn for the worse in every conceivable way. The book that jenny mentioned that i just finished, rebel cinderella, is the story of an American Woman who lived through that period, and that kind of woke me up to what life in the United States was like in the First World War and its immediate aftermath. And that is what i am writing about right now. So, the thoughts im going to share with you today are not from a book that is published, but from a book in progress. So, lets go ahead i just want to make sure and are you folks seeing my screen here, or do i have to click share screen again . Ok, good. You are seeing my slideshow, thats fine. Let me go ahead. I want to first describe the usual way that we remember america in the First World War. And then talk about aspect of that history that we tend to ignore. The way the story is usually told, the european powers had been battling themselves to a stalemate for nearly three years, starting in 1914. The british, the french, the germans. The war produced untold millions of deaths, an even larger number of wounded, and destruction beyond that of any previous european war. It left a devastated landscape as well, and still, the carnage went on and on, leaving the powers of the old world exhausted. Then, german submarines started sinking american ships. President woodrow wilson, who was in power at that time, declared enough is enough. And on april 2, 1917, he went before congress and asked it to declare war, and congress promptly did so. Wilson picked general john j. Pershing to lead the u. S. Troops who went to europe. Pershing arrived in france, declared famously, lafayette, we are here, and by mid1918, some two million american troops were in europe. They fought bravely, they helped to win the war, swiftly, the armistice came, which was really a german surrender, greeted with tremendous fervor here and in all the warring countries, tickertape parades welcomed the american troops home, general pershing was greeted as a great hero. And that is where the chapter on world war i in so Many American history textbooks ends. The country is at peace. The next chapter of American History begins, the 1920s, flappers, prohibition, speakeasies, babe ruth, the model t ford, and so on, right . But this skips over a great deal. So, i want to go back and look at the war years more closely, and then at the two years that followed the socalled peace. From the moment the United States entered the war, there was a fierce propaganda barrage from the government. This is a u. S. Army recruiting poster. And just look at it for a second, and at the image of ferocity that it contains. There was a tremendous paranoia about spies. Why . Not because there actually were a lot of german spies in the United States. There had been, but almost all of them had been rounded up fairly early in the war because their paymaster made the mistake of leaving his briefcase behind on a new york elevated train, and it was promptly collected by the american agent who was tailing him. So there really were no german spies by the time the u. S. Entered the war, but there was this tremendous paranoia in the air, i think in part because the United States had a huge foreignborn population. And the first reflection of that was paranoia about spies and then a paranoia about everything german, sometimes mixed with a longstanding antisemitism. Look at this poster, for example. The guy, the evil spy has a german helmet, but maybe a jewish nose . Now, i heard about the atmosphere of this time from my father, who was 25 years old in 1917. He was the son of a jewish immigrant from germany. The family spoke german at home, but they were terrified of doing so on the street. Some states actually passed laws against speaking german in public. German language instruction stopped in schools and universities across the country. Signs appeared like this one in a park in chicago. And amazingly, there were burnings of german books. Heres a bonfire outside a high school in baribou, wisconsin, of german language books and textbooks. Another picture of that fire. And if you can read the slide, chalked on the sidewalk it says here lies the remains of german in baraboo high school. Robert prager was a minor in collinsville, illinois. He tried to enlist in the u. S. Navy but was turned down because he had a glass eye. He had the bad luck to be germanborn. One day in 1918, prager was seized by a mob, wrapped in an american flag, forced to sing the starspangled banner, and lynched. Here are the people who lynched him. They were put on trial. The jury deliberated for 10 minutes and then found them innocent while a military band played outside the courthouse. There was antigerman craziness in the air in other ways. No more german songs were played. Weddings were played without mendelssohns wedding march. Berlin, iowa became lincoln, iowa. East germantown, pennsylvania became pershing. Sorry, east germantown, indiana became pershing, named after the general. Families named schmidt became smith. The frankfurter became the hotdog. There was ferocity in the air at the very highest level. For example, this is the former secretary of state, former secretary of war, senator from new york. In 1917, he was a special emissary of president wilson. He told an audience in new york in the summer of 1917 that pro german traitors were threatening the war effort. And here is what he said, in his own words. There are men walking about the city tonight who ought to be taken out at sunrise tomorrow and shot for treason. There are some newspapers published in this city every day, the editors of which deserve conviction and execution for treason. With his hatred of the media, he would be right at home in the trump administration. People like him were as fierce as they were about the war because there was considerable resistance to it. This is another thing that gets left out of our history books. There was a group, for instance, called the womens pieced party that agitated against the war, both before and after the United States joined. Heres an advertisement for an antiwar meeting that was to take place on the very eve of the war itself, the day before wilson went to congress to ask for the declaration. Two days later, this Organizations Office just two blocks away from the white house was vandalized and smeared with yellow paint. There were popular antiwar songs like this one, and there were newspapers, publications that took a strong antiwar stance, like this socialist newspaper in new york city. A National Magazine that was a strong voice against the war, which was by far the liveliest magazine in america at the time, a magazine that published john reed, walter lippmann, sherwood anderson, many others, many of the best artists and cartoonists of the day. In many ways, it was a precursor of todays new yorker. It published antiwar cartoons like this one, christ being shot by a firing squad. And if you look carefully at the different hats and helmets, you will see all of the warring countries are represented in the firing squad. There were prominent political figures who spoke out against the war, like socialist party leader eugene debs, the fivetime socialist candidate for president. And the very charismatic anarchist leader emma goldman, who started organizing against the draft. Several u. S. Senators were strongly against the war, of which the boldest voice was that of robert le pollock of wisconsin. He asked, for instance, on the floor of the senate, if this is a war to make the world safe for democracy, as wilson probably proclaimed, why shouldnt there be selfdetermination for ireland, for egypt, for india . He told his fellow senators that you could still be a patriot and oppose a particular war, and in the 19th century, he gave examples of how both Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln had done so. He began receiving missives in the mail, he was hanged in effigy on the campus of university of wisconsin, and his fellow senators opened an investigation, should he be expelled from the senate . Debs and goldman had worse fates. We will come back to that. The government moved quickly to suppress antiwar demonstrations. And anyone who refused military service was sent to prison or locked up in grim camps like this one in fort douglas, utah. Here is one such resistor, an antiwar activist and social worker named robert baldwin, who was sent to prison. We will come back to him. Now, one of the things that really characterized this period was the rise of vigilante groups. Organizations sprang up around the country. The largest was something called the American Protective League. And this is the badge that its members got to wear. And i think you can read it on the screen. Operative American Protective League, auxiliary to the u. S. Department of justice. Because the organization did indeed have Justice Department support. By the end of 1917, the American Protective League had more than 200,000 members. It was made up of men, only men, no women, who were too old to fight but who wanted to feel somehow that they were defending their country at home. What did they do . Among other things, they carried out what they called slacker raids, to find people who had not registered for the draft, and make citizens arrests on them. Also, sometimes a slacker was somebody who had failed to buy a war bond. Here, for example, are some of the young men who were arrested in a slacker raid in new york city in 1918, in which 60,000 people were rounded up because they had no draft cards. But these slacker raids by the American Protective League were a comparatively mild side of the vigilanteism that really took off in these years. Other expressions were much worse. Cartoons like this glorified vigilante violence, and sometimes people acted on that urge. Heres a newspaper headline about one such episode involving wobblies members of the most militant labor group, wobblies as they were called. 17 wobblies in tulsa, oklahoma were beaten, tarred, and feathered. What this article does not say is one of the leaders of the mast vigilantes who carried out this action was the local police chief, who had tipped off the newspaper in advance to have a reporter on the scene when this took place. Heres a photograph of another victim of tarring and feathering, a man who was a farmer from luverne, minnesota, who was attacked by a group of masked men in 1918 because he refused to buy war bonds. The men who attacked him were put on trial and found innocent. Someone else, a wobbly organizer, had a worse fate. He was seized from his bed in butte, montana in the middle of the night and hanged from a railroad bridge outside of town. Here is his body. Frank little, 38 years old. His crime was coming to organize workers for the wobblies in a mining town, butte, montana, where an underground fire several weeks earlier had taken the lives of more than 160 miners. And that brings us to an important point, which is that the real target of oppression during the war years in the u. S. Was not really draft dodgers or alleged progermans, it was the left, and it was organized labor. This was an era of enormous labor strife. Starting in about 1909, for the next 10 or so years, there were huge strikes every year in the United States with hundreds of thousands of workers walking off the job each year. And they were met with force. Sometimes, it was National Guard or state militia that put down strikes. These are state militiamen in massachusetts. Facing some striking clothing mill workers. Or they were put down police. That is a striking garment worker in chicago being arrested. And the war gave the federal government and big business the perfect excuse to crack down on organized labor in every way. Their impulse to do so was only exacerbated by the rise of the bolsheviks in russia. The american establishment was terrified at the prospect of the Russian Revolution spreading to the United States. And i think this is what led, starting in mid1917 for the next three years or so, to the worst time of political repression in the United States since the end of slavery. And it is an era that has largely been forgotten about. And i want to emphasize that this political repression happened not just during the First World War, it continued for more than two years after the war ended, and it happened on several fronts. There were a series of laws passed, the most important of which was the espionage act of 1917. Actually, an amended version of that law is still with us, and people Like NationalSecurity Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden has been arrested under it. But the law of 1917, the espionage act that year, among other things, gave the government the power to censor the press. Remember the magazine the masses that i talked about . This issue, august, 1917, was its last. That issue was printed, but it was banned from the u. S. Mail. Why . Because sensors objected to several pieces of text and several cartoons in this issue. Heres one of the cartoons they objected to and thought subversive. The liberty bell crumbling. And so, the best magazine in the country was forced to cease publishing. Over the next four years, the spring of 1917 through the spring of 1921, more than 400 issues of american newspapers or magazines were banned from the mail from 75 different publications. And in many cases, that meant the publication shutting down entirely. Who was americas chief press censor . Its the guy in this picture. Albert s. Burleson. He was the postmaster general, and the law gave him the power to censor what went through the mail. He was a former congressman from texas, actually the first texan to serve in a cabinet. Very conservative, an arch segregationist. When he was born, his family owned 20 slaves. And he loved being the chief censor. Right after the armistice in november 1918, president wilson declared an end to censorship. The war was over, so why do we need censorship anymore . Burleson paid no attention. He kept on banning publications he didnt like. Wilson didnt seem to mind, paid very little attention, and on occasion, explicitly backed him. Another facet of the repression was the way the government moved to jail critics of the war. I earlier showed you a picture of eugene debs, the socialist leader, and the leader before that of the rail workers union. Here he is as a federal prisoner, sentenced for speaking out against the war. Like so many were critics, he was still in jail two years after the war ended. In november 1920, while debs was convict number 9653 in the atlanta federal penitentiary, he was the socialist Party Candidate for president and received more than 900,000 votes. Far from the only person sent to jail for speaking out against the war, someone else imprisoned was Kate Richards ohare, a fiery socialist Party Activist and martyr. In prison, she became good friends with emma goldman, the war opponent who we talked about earlier, also jailed for opposing the war. Goldman spent two years in prison, but after that, the government also deployed another weapon against her. It deported her from the United States, where she had lived for more than 30 years. She and 248 other radicals the government was eager to get rid of were shipped off to russia just before christmas of 1919 on this decrepit troop ship, the ss beaufort. In a way that feels eerily familiar today, in 1919, the United States was swept by a frenzy about deporting people. No less than three people eyeing the democratic and republican president ial nominations in 1920 were campaigning on promises of mass deportations. When this deportation frenzy began in 1919, it was a very the war was over, but the cost of living had soared, we were in the midst of the biggest strike wave in American History, one in five American Workers went on strike during the year 1919. These are Chicago Police called out because of the steelworkers strike in chicago. The year 1919 was also the year of some of the worst racial violence in American History. Why . In part, because of returning war veterans. 400,000 blacks and several million whites were competing for jobs, and