To the lyrical left of Greenwich Village, Wilson’s 1916 campaign slogan, “He kept us out of war,” opened the way for the emergence of a more vibrant American culture. With talk of a “New Renaissance” in the background, Villager Floyd Dell spoke of an “exalted present pregnant with possibilities.” For Dell and his friends Randolph Bourne and Max Eastman, the war in Europe seemed far away. For the moment, they were imbued with an impregnable optimism. “It was,” said Dell, “our future.”
The administration’s critique of European power politics and its talk of the need for international law gave pacifist Jane Addams “unlimited faith in the president.” When Meyer London, the anti-war Socialist congressman from New York’s Lower East Side, and Socialist Party leader Morris Hillquit visited the White House to talk about the prospects for peace in Europe, they came away concluding, “[Wilson’s] sympathies are entirely with us.” Similarly, as Thomas Knock recounts in his book To End All Wars, after visiting the White House, the leaders of the American Union Against Militarism left feeling that “the President had taken us into his bosom.” Wilson, they noted, facing increased pressure to enter the war, “always referred to the Union Against Militarism as though he were a member of it” and talked about how “we” had to lay out a case for creating “a family of nations.”
The mutual courtship between Wilson and the leftists flourished during the hard-fought 1916 presidential election. In his campaign for reelection, Wilson faced a Republican Party that had recovered from its 1912 split between Teddy Roosevelt’s breakaway Bull Moose Progressives and the party’s anti-reform regulars; the revitalized GOP had coalesced around Supreme Court Justice Charles Evan Hughes. In the midst of the war in Europe, Wilson scraped out a victory by bringing into his “peace camp” sizable numbers of those who had supported TR’s intensely moralistic Bull Moosers (who admired Germany’s proto-welfare state), as well as Eugene Debs’s Socialists.
When Wilson gave his “peace without victory” speech in January 1917, proposing a democratic and anti-imperialist path out of the brambles of bloodshed, the revolutionary leftist Eastman was “enraptured.” In the next fifteen months, the faith of Eastman and the Progressives seemed well justified. But Germany’s declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare and the public revelation of the Kaiser’s plans for an alliance with Mexico to conquer the Southwest pushed the country toward war. Most Progressives backed America’s entry. The Progressive animus toward corrupt and overmighty party bosses and autocratic monarchists was, notes historian Morton Keller, “readily transferred to an overbearing Kaiser and his war machine as a continuation of the fight against tyranny at home.” Reforms at home and abroad were melded, as when The New Republic’s Walter Lippmann warned, “We shall call that man un-American and no patriot who prates of liberty in Europe and resists it as home.
Not even America’s reluctant entry into WWI in April of 1917 sundered Wilson’s strong ties with the largely anti-war left. In the very speech in which he had asked for a congressional declaration of war, Wilson welcomed the February Revolution of 1917 in Russia, which had overthrown the czar and put the Socialist Alexander Kerensky in power. The American president effusively, if inaccurately, described the Russian Revolution as the fulfillment of the Russian people’s long struggle for democracy. The revolution, explained Secretary of State Robert Lansing, “had removed the one objection to affirming that the European War was a war between Democracy and [Prussian] Absolutism.”
With American entry, Wilson, as always of two minds, made a point of keeping U.S. forces strictly under American command, which rankled the British and the French, whom he regarded as imperialists. He insisted on referring to the U.S. not as an ally of England and France but rather as an “Associated Power.” Wilson, like the isolationists, didn’t want to get tangled in Europe’s affairs, noted Walter Weyl of The New Republic; rather, he wanted to rise above them and impose a new vision from on high.
Eight months later, shortly after Lenin overthrew Kerensky, Wilson expressed his ambivalence toward Bolshevism, exclaiming, “My heart is with them, but my mind has a contempt for them.” Conceptually, Wilson saw Bolshevism as a legitimate response to economic inequality, notes historian Georg Schild. In practice, as an alternative to capitalism, he found it both unworkable and unacceptably autocratic.
“The Fourteen Points, [Wilson’s] message of good luck to the ‘republic of labor unions’ in Russia and his warning to the Allied powers that their treatment of Bolshevik Russia would be the ‘acid test’ of their ‘good will . . . intelligence, and unselfish sympathy’: These moves were immensely impressive to us,” explained Max Eastman, speaking for many leftists and Progressives. This was the extraordinary moment when Russia’s War Commissar Leon Trotsky, referring to Wilson, coined the now famous concept of the “fellow traveler.” The metaphor was based on Trotsky’s belief that the American president and the Bolsheviks shared a critique of European imperialism; both the newly Soviet Russia and a reformed, less capitalist U.S., in Trotsky’s view, were travelling on parallel tracks into a brighter future.
While Wilson increasingly spoke of an international comity between nations, comity between not-so-assimilated ethnic groups in the U.S. was breaking down. The German aggressions in eastern Europe produced pitched battles between Germans and Slavs in the streets of Chicago. At the same time, nearly a half million Germans in America returned to fight for the fatherland. Charles John Hexamer, president of the National German-American Alliance, financed in part by the German government, urged Germans in the U.S. to maintain their separate identity so they wouldn’t “descend to the level of an inferior culture.”
The most important example of German sabotage was the spectacular explosion on Black Tom Island in the summer of 1916, which shook a sizable swath of New York City and New Jersey; the force was the equivalent of an earthquake measuring 5.5 on the Richter scale. It shattered windows in Times Square, and people as far away as Philadelphia felt the blast. The man-made peninsula, situated in the mouth of New York Harbor, was a key storage and shipping point for munitions sales to the British and French. The peninsula sank into the sea as seven were killed and the Statue of Liberty was damaged. After the attack, President Wilson denounced Germany’s supporters in America as “creatures” of “disloyalty and anarchy [who] must be crushed.”
The American entrance into the war triggered hysteria, one result of which was the Sedition Act of 1918. The legislation was so broad in its assessment of what constituted a danger that it allowed violators to be sent to prison for ten years for saying that they preferred the Kaiser to President Wilson. Others were jailed for mocking salesmen who sold Liberty Bonds to support the war. Most famously, Socialist leader Eugene Debs was jailed for criticizing conscription. The disparity between Wilson’s call for extending liberty abroad and his suppression of liberty at home became a running wound for disenchanted Progressives.
Wilson placed George Creel, a journalist and Socialist who had strongly supported child-labor laws and women’s suffrage, in charge of the Committee for Pubic Information, an agency intended to sustain morale during wartime. But the committee, which Creel described as “the world’s greatest adventure in advertising,” wildly overshot its mark. Creel wanted “no mere surface unity, but a passionate belief in the justice of America’s cause that should weld the people of the United States into one white-hot mass instinct with fraternity, devotion, courage, and deathless determination.”
Everything German, from Beethoven to sauerkraut to teaching the German language, was barred. When black leaders protested the federal failure to respond to the wave of lynching that accompanied the war, they were accused of aiding the German enemy by criticizing the U.S. The Justice Department and the attorney general went so far as to encourage loyal vigilantism. The American Protective League (APL), a quarter-of-a-million-strong nativist organization, obtained semi-official status in order to spy on those suspected of disloyalty. The League also went out of its way to protect the national interest by breaking up strikes while branding its critics Reds.
Wilson, responding to the excesses of the American Protective League, exclaimed, “I’d rather the blamed place should be blown up than persecute