Nineteen-Sixteen: Red Blood, Black Earth

Nineteen-Sixteen: Red Blood, Black Earth
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Excerpt from Henry A. Wallace,Salt of the Earth(Nashville, TN: Pathfinder Press, 1963)

The war, I think, changed everything. I am candidly certain that had not over one million young American boys bled the soil of France red, then life as we know it today would be radically different. I’m sure it is the peculiar navel-gazing of old men and historians to ask what would have happened if some important event were to have been undone, but I cannot help to succumb to the temptation. One thing I do know for sure is that my own part in the war changed my life forever. The deaths of my comrades in the trenches of France and the militarization of society at home are an irrevocable part of me, and without them, I do believe I would have remained a simple farmer, happy with the smell of good tilled earth. I’m sure I would have been happier for it.

…During the 1916 Red Scare, President Taft and all of the kings of mine, rail and factory declared that the Army deployed in France was becoming a “boot camp for communist, socialist and anarchist subversion”. I do not know much of other regiments, but that was certainly true of mine. My fellow enlisted men were my teachers in the great school of Marxism, and much of what I am today I learned there. When the “dangerous subversives” and “bomb-throwers” are the only men decrying the insanity of attacking machine guns with the chests of men, of sending men to dark and bloodied battlefields for the purpose of conquest and plunder, of killing our brothers so that the Imperialist scramble can continue unhindered; then we all come to find that perhaps we who went along with the bloodshed were the insane ones, not those who denounced it.

Excerpt from Barry Goldwater,The Last Days of the Republic(Havana: Freedom Press, 1961)

It became very clear by 1916 that the Republic that our Founding Fathers had labored so hard to build, placing all the best hopes for humanity in, was entering its twilight years. A great proletarian mass from below, driven by immigrant anarchists, foreign agitators and home-grown demagogues, had come to reject the Enlightenment liberal values of the nation. Set against them, the great captains of industry had too forgotten what had made America great. Caught in between the great tides of Communism and Corporatism, the Constitution could not long endure.

Nevertheless, it became quite clear that the proletarian agitators were the aggressive party. The nation, caught in a war against Prussian militarism, found itself facing a great treasonous uprising among the unwashed masses. Rather than wage a war for liberty, they waged a class war against the Republic and the Constitution. It is no hypocrisy for those who defend liberty to use all means at their disposal to destroy the forces that threaten liberty. The Communists who accuse the War Government of being “proto-fascists” had far less noble aims than the government they betrayed.

Starting with the so-called “Bloody Valentine Raids”, the government aimed to suppress such seditious conduct by the Socialist Labor Party. Of the thousands of party activists and leaders arrested under the Espionage and Conspiracy Acts, not a single one of them was guilty of anything less than seditious libel, and a fair number of them were guilty of outright treason. While the leaders of Congressional opposition could not be arrested under federal law, thanks to the immunity granted to them by the very Constitution they sought to destroy, the National Executive of the Party and of the trade union congress were arrested.

While a number remained fugitives of justice until the granting of amnesty post-war, the party itself was decisively crippled during the state of emergency. But rather than destroy it outright, the leaders of the nation shirked at the duty they had to defend the constitution, and allowed the party itself to remain. By failing to destroy the organizational base, and arresting moderate “yellow socialists” alongside hardened reds, the noble cause of defending the Constitution would only serve to unite and further radicalize the forces that opposed the Republic.

Excerpt from Alan Smithy,The Twilight of the Law: The Legal Degeneration of the Old Republic(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975)

In 1916, Charles Schenck was General Secretary of the Socialist Labor Party of America. As part of his political duties, Schenck was responsible for printing, distributing and mailing party literature – in this case, leaflets advocating that American proletarians refuse to submit to conscription to fight in the First World War. Because of its principled opposition to the First World War, the party had found unprecedented growth, tapping into a powerful popular discontent with what was viewed as an imperialist war.

For exercising what he believed to be his constitutional right, protected by the First Amendment of the 1787 Constitution, Schenck was indicted and convicted under the Espionage Act of 1915.[1] Upon appeal, the case made itself all the way to the Supreme Court. It is here that the eminent Justices of the Supreme Court stepped into the breach, not to protect the rights of a citizen of the United States, but to affirm evermore that war is the health of the state. The case of Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S 47 (1917), represents a tortuous legal opinion that failed to articulate a credible standard in determining the free speech protections enjoyed by residents of the United States.

The “Clear and Present Danger” test put forth by Schenck was never applied in contemporary or subsequent jurisprudence.[2] The “Bad Tendency” test put forth by the subsequent case Eugene Debs v. United States, 249 US 211 (1917) gave even less protection to free speech. The overturn of precedent in mere months undermined the credibility of the Court’s implied position as an impartial arbiter of the law. As the legal logic of the Schenck case will show, maintaining the conviction and punishment of dissenters was a higher priority than the consistent application of the Court’s own legal standards.

In Schenck , the esteemed so-called liberal Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes freely admitted that “in ordinary times” Schenck would have been perfectly within his rights in saying all that was said in the pamphlets he distributed, 249 U.S. 47, 52 (1917). It is here that Holmes utters the famous analogy, that “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”

Thus begins the false dilemma, expertly crafted to nullify the right of political speech whenever the state has declared an emergency, wartime or otherwise. However, Holmes paints us a picture, not of a man expressing his dissatisfaction at a nation being ram-rodded into a war it had no stake in, but rather of a bomb-throwing anarchist; a menace to society whose words are weapons against the state. True, Holmes lays out a fairly succinct and clear standard. As he writes; “The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.”

What “substantive evil” might there be in this case that we should so devoutly wish that Congress use all the majesty and might of the state to prevent? Holmes does not elaborate beyond the obstruction of recruitment into the armed forces. Truly a great evil that Schenck might dissuade people from being sent off to by truckloads to die in the mud of northern France in a war that was being waged for economic interests.

It is quite telling that Holmes offers no concrete example in the Opinion of the Court as to what way the exercise of Schenck’s political speech – opposing a war that was absolutely lethal to working class soldiers – might threaten the state. The United States was not under the threat of invasion. To the extent that the United States was directly threatened came only from the sinking of American merchantmen at sea – merchantmen who were shipping war material to Great Britain flying the flag of Mexico, a supposedly neutral country, in direct violation of the laws of war. It is simply taken, ipso facto , that to dissent in time of war constitutes a seditious crime against the state. This was a total violation of the Court’s assumed role as a guardian and fair arbiter of the law.

It was during times of war that the fundamental liberties protected by the Bill of Rights were needed the most. The text of the First Amendment stated very plainly that “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” It made absolutely no mention that these rights only apply in peacetime. It did not say that speech is free unless it is speech that is dangerous to the state.

In the total absence of precedent, the Court set out – in the midst of the First World War – not to impartially interpret the law, not to protect the rights of the citizenry; but rather to find whatever rationalization possible to ensure that the enemies of the state were punished. The Court applied two separate standards in the three largest cases it saw of this type, all within a single year. The clear chilling effect upon free speech is plain to see. In the case of Debs v. United States , the plaintiff, Eugene Debs, then four time Socialist Labor Party candidate for president, had very carefully tailored his speech to avoid prosecution under the Espionage Act. It was to no avail. The so-called liberal Holmes did his patriotic duty, and found Debs guilty of intending to obstruct recruitment on the flimsiest of grounds, 249 U.S. 211, 212-4 (1917).

There can be no doubt that the Court had no lofty minded goals in its conduct of the free speech trials. The standard of “clear and present danger” put forth in Schenck was articulated in bad faith, inconsistently applied, and then unceremoniously abandoned the moment it was no longer useful in upholding the convictions of enemies of the state. It was not as though the facts of the case were not properly understood by the Court. The facts themselves were irrelevant in the face of the necessity of protecting the state’s use of terror against dissidents. Schenck and the related cases were not just bad law; they represent a total abdication by the Court, and thus of the rule of law itself, to the political class and the state. The Court fulfilled its most basic, never admitted role: perpetuating the state and the class that controls it. Holmes et al. did their patriotic duty to the Fatherland in clear violation of their duty to the rule of law. Perhaps what is most illustrative of these cases and the abject failure of the rule of law is that they have proven it does not matter if the Emperor has no clothes. In the very speech that resulted in his conviction, Debs noted that “Every single one of these aristocratic conspirators and would-be murderers declares himself to be an arch-patriot.” It was not just the political branches of government that were guilty of betraying the public to serve narrow class interests. The Supreme Court made itself a willing accomplice as well.

The War on the Front

It was a badly hidden secret that all the various armies on the Western Front were in bad shape by 1916. The front-line divisions of all of the belligerents had been ground into dust months ago; the French Army held on with poorly trained reservists and new call-ups. The British Army’s entire professional core was gone; either dead or incapacitated or watered down to provide NCOs for the waves of the recently conscripted. The US Army fared no better. The professional core had been pulverized, and while the new waves of conscripts were better equipped with machine guns and artillery than they had been in 1915, morale had plummeted.
In May 1916, the French Army began its costly attempt to break out from the fortress town of Verdun. The German Heer, predictably, gave ground stubbornly and at great cost to the French. The German commanders, having lost the initiative in the West, were determined to wage a battle of attrition against the Entente.
The main action of the year, however, would be the bloodiest single battle of the war: The Somme. On June 1, the American and French armies began a joint offensive, supported by the largest artillery bombardment yet seen. It would not be enough. While the American and French units were better equipped with artillery and ammunition, they lacked a sufficient number of heavy guns to destroy the well-prepared German bunkers. Further, the gunners lacked sufficient accuracy to drop shells to maximum effect on the front.

In spite of an average of fifty tonnes of explosives and shrapnel being dropped on each kilometer of front, many of the frontline soldiers survived the barrage in their deep dug-outs, and savaged the infantry in no-man’s-land as soon as the barrage lifted. In spite of the outright failures of the initial attacks, the assaults continued until November, with the Heer giving ground slowly and at great cost.

In late July, the British Army under General Haig joined the battle on the northern flank, hoping to provide the extra push necessary to collapse the German defenses. Unfortunately for the Entente, the British proved no more effective than their American or French allies, and were similarly savaged. While the British Army fielded its wonder weapon, the tank, in September, this proved to be entirely underwhelming, and had very little effect on the outcome of the battle. Many of the tanks broke down before they reached the starting line, and those that did begin the assault could not sustain the offensive. But, in spite of this, the tank proved to be an effective terror weapon, and the proof of concept had been made.

Both the American and French armies soon formed their own tank corps. However, the bodies continued to pile up at the Somme. By the time the offensives ceased in early November, there were over 900,000 casualties for the Entente, and perhaps 600,000 for the Germans. Little more than 13 km at the deepest penetration, the Somme was a catastrophic debacle. However, the German army could little afford the causalities either. The Somme truly represented the attritional phase the war had entered.

The State of Exception on the Home Front

By September, it was abundantly clear to the War Cabinet that the political costs of the war had become astronomical. The upcoming general election would likely result in a disastrous political defeat for the National Unity Government. With the continuing bloody nose at the Somme, the debacle at Jutland, and the seething unrest at home, the government was faced with politically catastrophic consequences.

Thus Wilson did what had been previously unthinkable: dozens of opposition Congressional candidates were arrested and held without trial by federal and state police. Patriotic citizen groups brutalized Socialist Labor Party gatherings, and attempted to suppress the vote in November. And the truly unheard of happened: Democrats and Republicans did not stand for election against each other.

Such brutal, unconstitutional exercises of power were justified, as always, to defend the Constitution and the state against a clear and present danger.
However, as always, there was skullduggery afoot, even within the National Unity government. President Taft declined Wilson’s proposal that he run for a third term as president. In a seeming gesture of goodwill, Taft instead offered for the Republican Party to not run a candidate in the 1916 election, and instead back prominent Democrat Thomas R. Marshall on a unity ticket, with a Republican as his running mate.

While the resulting deals would give the Democratic Party its first taste of power in ages, it would also place the political cost of the war firmly at the feet of the Democratic Party. The Republican Party would quickly capitalize on this after the conclusion of the war, victorious or otherwise, and place the entire blame for the war on the Democrats.

Economically, the American worker was somewhat secure. Unemployment had dropped to 2.5 percent by mid-year 1916, completely unheard of levels. Immigrants from China, Japan, and Latin America were being hired for farm or war industry at the ports of entry to keep up with the demand for labor. With much of France’s native industry under German occupation, American industry boomed thanks to the demand generated by French and British orders, themselves buoyed by favorable loans given by American financial institutions and secured by the United States government. And through the central control of war production in the Department of Industrial Coordination, the American industry rapidly transformed itself with the application of scientific management and patent sharing.

Wages ticked up modestly, held down by a mixture of government intervention and public diplomacy. Rationing of many basic consumer goods and food ensured workers and farmers would invest their gains in government bonds to support the war effort. The public face of the system of wage and price controls, rationing, conscription and Taylorism was one of patriotic sacrifice for the freedom of the people of the United States. In practice, the system was immensely corrupt, and the Wilson government made few attempts at seriously curbing it.

The scions of rich and politically connected families received draft deferments, or posts at the much expanded US Military Academy in West Point, all but guaranteeing they would miss the present slaughter. Luxuries of the rich were excluded from rationing, and few local sumptuary ordinances regulating restaurants, which were unrationed, were seriously enforced. A perception of corruption and war profiteering was widespread. An unreasonably high number of defective rifles, machine guns, and munitions made it to the front. Food and clothing for the troops was another target of war profiteering, and the US government’s overtaxed resources faced difficulty combating it. In one of its last acts before the 1916 General election, Wilson’s government moved to nationalize munition production, to meet demands for quality and quantity that the previous system of subcontracting had failed to do.

The much cowed labor movement made political hay of these scandals, focusing efforts away from direct resistance towards criticism of corruption, and profiteering. It proved to be an effective way to condemn rent-seekers and capitalist bloodsuckers while avoiding the worst of the wartime environment.

General Election, 1916
Presidential Results

Wikibox courtesy of@Asami

Congressional Results

House of Representatives |
Seats |
Change
---|---|---

Republican Party |
190 |
-45

Democratic Party |
182 |
+22

Socialist Labor Party |
63 |
+23

U.S. Senate | |

Republican Party |
47 |
-2

Democratic Party |
41 |
-3

Socialist Labor |
8 |
+8

1. U.S.C. 18, Pt 1, Ch 37. Specifically, IOTL Schenck was convicted for “causing and attempting to cause insubordination, &c., in the military and naval forces…and to obstruct the recruiting and enlistment service of the United States…” while in a time of war. See Schenck v. United States , 249 US 47, 48-9 (1919).
2. IOTL, See Debs v. United States , 249 U.S. 211 (1919) and Abrams v. United States , 250 U.S. 616 (1919). Notably, these cases also involved Socialist Party politicians being convicted for speaking out against the war.