The Only Badge Needed Is Your Patriotic Fervor
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The Only Badge Needed Is Your Patriotic Fervor: Vigilance, Coercion, and the Law in World War I America Author(s): Christopher Capozzola Source: The Journal of American History, Vol. 88, No. 4 (Mar., 2002), pp. 1354-1382 Published by: Organization of American Historians Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2700601 . Accessed: 26/01/2011 12:41 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=oah. 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Organization of American Historians is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of American History. http://www.jstor.org The Only Badge Needed Is Your PatrioticFervor: Vigilance, Coercion, and the Law in WorldWar I America ChristopherCapozzola On July26, 1918, PresidentWoodrow Wilson condemned mob rule.Almost four monthshad passedsince Robert Prager, a GermanAmerican coal miner,had been lynched.Wilson was angeredthat the enemyGerman press had used thekilling of Pragerin itswartime propaganda, and he feltincreasing pressure from civil libertari- ans at home.In a widelyreprinted proclamation, Wilson insisted on therule of law. He claimedthat "no manwho lovesAmerica, no manwho reallycares for her fame and honorand character,. can justifymob actionwhile the courts of justiceare openand thegovernments of theStates and theNation are ready and ableto do their duty."The mob spirit,Wilson averred, was irreconcilablewith American democracy. I sayplainly that every American who takespart in theaction of a mob or givesit anysort of countenance is no trueson ofthis great Democracy, but its betrayer, and does moreto discredither by thatsingle disloyalty to herstandards of law and of rightthan the words of herstatesmen or the sacrificesof herheroic boys in the trenchescan do to makesuffering peoples believe her to be theirsavior.1 In theearly twentieth century, there was farless consensus about the nation's "stan- dardsof law and of right"than Wilson suggested. During and afterWorld War I, Americans debated the place of extralegalviolence in American political life. Through words and actions, they negotiatedthe boundaries of legitimatepolitical ChristopherCapozzola is a visitinginstructor in theDepartment of American Literature and Civilizationat Mid- dleburyCollege. This essayreceived the Louis PelzerMemorial Award for 2001. This essaywas firstpresented at the Workshopin Twentieth-CenturyAmerican Politics and Historyat Columbia University.For comments,I would like to thankAlan Brinkley,Elizabeth Blackmar, and Ira Katznel- son;Joanne Meyerowitz, Susan Armeny, Kevin Marsh, the Pelzer Prize committee, and thestaff of, and an anony- mous readerfor, the Journal ofAmerican History; and mygraduate student colleagues in theColumbia University Departmentof History,without whose support this essay would not have been written.Funding has been pro- vided by the Columbia UniversityInstitute for Social and Economic Researchand Policy,the Social Science ResearchCouncil Programon Philanthropyand the NonprofitSector, and the Sophia SmithCollection and SmithCollege Archives. Readersmay contact Capozzola at <[email protected]>. l WoodrowWilson, "A Statementto theAmerican People," July 26, 1918, in ThePapers of WoodrowWilson, ed. ArthurS. Link et al. (69 vols.,Princeton, 1966-1994), XLIX, 97, 98. On thekilling of RobertPraget, see Donald R. Hickey,"The PragerAffair: A Studyin WartimeHysteria," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 62 (Summer1969), 117-34; FrederickC. Luebke,Bonds of Loyalty: German-Americans and WorldWar I (DeKalb, 1974), 3-26; and Carl Weinberg,"The Tug of War: Labor,Loyalty, and Rebellionin the SouthwesternIllinois Coalfields,1914-1920" (Ph.D. diss.,Yale University,1995), 452-521. 1354 The Journalof American History March2002 Vigilance,Coercion, and theLaw in WorldWar I America 1355 coercion.These ongoingdebates shed light on therelationship between voluntarism and stateauthority in twentieth-centuryAmerican political culture. WoodrowWilson's proclamations notwithstanding, violence has been a persistent featureof American political life, especially in thetumult of World War I. Politicalvio- lenceclaims a centralplace in manynarratives of the American past. To readthem is to learnthat violence is as Americanas applepie, a pointthat would not have been lost on thecrowd that strung Robert Prager up on thebranch of a lonehuckleberry tree on the outskirtsof Collinsville,Illinois, and thendropped his bodythree times, in the wordsof one participant,"one for the red, one forthe white, and one forthe blue."2 Butif violence is integralto Americanhistory, why were Wilson's words so compel- lingto manyreaders in 1918? Why did the "lawlesspassion" that Wilson decried strikeGeorge Creel, the nation's leading war propagandist, as so un-Americanthat he couldexplain it onlyas thework of German spies? Why-or, moreimportant, how- did incidentsof violence in 1918 leadso readilyto a ritualof denunciation? The years surroundingWorld War I marka highpoint of one kindof political violence in Amer- ican historyas the actionsof repressivestate institutions, private organizations, and spontaneouscrowds left dozens of Americans dead and led to temporarydetainment ofthousands on war-relatedcharges. Yet those years also witnessed the invigoration of politicalarguments that questioned all extralegalauthority and laid thegroundwork forthe legal and politicaldismantling of vigilantism in thetwentieth century.3 One keyto understandingthis debate turns on thedistinction between vigilance andvigilantism made during this period. On theWorld War I Americanhome front, citizensproudly called themselves vigilant and believedthat they were doing work needed and explicitlyrequested-by the national government. In thatassumption, theywere not wrong.Leading public figures, drawing on long-standingtraditions equatingcitizenship with obligation, did call on Americansto standvigilant during thewar. Appealing to habitsof voluntaryassociation, they supported the organiza- tion of vigilancemovements nationwide: committees of safety,women's vigilance leagues,home guards. State actors depended on thevoluntary work of suchgroups forthe success of the nation's war mobilization effort. Yetsome of thosefigures also spokeout againstvigilantism, few more eloquently thanWilson in hisJuly 1918 statement.When they did so, theydid nothave the vig- 2 Weinberg,"Tug of War,"484. See also RichardHofstadter and MichaelWallace, eds., American Violence: A DocumentaryHistory (New York,1970). On thehistory of citizenship,see GaryGerstle, "Liberty, Coercion, and theMaking of Americans,"JournalofAmerican History, 84 (Sept. 1997), 524-58; and RogersM. Smith,Civic Ide- als: ConflictingVisions of Citizenshipin U.S. History(New Haven, 1997). On WorldWar I-era repression,see StephenM. Kohn, AmericanPolitical Prisoners: Prosecutions under the Espionage and SeditionActs (Westport, 1994); H. C. Petersonand GilbertC. Fite,Opponents of War, 1917-1918 (Seattle,1968); and WilliamPreston Jr., Aliensand Dissenters:Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903-1933 (Urbana,1994). For a heatedexchange on the place ofviolence in AfricanAmerican history, see "WhatWe See and Can'tSee in thePast: A Round Table,"Jour- nal ofAmericanHistory, 83 (March 1997), 1217-72. 3Responses fromWilson's readers include Robert Russa Moton to WoodrowWilson, July 27, 1918, in Papers of WoodrowWilson, ed. Link et al., XLIX, 113-14; and GeorgeFoster Peabody to Wilson,July 29, 1918, ibid., 125. GeorgeCreel, "Unite and Win," Independent,April 6, 1918, pp. 5-6. For historians'debate on thesignifi- cance of Wilson'sstatement in relationto the issue of lynchingsof AfricanAmericans, see HenryBlumenthal, "WoodrowWilson and theRace Question,"Journal ofNegro History, 48 (Jan.1963), 4, 10-12; StephenR. Fox, The Guardianof Boston:William Monroe Trotter (New York,1971), 221; and RobertL. Allen withPamela P. Allen,Reluctant Reformers: Racism and SocialReform Movements in theUnited States (Washington, 1974), 98. 1356 The Journalof American History March2002 ilancesocieties in mind.What Wilson and thosewho sharedhis outlookmeant was somethingmore specific and rarer:the mob, conceived as a violent,spontaneous, and extralegalpublic group. As nationalleaders denounced the mob in evermore fre- quentcalls for "law and order,"they attempted to separatevigilance and vigilantism. They castthe former as a valuablework of serviceand voluntarismthat embodied Americandemocracy and delegitimatedthe latter as incompatiblewith what Wilson had calledthe nation's "standards of law and ofright." The distinctiontook