When the Great War Reached Wisconsin, Free Speech Was the First Casualty

By Richard L. Pifer
via the What It Means to be American web site

Woodrow Wilson did not want to go to war. On two different occasions during the weeks leading to the 1917 declaration of war that brought the United States into World War I, the president expressed reservations regarding the course he was contemplating.

Examples of anti-anti-war propaganda in 1918 Wisconsin: (left) Wisconsin senator Robert LaFollette is pictured receiving medals from the Kaiser; (right) labor agitators are accused of being in the pay of Germany.Because war is autocratic, he feared that free speech and other rights would be endangered. The President told Frank Cobb of the New York World: “Once lead this people into war, and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter the very fiber of our national life, infecting congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street. . . . If there is any alternative, for God’s sake let’s take it!”

Wilson’s predictions became self-fulfilling prophecies. Once the United States joined the fight against the Kaiser, Congress and Wilson’s own administration implemented legislation and surveillance programs designed to keep America safe by ferreting out subversive activity and crushing dissent—especially in states like Wisconsin, which I have studied for many years. These steps curtailed meaningful debate about how best to fight the war at home and abroad. Tolerance did indeed go out the window.

Public discourse very quickly defined a new, clear dichotomy between the righteous people of the United States and the bestial German Hun, between us and “them.” As Congress assembled for Wilson’s war message, Texas Representative Joe Eagle told the Wisconsin State Journal: “The Kaiser is a cave man with murder in his heart . . . . He is bent on the unwavering course of brute force and pillage.” The language of peace, neutrality, and forbearance had almost immediately given way to the language of war: bellicose, dehumanizing, and designed to create a noble enterprise worthy of the sacrifice of thousands of lives. Through posters, pamphlets, and movies, the nation’s propaganda office, the Committee on Public Information, spread the message of the righteous war against the evil Hun.

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