Unraveling Freedom by Ann Bausum

Author:Ann Bausum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: National Geographic Society
Published: 2010-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

The deportation of such persona non grata as unwanted aliens (deporting Germans) began with the passage of the Alien Act of 1918. Nearly 12,000 aliens found themselves deported in just the first year of the act’s enforcement.

Persona non grata. Foreign nationals who found themselves in the spotlight during wartime (a multilingual notice from 1917) remained there through the uneasy transition that followed World War I. Contrarian rival. Henry Cabot Lodge, a powerful Republican senator from Massachusetts who had frequently criticized the Democratic Wilson during his Presidency, questioned the soundness of Wilson’s push for a postwar League of Nations. Lodge worried that U.S. participation in the peacekeeping League would undercut America’s independence, concluding that the U.S. might be forced to follow League decisions—such as going to war—even if its leaders opposed them.

The war had fueled other domestic issues, too. Hostility toward the German-American dominated brewing industry contributed to passage of a so-called prohibition amendment to the U.S. Constitution, banning the sale of alcohol in the U.S. after 1919. The war had also prompted women to become increasingly insistent that a nation fighting for democracy abroad owed its own female citizens the right to vote at home. Lest Wilson overlook their point, a group of volunteers began staging protests in front of the White House in 1917; in 1919 they were still at it. Other domestic issues included postwar inflation and a worldwide flu epidemic that killed half-a-million Americans during 1918 and 1919.

MEANWHILE AUTHORITIES FRESH FROM HUNTING FOR GERMAN spies intensified their scrutiny of labor leaders with ties to socialism and other non-mainstream political beliefs. J. Edgar Hoover, the man whose name would eventually become synonymous with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), organized the effort from a small office within President Wilson’s Justice Department. His investigators targeted the so-called radicals who were fighting against American industrial powers for the rights of workers to form unions and improve their employment conditions. The department’s effort became known as the Red Scare because of charges that these labor organizers were tied to the red-flag-bearing revolutionaries of the World War I era who had taken over Russia and established communist rule in the new Soviet Union.

Identifying local labor organizers proved easier to do than the earlier assignment of finding German spies. Using the provisions of a companion bill, the Alien Act of 1918, authorities rounded up hundreds of Americans, even citizens, and deported them to countries they may have immigrated from decades earlier. Few of those deported posed any actual threat to the U.S. government, and their expulsion was soon regarded as an overreaction to exaggerated fears.

Home-front tensions mattered little to a President who felt that he had a God-given duty to make World War I the "War to End all Wars," in a popular phrase of the day. Wilson told Congress that securing world peace would repay the war’s dead by “making good what they offered their life’s blood to obtain.” Wilson had identified a list of 14 points that he hoped would form the basis of the peace treaty.

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