The
Economics of Peace: World War I and Scott Nearing’s
Radical America
Thomas Wirth
Department
of History
Villanova
University
Edited by Cynthia Kaschub
Scott
Nearing’s resignation from the University of Toledo
in March 1917 marked the beginning of a transformation in his life. For the
second time in two years the 34-year-old economist relinquished a teaching
position on account of political and philosophical differences with his
employers. After being fired from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in 1915 for attacking industrial America’s exploitive child labor practices and then asked to
leave Toledo two years later because of his anti-preparedness
stance, Nearing was essentially excommunicated from academia. Embittered by his
pariah status and standing at a crossroads—jobless,
an opponent of international violence under any circumstance, and increasingly
socialistic in thinking—he embarked upon a
campaign to expose the “hypocrisy” of America’s industrial-capitalist
establishment and its role in implicating the U.S. in a war of European
imperialism. Nearing once wrote that his expulsion from academia allowed
him to pursue “a new and larger field, a study of human society, its
assumptions, principles, responsibilities, and practices,” pushing him
“unceremoniously onto a new level of social usefulness.”
His trenchant views on capitalism and war propelled him to the forefront of the
peace movement and the Socialist Party, while simultaneously earning him the
scorn of liberal elites. Nearing’s battle with
America’s privileged classes profoundly altered the course of “radical”
activity in the U.S. during World War I and left a lasting impression on the
country’s intellectual, political and social culture.
Surprisingly, Nearing’s personal
odyssey during World War I has not been fully treated, and for the most part he
is viewed both as an ancillary and divisive figure within the anti-war movement
and as having only a minor influence on the movement as a whole.
Two biographies offer insight into his involvement with peace groups and
socialism during this period. Stephen J. Whitfield’s narrative focuses
generally on Nearing’s public activism during the
war, locating it within the larger “travail of dissent” of the twentieth
century, and John Saltmarsh’s more focused and
comprehensive study addresses Nearing’s philosophical
roots and intellectual growth, while also
tactfully balancing his “central incongruity” as both “public intellectual” and
“private thinker.” Neither
of these studies, however, effectively engages his substantial role in
fomenting anti-establishment values among socialists, intellectuals, students,
and workers. The biographies faithfully reconstruct the spirit of Nearing’s contributions as an agitator and a radical, but
fail to capture the significance of his leadership within both the anti-war and
socialist movements. As a supplement to these studies, what is needed is an
analysis of Nearing’s discursive and oratorical
method and its impact on uniting radical activity during the pivotal war years.
Known
among liberal academics as a scholarly maverick, Scott Nearing carved out a
reputation as a staunch proponent of working-class values before the war,
earning “him the enmity of powerful interests in the financial and industrial
world.” Nearing’s radicalism developed rapidly after Woodrow
Wilson’s November 4, 1915 proclamation directing the nation to support military
preparedness. Throughout 1916 and early 1917, he wrote and spoke openly about
the proclamation’s contradictions. He asked how
the United
States
could call itself a neutral country and at the same time arm for the war and
provide munitions to countries already participating in the bloodshed. He also
appealed to workers directly, asking them what gains they stood to reap by
supporting American industrial production for a war overseas, other than
enabling widespread death and devastation. In a keynote address at a meeting of
the Central Labor Union of Toledo, Nearing reminded his audience that, “The
American people are committed people who do America’s work. The people, as a whole, do not want war.
Should we fight for the capitalist traders? So much the greater fools, we.”
Nearing also made an explicit connection between Wilson’s call for preparedness and Germany’s blockade of armaments to England, the United States’ biggest customer:
When
England declared a blockade of Germany, American business said to John Bull: ‘It’s all
right, we’ll sell to you.’ Now that Germany has threatened to do the same to England we are in danger of losing our market for munitions
and are on the verge of war. It looks as if J.P. Morgan and Co. stands to lose
their [sic] big bet on England to win the war and we must step in to help them win.
If we go into this war it will be to make money…
His critique of war as a
capitalist conspiracy strengthened a fast growing domestic peace coalition that
became gradually focused on eradicating two root causes of war: greed and
ineffectual diplomacy.
Socialists
such as Randolph Bourne, William English Walling, and John Reed contended that
the fundamental cause of the war could be found in the conflict of economic
interests. Walling, a moderate socialist, chastised “bourgeois pacifism”
practiced by liberal progressives like Jane Addams. He argued that Addams’s Woman’s Peace Party, one of the earliest pacifist
organizations, failed to consider “the great task that lies before us, namely,
to find a way either in the near future or ultimately to bring the conflict of
national economic interests to an end.”
The so-called “bourgeois pacifists” argued, on the other hand, that in order to
achieve peace a robust diplomatic internationalism must work to stem the tide
of militaristic behavior mounting in Europe. For example,
Walter Lippmann, an editor of The New Republic, argued that “the important point is that there
should be in existence permanent international commissions to deal with those
spots of the earth where world crises originate…such international governing
bodies are needed wherever the prizes are great, the territory unorganized, and
the competition active.”
Technical criticisms aside, socialists were in fact able to collaborate
successfully with bourgeois pacifists prior to American involvement in the war.
As Thomas Knock writes, many socialists and liberals “regarded reactionary
opponents of domestic reform and the advocates of militarism and imperialism as
twins born of the same womb,” and to combat these insidious forces, they
responded by combining their powers of protest.
The
formation of the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM) in January 1916
resulted directly from Wilson’s preparedness speech given in November of the
previous year, and represented one such collaborative effort between socialists
and bourgeois pacifists. The AUAM declared its intention to “throw…a monkey
wrench into the machinery of preparedness and to stop the war through a
conference of neutrals…”
C. Roland Marchand notes that the AUAM at this time
also began perpetuating the idea that “the battle between the people’s
interests and the entrenched special interests…was now being reenacted in the
struggle over military preparedness and war.”
Although not affiliated with the AUAM at this point, Nearing held similar
beliefs about linking preparedness to “profit-hungry” capitalists. In Poverty and Riches, published in the
fall of 1916, he concluded that, “as long as industry is being run for profit,
the dollar will be put above the man. Grant the truth of this assertion and it
becomes apparent that there is a fundamental conflict between the principle of
democracy and the present system of industry for profit.”
He also delivered a series of lectures that fall in which he questioned why
“The American people are being urged to ‘prepare.’ Is it preparation for peace
or preparation for war?”
Like many Americans, Nearing and the members of the AUAM were confused as to Wilson’s motivations in 1916.
World
events moved at a break-neck pace in the first several months of 1917 and the
picture became much clearer to socialists and pacifists: the American people
were indeed being prepared for war. Irrespective of Wilson’s speech to the Senate on January 22, 1917, calling for a “peace without victory,” many
socialists believed that the United States had already become too involved not to be drawn into
the war. As the prominent New York
socialist Morris Hillquit recalled, “as the war went
on the ‘neutrality of thought’ was gradually abandoned in certain quarters, and
voices began to be heard, speculating on the possibility of American
participation. It is undoubtedly true that the change of sentiment was largely
induced by the business interests…more and more entangled in allied arms.” Hillquit did not deny German intransigence as a genuine
cause of war, but as a socialist, he could not accept unabated capitalist
profiteering at the expense of millions of lives. Thus, the fundamental
conflict between socialist-pacifism and bourgeois or progressive pacifism was
set. Wilson’s disciples, in general, found aggressive militarism
to be the most unsavory and dangerous aspect of the world conflict. For this
reason, they accepted his decree of February 26 to begin preparation for “armed
neutrality” and his April 2 decision to put the nation on a footing for war.
Socialists argued that Wilson had been duped by “big business,” (even as German submarines sunk American ships) and
they stood steadfast in their position that the pursuit of peace could be the
only objective.
The
two years of hospitable relations that existed between socialists and liberals
ended on April 6, 1917, when
the U.S. entered the war. Many prominent progressives,
including The New Republic editors Lippman and
Herbert Croly, the historian Charles Beard, and the
journalist Walter Weyl, abandoned their commitment to
the peace movement, believing that German militarism posed too great a threat
to ignore. Moderate socialists, such as Walling, Upton Sinclair, Charles Edward
Russell, and John Spargo also abandoned the cause.
This left the American pacifist movement fragmented and disorganized. To save
itself from disintegration, the movement, which had become increasingly
militant in its outcry against war since the beginning of 1917, turned east to Russia for guidance. In spite of considerable instability
within their country, the Russians took a step toward democracy in March 1917
with the dissolution of Czar Nicholas’s regime. Although still participating in
the war, an estimated one and a half million men had deserted their posts by
the end of 1916. “New Russia,” for all intents and purposes, began moving toward
its ideal plan—a negotiated peace and an immediate cessation to the
hostilities. This plan alone offered hope to an American peace movement that
was quickly being undermined by a sudden lack of support.
March
and April 1917 were transformational months on several levels for socialists
and pacifists in America. From an international standpoint, the emergence of a
democratic Russia set the stage for a clash of diverging claims to a
new world order. The Americans determined that the only way to achieve
meaningful peace was to stamp out militarism in all its virulent forms and to
enter the fighting on the side of the allies. The Russians, urged by the allies
to step up their waning military support, contended that only a peace-first
attitude could cure the flare up of aggression and put an end to the hegemonic
forces of war that “enslaved” the workers of the world. At the domestic level,
both socialism and pacifism went from acceptable, indeed popular, movements to
unpatriotic and subversive fringe movements. Reformer pacifists, such as
Lillian Wald and Jane Addams (who, unlike Walling,
held firm in their commitments to non-violence), and socialists were
immediately targeted as radicals and forced to carry out their protests under
the constant fear of repression. Finally, at the individual level Americans
were called upon to make a “sacrifice” and unquestioningly advocate war “to
make the world safe for democracy.”
Most were exasperated with Germany’s belligerence by March 1917, and like the President,
felt that the time for peaceful negotiation had ended. Yet more than a mere
handful of Americans argued that war at any cost violated the principles of
democracy, enriched industrialist “tyrants,” and further oppressed the working
classes. Apparently not enthralled with the socialist-pacifist challenge to
establishment prerogative, Americans chose war overwhelmingly, and in the short
span of two months the temperament of the nation changed from tolerant to intolerant
and from conciliatory to confrontational. With the line between pacifist and
socialist deliberately blurred by American patriots who lumped all
“un-American” behavior together, radicals looked to one another for
reinforcement, and eventually, in November 1917, to the Bolsheviks and their
socialist revolution.
Scott
Nearing belonged to this latter group of Americans who thought that industrial
“plutocrats” were largely responsible for plunging the nation into war. As a
social scientist, Nearing tried to avoid being a “teacher with a doctrine,” someone who “was unable or unwilling to face new
situations.” However, his mounting resentment
for the war, for capitalism and for a careening world political situation allowed him to abandon previous fears of ideological rigidity;
embracing socialism put him on a collision course with pro-war Wilsonian liberals.
In a speech delivered to the Twentieth Century Club of Detroit, two weeks
before joining the Socialist Party and just a few days before leaving his academic
post for good, Nearing laid out the American crisis in stark economic terms:
The
six or ten millions of men who would be thrown out of employment by the
cessation of the war, would rise in revolution against the government which is
responsible for their unlucky lot, and to prevent the disruption of the
government, President Wilson has taken the only other course: immediate
participation in the present conflict.
The
most pressing goal for radicals after America entered the war was to quickly unite various
individual pacifist groups that had been ravaged by a loss in membership. Many
historians have pointed out that the movement suffered from too much diversity
at the outset, which in the end foiled plans to reach a wide audience and
harness momentum. Nearing, however, attempted to create a bridge for disparate
interests to meet on common ground. Using his unique position as a hinge
radical, moving fluidly between pacifist, socialist, and labor organizations,
he advocated a program of inclusion whereby all three groups could articulate their
grievances. When Vladimir Lenin wrote that “it is with ideas, not with armies,
we shall conquer the world,” Nearing took it literally.
During the war he encouraged opportunities for radicals to engage in meaningful
resistance together, rather than in isolation from one another. He laid out a
prescription for unified action in his contentious anti-war pamphlet The Great Madness, published shortly
after the American entry into battle:
The
work of the people is cut out for them—cut out in all its stupendous
importance. They must:—
1.
Continue to meet
regularly and systematically for the discussion of vital questions.
2.
Publish a paper
in every city that will be owned by the people and will represent them.
3.
Capture the schools.
The school system is the greatest single asset now in the hands of the
plutocracy.
4.
Establish
industrial and political solidarity.
5.
Educate!
Educate!! Everywhere and upon every possible occasion in home, shop, streetcar,
meeting hall.
6.
Take out all profit
out of industry.
7.
Guarantee and
maintain equal opportunity and justice for all.
The directives issued here
speak to Nearing’s desire for a general platform
catering to broad segments of the movement. He believed that the only way to combat
the federal government’s pro-war public relations assault was to counter it
with an outpouring of propaganda that spoke collectively to these groups.
Before
assimilating competing philosophies and strategies, however, it was necessary
to craft a formal rapprochement between the variant strains of pacifism. The
bulk of the AUAM consisted of progressive pacifists who favored a program
attentive to ending militarism. They were concerned mainly with changing the
structure of international diplomacy, repealing the Conscription Act of May 18, 1917, and ending the war on democratic terms. They did not
want to become “a party of opposition” and emphasized that “we are not, by
habit or temperament, troublemakers.”
American socialists, on the other hand, were combative at the start of the war.
Emboldened by the initial Russian experiment in self-government and growing
Bolshevik representation in the Provisional Government, they stepped up their
attacks on the “liberal-capitalist” establishment, demanding a platform for
international industrial reform. Socialists differed in focus from progressive
anti-war demonstrators: the former wanted to attack the industrial elite, while
the latter sought only to change existing diplomatic practices based on Real Politik.
In addition to the concerns of the socialists and liberal-progressives —the two
largest components of the peace movement—hundreds of smaller peace
organizations made up of farmers, Christians, single-taxers,
and local labor unions, each with their own agenda, threatened to be swallowed
up by the great tide of patriotism sweeping the country. The problem was clear
enough: unite or face extinction.
The
First American Conference of Democracy and Terms of Peace convened on May 30
and 31, 1917 at Madison Square Garden in New York City in front of 15,000 people.
The conference aimed to bring together pacifists from all over the U.S. to discuss a program of unification. Led by Nearing,
Louis Lochner and Rebecca Shelly, the latter two of
the Emergency Peace Federation (EPF), planning for the conference began shortly
after the American declaration of war. From the beginning, the moderate faction
of the AUAM expressed its discontent with the strong socialist elements
permeating the unification movement, which they argued only complicated the
realistic goal of ending the war. As director of the organizing committee for
the May conference, and a member of the American Union, Nearing defused the
crisis with the simple suggestion that they pursue a more ecumenical program that
joined forces to work “towards the establishment of industrial democracy in the
United
States
after the war.” The use
of the term “industrial democracy” became a catchphrase within the peace
movement, meaning different things to different people. For socialists, it
meant replacing the capitalist political economy with a system of
collectivization in which the “social machinery” transferred from the
individual capitalist to the hands of the American working people. For the
pacifist unwilling to accept socialist doctrine, industrial democracy could
mean simply working to improve upon current international labor standards.
Manipulating the language and the terms of unification kept most moderates
happy. While the AUAM withdrew from the conference, it remained on the bill as
a supporting organization, and many of its more radical members joined up with
its sister peace organization, the EPF. Nearing’s
contribution to this first conference went well beyond two simple words, but
nevertheless, these words were symbolic of his willingness to find middle
ground for all groups to meet on.
Out
of the May conference grew a complete set of compromises that spoke to a
national audience of peace groups. Although tension remained between radicals
and moderates, they both agreed that for the time being the Russians had put
together the most progressive peace plan. In the spirit of internationalism,
they modeled their national peace organization after the Russian Council of
Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates, a faction sympathetic to the Bolsheviks that
held a position of power within the Provisional Government. The moderates were
able to accept the Russian plan without reservation because of its universally
democratic language. Socialism had yet to make its revolutionary inroads in Russia, and, in fact, the Wilson administration still praised the country’s
implementation of democratic principles (they also cheered Russia’s labors in hope that it would stimulate a renewed
vigor for the allied war cause).
The
American pacifists called their organization the People’s Council of America,
and their program advocated “an early, democratic and general peace in harmony
with the principles of New Russia, namely: no forcible annexations, no punitive
indemnities, [and] free development for all nationalities.”
Secondly, the Council urged substantive changes in the American approach to
international diplomacy, as well as putting an end to the secret negotiation of
treaties, conscription and the draft, the poor treatment of workers, and the
curtailment of civil liberties. Finally, and most importantly, they called for
peace through national referenda. The Council supported the opinions of its
“constituents” in matters of international diplomacy and formulated “policy”
after gauging their attitudes. If the American government failed to heed the
voice of the people, the Council reasoned, then the only recourse would be to
shift tactics from independent lobbying to mass, united action. The structure
of the Council reflected that of the Russian “soviet” system, a flexible and
decentralized body of state committees responsive to local council committees,
but also had representation in the decision-making process at the national
level of the organization. The national council acted as the chief generator of
propaganda and education, providing uniformity to the pacifist message and
direction to the massive alliance, which included, by June 1917, the full
participation of the EPF, the Woman’s Peace Party, the American Legal Defense
League, the American Association for Labor Legislation, the Non-Partisan
League, the American Civil Liberties Bureau (bureau was changed to union
shortly thereafter), hundreds of local labor unions, the Socialist Party, and
the Socialist Labor Party.
From
June through September 1917, Nearing served on the People’s Council executive
committee in charge of labor agitation. His experience teaching economics made
him the most qualified candidate to discuss in laymen’s terms the pressing
crisis that war had thrust upon workers. During this period, he also taught
full-time at the Rand School of Social Science in New York City and lectured extensively to national and local labor
organizations around the country.
As the war dragged on into the fall, he grew increasingly uncertain about the
merits of moderation in the pacifist movement. His experience with organized
labor soured him on the prospect of a peace-first plan geared toward ending
militarism. In his mind, militarism flowered under the exigencies of capitalist
domination. Faced with the difficult task of trying to undercut the activities
of Samuel Gompers’ pro-war and pro-capitalist
American Alliance for Labor and Democracy, Nearing came to the conclusion that
the People’s Council did not go far enough in providing a true alternative for
workers. In order to obtain the socialist vision of industrial democracy, the
terms of peace needed to be more closely tied to an anti-corporate agenda. In
September 1917 he wrote, “Recent events lead me to the conclusion that it is not the diplomats who want the war to go on
but the business interests.”
Nearing could no longer accept that militarism was due as much to diplomatic
failure as it was due to plutocratic self-indulgence. This revelation is not in
itself startling when placed side-by-side with his philosophic economism—the belief in the primacy of economic causes—and
the fact that radical socialist power in the Russian Provisional Government
continued to gain momentum. His opinions grew even more strident as he assumed
the chairmanship of the People’s Council upon Morris Hillquit’s
departure in late September 1917.
Nearing’s
accession to the top position on the People’s Council represents the
culmination of his transformation from liberal economist to radical socialist.
It also marked the beginning of a new experiment in radical activity for
pacifists, prefiguring the leftward political surge the movement experienced
through 1920.
Publicly Nearing professed a united front among pacifists, telling the
socialist New York Call, “It is the
business of the People’s Council to find those points of probable agreement and
thus establish a common meeting ground, a clearing house for the liberal and
the radical elements in American life.”
Under his direction, however, the Socialist Party played a much larger role in
formatting the agenda for peace than he led on. The language of socialism
gradually crept into the Council’s bulletins, sent out weekly to its members
across the country, and he stepped up the challenge to Gompers’s
Alliance for Labor. Nearing fired a shot at the Alliance one
day after assuming the chairmanship: “…The American People are opening their
eyes…they know that the big business forces have been trying to suppress the
revolutionary labor movement in this country, while they folded to their bosoms
a little group of labor politicians who are using the occasion to ‘clean up’ on
their opponents.”
Nearing no doubt had Gompers in mind when writing
this polemic. In order to meet the Alliance head on, he attempted to set the Council’s program on
a higher moral ground. He wanted to establish the socialist-pacifist cause as
the cause of working-class freedom, removed from the “degeneracy” spawned by
industrial capitalism, and as striving toward a greater good—the institution of
industrial democracy.
The
success of the Bolshevik Revolution lent credence to Nearing’s
approach. Lenin and the Bolsheviks swept out of power the American-recognized
Provisional Government led by Alexander Kerensky on November 7, 1917. Wilson and other prominent American
internationalists chafed at Lenin’s immediate calls for a negotiated peace
between the European antagonists. When the Americans entered the war, they did
so with the intent of crushing Prussian militarism. The Bolsheviks anti-war
stance (consider rewording-awkward) and their decision to call back troops from
the front lines at the end of 1917 thwarted this intention and raised fears of
a possible conspiracy with the Central Powers. “The forces of movement” split
into competing factions, with liberalism pitted squarely against revolutionary
socialism. Both
the Americans and Russians proclaimed their desire for peace, and in Wilson’s words, a “world made safe for democracy,” but each
sought different means to achieve their goal of creating a new form of
diplomacy.
Nearing’s
reaction to these complex geopolitical developments on the domestic front is
important in two ways. First, the Russian political successes provided a
convenient opening for Nearing to bolster his criticism of American war profiteering
and to further a program of agitation that connected the war to working-class
oppression. Shortly after the Bolshevik seizure of power he wrote that the
“whole question of war profiteering” bears “directly upon the ‘economic rights’
of the American people and therefore fall[s] within the scope of the People’s
Council program.”
This statement conflicts with his earlier comments to the New York Call, in which he labeled the Council a “clearing house”
for both radicals and liberals in America. Clearly, Nearing set out to separate the Council
from the liberal program for peace by allying it with a Russian program that
highlighted elements of class conflict. Secondly, the revolution legitimized
the previous two decades of activity by American Socialists, augmenting
domestic opposition to the Wilson Administration’s wartime policies. The
historian Charles Chatfield points out that some “pacifists supported the
revolution, too, because its peace planks accorded with their own demand for a
‘new diplomacy’ embodying democratic principles such as freedom of press,
petition, and speech,” as well as a “progressive tax on war profits.”
Even as the Council continued to ramp up its radicalism, some progressive
pacifists remained loyal because they believed that the Russian peace program
offered a legitimate, non-violent solution to the conflict. For
dyed-in-the-wool pacifists, the Bolsheviks offered the most realistic plan for
galvanizing worldwide support for democratic diplomacy, despite their socialist
economic views. Although many pacifists, liberal or otherwise, did not convert
to socialism, they believed that the Russians honestly represented the people’s
voice. Since the preparedness controversy in 1916, they no longer trusted Wilson to do the right thing. As Nation editor Oswald Garrison Villard
remarked at the time, “I am utterly discouraged and shocked and have completely
lost my faith in Wilson…I simply feel that he is no longer to be depended
upon…”
Playing
on this current of mistrust, in order to spread the word about the Bolshevik
peace plan, Nearing redoubled his commitment to educating the American worker
about the benefits of socialism. His teachings to student-workers at the Rand School, the International Fur Workers’ Union
and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers’ Union in New York City played a significant role in developing a unified
socialist educational method that attempted to undermine the effectiveness of Wilsonian internationalism.
Supplementing his seven-pronged prescription for pacifist activism delineated
in The Great Madness, Nearing
injected into the cause specifically socialist aims patterned after the Russian
Revolution. The goal became not simply civilized activism, working through
proper bureaucratic channels for peace, but urgent and abrupt mass action
modeled after the Bolsheviks. Nearing wanted to take the People’s Council’s
momentum in to a new stage, and he found in socialist doctrine the political
weapon with which to make immediate, rather than gradual change. By fusing the
revolutionary tone of socialism to the program of peace laid out by the
People’s Council, Nearing believed he could lift the masses upward toward
change. Although he never explicitly advocated violent revolution, he did use
the rhetoric of a revolutionary, as evidenced by this speech delivered to Rand School students in 1918:
So while we rejoice
that the Russian revolutionists are breaking economic chains; while we send out
good wishes and cheer to the German revolutionists as they throw off autocracy
and set up a government of the people, let us not forget that expressions of
good cheer are not the things that the Russian and German workers want from us.
They want from us a Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council in New York City. They want from us a Workers’ and Soldiers’
Government in the United States. When we have established government, we will have
made good our claim to brotherhood and comradeship with the workers of Russia and Germany.
Although
Nearing did not have a working-class background he sympathized with the plight
of the oppressed. He valued work, he once said, because “Everyone who
works—whether joyfully or joylessly—is creating a product that will benefit a
fellowman.” Like
Eugene Debs, the entrenched father of American socialism and the symbol of
agrarian radicalism, he believed every working man and woman held the key to
the future of the United States. Secondly, he understood the importance of appealing
to the values of the commoner. He learned this latter skill from Debs. The
former Indiana rail worker possessed an uncanny ability to empathize
with his audience, making them feel that he was communicating “not to people,
but for them.”
The New York Call reported on a 1908
rally at Grand Central Station in New York in which Debs, who was not opposed to using biblical
metaphor, uttered what are now famous lines: “You workingmen have heads. You
are satisfied to use your hands in the interest of the fellows who are shrewd
enough to use their heads. Let me remind you that you have heads as well as
hands. And when you use both you will be masters of this earth.”
Nearing employed similarly dramatic language throughout the war in effort to
draw attention to economic injustices and “the ever widening chasm between
those who possess and those who do not.”
Whereas Debs spoke for the people,
Nearing spoke about what happened to
the people as a result of the capitalist’s “ill-gotten” war profits.
Nearing’s vision of democracy placed knowledge and cooperation
above gratuitous uses of power and privilege. In the context of war, the
erosion of both democratic ideals and progressive notions of societal improvement
appeared very real. Nearing seized on this fear with apocalyptic language,
linking up socialist discourse with an image of America as a imperialist behemoth.
The
Wilson Administration sought to placate public alarm over the war with
reassurances that the U.S. was in fact fighting to guarantee the preservation of
international democracy. Of course, they maintained a slight advantage in
keeping their message in front of the people. With control of the mail, the
backing of industry and major media outlets, and the force of the Espionage and
Sedition Acts, the government fastened a tight noose on the spread of
disagreeable information. Additionally, the Committee on Public Information
(CPI), the government’s aggressive war-boosting agency headed by former
newspaperman George Creel, worked to drown opposition to Wilsonian
doctrine. As Elizabeth McKillen suggests, the
American Federation of Labor, under Gompers, also
played an important part in suffocating radicals: “Gompers
wore down his opponents through smear campaigns that questioned their
patriotism and often linked them to German sabotage…he also had the power to
deny his opponents any real voice in shaping AFL policy.”
The President too, ultimately played a
significant role in frustrating the efforts of socialists and pacifists. As the
war passed through 1917, notes Arthur Link, “Wilson pressed his campaign for
peace with mounting intensity…Again and again, he said that Americans had no
quarrel with the great German people, admired their accomplishments, and, above
all, coveted their friendship.” Wilson conveyed to Americans that the country’s only
objective in waging war was to achieve peace. But as Link also points out, Wilson “took assiduous pains to make clear that the United States was in the war for its own reasons.”
Socialists were at an advantage in this respect, as they found ways to exploit
anything that smacked of aggrandizement.
