The Revolt Against the Masses. Fred Siegel
G. Harding of Ohio was ensconced in Washington, along with his card-playing cronies. The crusade that had ended abroad finally wound down at home. Harding, who in a conciliatory gesture freed Socialist leader Eugene Debs from jail, championed what he dubbed a return to “normalcy” in public life.
The silver lining of the wartime repression was that it laid the groundwork for the modern interpretation of the First Amendment, which would eventually extend free-speech rights to individuals harassed by not only federal authorities but state and local government as well. The expansion of free speech evolved from the 1918 case of Jacob Abrams, a Russian-Jewish immigrant bookbinder. Abrams had printed anarchist leaflets in English and Yiddish and distributed them on New York’s Lower East Side by dropping them from buildings. The pamphlets bitterly denounced Wilson’s half-hearted attempts to cooperate with England and France in pressuring Russia back into the war against Germany. Zealous prosecutors saw the leaflets as violations of the Espionage Act, which made it a crime to undermine American wartime policy. Abrams was sentenced to twenty years in jail and eventually deported.
In 1919, the Supreme Court upheld Abrams’s conviction. But in his dissent, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes laid the basis for the modern First Amendment. Holmes found that “speech that produces or is intended to produce a clear and imminent danger” can be prosecuted. But he saw no such “imminent” danger in Abrams’s leaflets, which he described as “silly” writings by an “unknown man.” More important was Holmes’s underlying reasoning. Like the British philosopher John Stuart Mill, Holmes determined that a maximum of free speech was essential for a successful society. America, he reasoned, had an interest in discovering truth available only through “the marketplace of ideas,” where proponents of competing viewpoints must strive to make their best case.
The spirit of Justice Holmes, with his emphasis on a carefully calibrated consideration of conflicting imperatives, has not always been in evidence on the part of historians. In the years since the Red Scare, most left and liberal chroniclers of that period, whether due to inadequate imagination or parochial political motives, have simply argued away the existence of Communists and anarchists who sought to inflict real harm upon America. Sacco, based on the ballistic evidence, was most certainly guilty; and Vanzetti was convicted of an earlier violent crime; in the hands of sympathizers, both were turned into injured innocents whose legend became part of a martyrology.
The fears of those years were wildly exaggerated, but they were not manufactured out of whole cloth. Lenin’s emissary in New York, Ludwig Martens, wasn’t unjustly persecuted and deported. Martens, notes historian Beverley Gage, referring to internal Russian documents, was one of the conduits Lenin used to smuggle 3 million rubles (largely in gold, jewels, and silver) into the U.S. to finance Communist Party activities. The famed Wall Street bombing of September 1920 aimed at banker J.P. Morgan, which claimed the lives of thirty-eight ordinary New Yorkers and injured 400, was probably the work of radical anarchists. The post-WWI Red Scare inaugurated an ongoing dynamic in which the excesses induced by the response to an internal enemy allowed liberals to pretend that the only danger at hand was the American reaction to imagined enemies.
For the intellectuals and writers who saw the bright sun of optimism just over the horizon in 1916, the end of the war years brought anger and intensified alienation. WWI, said Floyd Dell, discredited “the schemes and instruments of idealism” and produced a generation of young minds “trained in disillusion.” Many Americans felt that they had been let down by their leader, their country, and their countrymen, and they had little interest in the intractable dilemmas of how to deal with Prussianism and Bolshevism. They felt betrayed by Wilson on Russia, betrayed by Wilson on the failures and compromises of the Versailles Treaty, betrayed by Wilson in his willingness to suppress civil liberties, and confirmed in their disdain for the society that had supported both the Red Scare and Prohibition. They placed blame for “the sanctimonious swindle” of WWI not on America’s enemies but on the middle-class nature of American society. In the words of Harold Stearns, an influential young liberal: “We crushed German militarism only to find that we ourselves had adopted many of its worst features.”
The pre-war faith in progress, noted Bertrand Russell’s son Conrad, had been “gunned down” in World War I. In This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald describes the effect of WWI: “all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faith in man shaken.” President Wilson in particular was accused by one former Progressive as having “produced more cynics than any other figure in modern history.”
Stearns, soon to exile himself to France, wrote bitterly about the post-war U.S. in his seminal 1919 book, Liberalism in America: “In Soviet countries there is in fact no freedom of the press and no pretense that there is. In America today there is in fact no freedom of the press and we only make the matter worse by pretending that there is.” The man who had been President Wilson’s Commissioner of Immigration, Frederick Howe, was equally bitter. America “seemed to want to hurt people,” he said. “It showed no concern for innocence. . . . It was not my America, it was something else.”
Between January of 1920 and July of 1922 when the Twenties began to roar, the country endured an economic collapse nearly as steep as that between 1929 and 1933. But the plummet was followed by a rapid recovery under Harding, who was devoted to less government through lower taxes and less regulation. This might have seemed a vindication of the American way, particularly as compared with Europe’s ongoing woes. But the short, sharp downturn, resolved without government intervention, drew only passing intellectual attention. Literary elites soon returned to their central themes.
A 1922 follow-up book edited by Stearns, Civilization in the United States: An Inquiry by Thirty Americans, might better have been titled “Why There Is No Civilization in America.” The theme repeated by the various authors was that people just do things better in Europe. Stearns, the man who had done the most to explain why liberalism was different from the Progressivism that had preceded it, conceived of the book’s essays as a collective denunciation of a supposedly Puritan America. “Life in this country,” explained one of the contributors, “is joyless and colorless, universally standardized, tawdry, uncreative, given over to the worship of wealth and machinery.” America’s material success, one essayist noted, was a reflection of its spiritual failure. The wife of the American man, another contributor explained, quoting George Cabot Lodge, “finds him so sexually inapt that she refuses to bear his children.” Before his death in 1918, Randolph Bourne, always a lodestar to Stearns and other young liberals, had noted: “The modern radical opposes the present social system not because it does not give him ‘rights’ but because it warps and stunts the potentialities of society and of human nature.”
The contributors to Civilization in the United States, many of them Harvard men, were driven by resentment. The so-called lost generation, explained Malcolm Cowley, was “extremely class conscious.” Like Bourne, they had “a vague belief in aristocracy and in the possibility of producing real aristocrats through education,” Cowley said. They went to Europe “to free themselves from organized stupidity, to win their deserved place in the hierarchy of intellect.” They felt that their status in America’s business culture was grossly inadequate, given their obviously exceptional intelligence and extraordinary talent. Their simmering anger at what they saw as the mediocrity of democratic life led them to pioneer the now commonplace stance of blaming society for their personal failings. Animated by patrician spirit, they found the leveling egalitarianism of the United States an insult to their sense of self-importance.
What followed was not so much protest as slow-burning scorn. In 1919, the Germanophile H.L. Mencken, writing in the New Republic, called for “honoring” the civilian heroes who had so hysterically suppressed Beethoven out of misguided patriotism; these ignoramuses, he urged, should be bedizened with bronze badges and golden crosses. Mencken branded the mass of Americans who had backed “Wilson’s War” as “boobs” and “peasants.” They were nothing more than a “timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob.” Mencken, a great admirer of the Kaiser, characterized American democracy