The History Book Club discussion

*POTENTIAL SPOILERS*

This is the glossary for Enemies: A History of the FBI. This is not a non spoiler thread so any urls and/or expansive discussion can take place here regarding this book. Additionally, this is the spot to add that additional information that may contain spoilers or any helpful urls, links, etc.
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by Tim Weiner

Folks, this interview may be on interest to you:

The History Of The FBI's Secret 'Enemies' List

Source: NPR:

http://www.npr.org/2012/02/14/1468620...



Hoover saw Martin Luther King Jr. as an "enemy of the state," says author Tim Weiner according to the NPR site.

John Lord O'Brian:



John Lord O'Brian was born in Buffalo, New York in 1874. He received the A.B. degree from Harvard College in 1896 and the L.L.B. degree from Buffalo Law School in 1898.

In February 1909, O'Brian was appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt to serve as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of New York. He continued to serve in this position through the administrations of President Taft and President Wilson.

During World War I, O'Brian served as Head of the War Emergency Division in the U.S. Dept. of Justice where he was responsible for prosecuting cases of espionage and sabotage. At the end of World War I, O'Brian returned to Buffalo to practice law.

In 1929, President Hoover appointed O'Brian to serve as Assistant Attorney General of the Anti-Trust Division at the U.S. Department of Justice where he was responsible for arguing more than 15 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. He was retained by the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1935, eventually winning the case that challenged the creation of the Authority.

In 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt appointed O'Brian to serve as General Counsel of the War Production Board. From 1945 until his death, at age 98, O'Brian practiced law in Washington, D.C.
(Source: http://law.lib.buffalo.edu/collection...)

Department of Justice:

The Judiciary Act of 1789 created the Office of the Attorney General which evolved over the years into the head of the Department of Justice and chief law enforcement officer of the Federal Government. The Attorney General represents the United States in legal matters generally and gives advice and opinions to the President and to the heads of the executive departments of the Government when so requested. In matters of exceptional gravity or importance the Attorney General appears in person before the Supreme Court. Since the 1870 Act that established the Department of Justice as an executive department of the government of the United States, the Attorney General has guided the world's largest law office and the central agency for enforcement of federal laws.
(Source: http://www.justice.gov/ag/about-oag.html)

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_S...

Theodore Roosevelt:



Theodore Roosevelt, who came into office in 1901 and served until 1909, is considered the first modern President because he significantly expanded the influence and power of the executive office. From the Civil War to the turn of the twentieth century, the seat of power in the national government resided in the U.S. Congress. Beginning in the 1880s, the executive branch gradually increased its power. Roosevelt seized on this trend, believing that the President had the right to use all powers except those that were specifically denied him to accomplish his goals. As a result, the President, rather than Congress or the political parties, became the center of the American political arena.

As President, Roosevelt challenged the ideas of limited government and individualism. In their stead, he advocated government regulation to achieve social and economic justice. He used executive orders to accomplish his goals, especially in conservation, and waged an aggressive foreign policy. He was also an extremely popular President and the first to use the media to appeal directly to the people, bypassing the political parties and career politicians.

Early Life

Frail and sickly as a boy, "Teedie" Roosevelt developed a rugged physique as a teenager and became a lifelong advocate of exercise and the "strenuous life." After graduating from Harvard, Roosevelt married Alice Hathaway Lee and studied law at Columbia University. He dropped out after a year to pursue politics, winning a seat in the New York Assembly in 1882.

A double tragedy struck Roosevelt in 1884, when his mother and his wife died in the same house on the same day. Roosevelt spent two years out West in an attempt to recover, rustling cows as a rancher and busting outlaws as a frontier sheriff. In 1886, he returned to New York and married his childhood sweetheart, Edith Kermit Carow. They raised six children, including Roosevelt's daughter from his first marriage. After losing a campaign for mayor, he served as Civil Service commissioner, president of the New York City Police Board, and assistant secretary of the Navy. All the while, he demonstrated honesty in office, upsetting the party bosses who expected him to ignore the law in favor of partisan politics.

War Hero and Vice President

When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, Roosevelt volunteered as commander of the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, known as the Rough Riders, leading a daring charge on San Juan Hill. Returning as a war hero, he became governor of New York and began to exhibit an independence that upset the state's political machine. To stop Roosevelt's reforms, party bosses "kicked him upstairs" to the vice presidency under William McKinley, believing that in this position he would be unable to continue his progressive policies. Roosevelt campaigned vigorously for McKinley in 1900—one commentator remarked, "Tis Teddy alone that's running, an' he ain't a runnin', he's a gallopin'." Roosevelt's efforts helped ensure victory for McKinley. But his time as vice president was brief; McKinley was assassinated in 1901, making Roosevelt the President of the United States.

By the 1904 election, Roosevelt was eager to be elected President in his own right. To achieve this, he knew that he needed to work with Republican Party leaders. He promised to hold back on parts of his progressive agenda in exchange for a free hand in foreign affairs. He also got the reluctant support of wealthy capitalists, who feared his progressive measures, but feared a Democratic victory even more. TR won in a landslide, becoming the first President to be elected after gaining office due to the death of his predecessor. Upon victory, he vowed not to run for another term in 1908, a promise he came to regret.

Modern Presidency

As President, Roosevelt worked to ensure that the government improved the lives of American citizens. His "Square Deal" domestic program reflected the progressive call to reform the American workplace, initiating welfare legislation and government regulation of industry. He was also the nation's first environmentalist President, setting aside nearly 200 million acres for national forests, reserves, and wildlife refuges.

In foreign policy, Roosevelt wanted to make the United States a global power by increasing its influence worldwide. He led the effort to secure rights to build the Panama Canal, one of the greatest engineering feats at that time. He also issued his "corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine, which established the United States as the "policeman" of the Western Hemisphere. In addition, he used his position as President to help negotiate peace agreements between belligerent nations, believing that the world should settle international disputes through diplomacy rather than war.

Roosevelt is considered the first modern U.S. President because he greatly strengthened the power of the executive branch. He was also an extremely popular President—so popular after leaving office in 1909 that he was able to mount a serious run for the presidency again in 1912. Believing that his successor, William Howard Taft, had failed to continue his program of reform, TR threw his hat into the ring as a candidate for the Progressive Party. Although Roosevelt was defeated by Democrat Woodrow Wilson, his efforts resulted in the creation of one of the most significant third parties in U.S. history.

With the onset of World War I in 1914, Roosevelt advocated that the United States prepare itself for war. Accordingly, he was highly critical of Wilson's pledge of neutrality. Once the United States entered the war in 1917, all four of Roosevelt's sons volunteered to serve, which greatly pleased the former President. The death of his youngest son, Quentin, left him deeply distraught. Theodore Roosevelt died less than a year later.
(Source: http://millercenter.org/president/roo...)

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore...
http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/presi...
http://www.theodoreroosevelt.org/

Captain Franz Von Papen:



Franz von Papen (1879-1969), who ultimately served as Germany's Chancellor in 1932, acted as his country's military attaché to the U.S. from the outbreak of World War One until his expulsion in disgrace in 1915.

With a military background and the rank of Captain von Papen was despatched to Mexico and the United States as German military attaché in 1913. Both he and the German naval attaché, Karl Boy-Ed, quickly became active in establishing a German spy ring and a group of saboteurs within the U.S., the aim being to disrupt American economic aid to the Entente Powers in Europe.

Found out for his role in a plan to blow up the Welland Canal he was effectively expelled from the U.S., with President Woodrow Wilson asking Berlin to recall von Papen in December 1915.

Back in Germany Papen was reassigned to his former military capacity and despatched to the Western Front as a battalion commander. He later served in staff positions both in France and on the Palestine Front.

Papen ultimately became German Chancellor in 1932. In 1934, under the Nazi regime, he acted as envoy to Austria. From 1939-44 he was Ambassador to Turkey.

He died in 1969.
(Source: http://www.firstworldwar.com/bio/pape...)

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_vo...

Franz Von Rintelen:



was a German Naval Intelligence officer in the United States during World War I.

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Captain von Rintelen

Sinking of the Lusitania:



The RMS Lusitania was a British ocean liner of the early twentieth century, owned and operated by the Cunard Company. Her keel was laid on 16 June 1904 and she was launched on 7 June 1906. Lusitania began her maiden voyage out of Liverpool, England on 7 September 1907 and arrived in New York, United States, on 13 September. At the time of her launch, she was the largest and fastest ship in the world, although she was soon eclipsed in both by newer ships afterwards. Lusitania would make 101 round-trip voyages (or 202 crossings) during her career.

Lusitania became a casuality of World War I (1914 – 1918). On 7 May 1915, Lusitania was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland by the German submarine (or u-boat) U-20, sinking in 18 minutes. Of the known 1,960 people on board, 768 survived and 1,192 perished in the disaster. Four of those survivors died in the following months, bringing the numbers to 764 survivors and 1,196 victims. The wreck of the Lusitania lies at 51°25′N 8°33′W, in waters south of the Old Head of Kinsale, Ireland.

Lusitania was carrying a great number of Americans and women and children as well as war materiel for the British Army. The sinking of the Lusitania and resulting deaths of civilians and neutral nationals aboard the ship is considered one of the first modern examples of “total war” and a turning point in World War I. The nature of the explosions that sank the ship and the politics surrounding her demise remain controversial topics.

Contrary to popular belief, the Lusitania disaster was not the proximate cause of the United States entering the First World War; however, the sinking of the steamship Lusitania is often credited for turning the then-neutral American public opinion against Germany. Furthermore, Germany, fearing American wrath, restrained themselves in submarine warfare, which may have been Germany’s best chance at winning the war. Yet, it was Germany’s very resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare in early 1917 that finally forced the United States to declare war.
(Source: http://www.rmslusitania.info/)

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http://www.firstworldwar.com/features...
http://www.pbs.org/lostliners/lusitan...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Lusi...

FBI History: 1908-1910:

Origins (1908-1910)

The FBI originated from a force of special agents created in 1908 by Attorney General Charles Bonaparte during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. The two men first met when they both spoke at a meeting of the Baltimore Civil Service Reform Association. Roosevelt, then Civil Service commissioner, boasted of his reforms in federal law enforcement. It was 1892, a time when law enforcement was often political rather than professional. Roosevelt spoke with pride of his insistence that Border Patrol applicants pass marksmanship tests, with the most accurate getting the jobs. Following Roosevelt on the program, Bonaparte countered, tongue in cheek, that target shooting was not the way to get the best men. "Roosevelt should have had the men shoot at each other and given the jobs to the survivors."

Roosevelt and Bonaparte both were "Progressives." They shared the conviction that efficiency and expertise, not political connections, should determine who could best serve in government. Theodore Roosevelt became President of the United States in 1901; four years later, he appointed Bonaparte to be attorney general. In 1908, Bonaparte applied that Progressive philosophy to the Department of Justice by creating a corps of special agents. It had neither a name nor an officially designated leader other than the attorney general. Yet, these former detectives and Secret Service men were the forerunners of the FBI.

Today, most Americans take for granted that our country needs a federal investigative service, but in 1908, the establishment of this kind of agency at a national level was highly controversial. The U.S. Constitution is based on "federalism:" a national government with jurisdiction over matters that crossed boundaries, like interstate commerce and foreign affairs, with all other powers reserved to the states. Through the 1800s, Americans usually looked to cities, counties, and states to fulfill most government responsibilities. However, by the 20th century, easier transportation and communications had created a climate of opinion favorable to the federal government establishing a strong investigative tradition.

The impulse among the American people toward a responsive federal government, coupled with an idealistic, reformist spirit, characterized what is known as the Progressive Era, from approximately 1900 to 1918. The Progressive generation believed that government intervention was necessary to produce justice in an industrial society. Moreover, it looked to "experts" in all phases of industry and government to produce that just society.

President Roosevelt personified Progressivism at the national level. A federal investigative force consisting of well-disciplined experts and designed to fight corruption and crime fit Roosevelt's Progressive scheme of government. Attorney General Bonaparte shared his president's Progressive philosophy. However, the Department of Justice under Bonaparte had no investigators of its own except for a few special agents who carried out specific assignments for the attorney general, and a force of examiners (trained as accountants) who reviewed the financial transactions of the federal courts. Since its beginning in 1870, the Department of Justice used funds appropriated to investigate federal crimes to hire private detectives first and later investigators from other federal agencies. (Federal crimes are those that were considered interstate or occurred on federal government reservations.)

By 1907, the Department of Justice most frequently called upon Secret Service "operatives" to conduct investigations. These men were well-trained, dedicated—and expensive. Moreover, they reported not to the attorney general, but to the chief of the Secret Service. This situation frustrated Bonaparte, who wanted complete control of investigations under his jurisdiction. Congress provided the impetus for Bonaparte to acquire his own force. On May 27, 1908, it enacted a law preventing the Department of Justice from engaging Secret Service operatives.

The following month, Attorney General Bonaparte appointed a force of special agents within the Department of Justice. Accordingly, 10 former Secret Service employees and a number of Department of Justice peonage (i.e., compulsory servitude) investigators became special agents of the Department of Justice. On July 26, 1908, Bonaparte ordered them to report to Chief Examiner Stanley W. Finch. This action is celebrated as the beginning of the FBI.

Both Attorney General Bonaparte and President Theodore Roosevelt, who completed their terms in March 1909, recommended that the force of 34 agents become a permanent part of the Department of Justice. Attorney General George Wickersham, Bonaparte's successor, named the force the Bureau of Investigation on March 16, 1909. At that time, the title of chief examiner was changed to chief of the Bureau of Investigation.
(Source: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/history/b...)

Black Tom Island Explosion:





Black Tom was only one of a number of homeland attacks in retaliation to the British naval blockade of Germany. In New Jersey, on January 1, 1915, a fire took place at the Roebling Steel foundry in Trenton. And after the Black Tom incident, on January 11, 1917, a fire took place at the Canadian Car and Foundry plant in Kingsland. These facilities had contracts for goods being sent to the Allies. The US entered the war on the side of the Allies in April 1917, after numerous claims of German espionage and violations to American neutrality.

On the evening of the Black Tom incident, barges and freight cars at the depot were reportedly filled with over two million pounds of ammunition waiting to be shipped overseas. The munitions at the depot included shrapnel, black powder, TNT and dynamite. The Johnson Barge No.17, for example, held some one hundred thousand pounds of TNT. Given these incendiary devices, the Black Tom facility was not securely gated to safeguard the nearby civilian population from the potential of foul play.

Shortly after midnight on Sunday morning, small fires on the pier were discovered and the eight guards on duty gave flight. One of the guards, however, sounded the fire alarm alerting the Jersey City Fire Department. The fires gradually set off a succession of exploding shrapnel shells. After the terrifying 2:08 a.m. blast, the well-stocked arsenal was ablaze, even casting the barges at Black Tom afloat in New York Harbor. Pieces of metal from the explosion struck the Jersey Journal building clock tower at Journal Square, stopping the clock at 2:12 a.m.
(Source: http://www.njcu.edu/programs/jchistor...)

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President Wilson's War Message (April 2, 1917) Part I:

I have called the Congress into extraordinary session because there are serious, very serious, choices of policy to be made, and made immediately, which it was neither right nor constitutionally permissible that I should assume the responsibility of making.

On the third of February last I officially laid before you the extraordinary announcement of the Imperial German Government that on and after the first day of February it was its purpose to put aside all restraints of law or of humanity and use its submarines to sink every vessel that sought to approach either the ports of Great Britain and Ireland or the western coasts of Europe or any of the ports controlled by the enemies of Germany within the Mediterranean. That had seemed to be the object of the German submarine warfare earlier in the war, but since April of last year the Imperial Government had somewhat restrained the commanders of its undersea craft in conformity with its promise then given to us that passenger boats should not be sunk and that due warning would be given to all other vessels which its submarines might seek to destroy when no resistance was offered or escape attempted, and care taken that their crews were given at least a fair chance to save their lives in their open boats. The precautions taken were meager and haphazard enough, as was proved in distressing instance after instance in the progress of the cruel and unmanly business, but a certain degree of restraint was observed. The new policy has swept every restriction aside. Vessels of every kind, whatever their flag, their character, their cargo, their destination, their errand, have been ruthlessly sent to the bottom: without warning and without thought of help or mercy for those on board, the vessels of friendly neutrals along with those of belligerents. Even hospital ships and ships carrying relief to the sorely bereaved and stricken people of Belgium, though the latter were provided with safe conduct through the proscribed areas by the German Government itself and were distinguished by unmistakable marks of identity, have been sunk with the same reckless lack of compassion or of principle.

I was for a little while unable to believe that such things would in fact be done by any government that had hitherto subscribed to the humane practices of civilized nations. International law had its origin in the attempt to set up some law which would be respected and observed upon the seas, where no nation had right of dominion and where lay the free highways of the world.... This minimum of right the German Government has swept aside under the plea of retaliation and necessity and because it had no weapons which it could use at sea except these which it is impossible to employ as it is employing them without throwing to the winds all scruples of humanity or of respect for the understandings that were supposed to underlie the intercourse of the world. I am not now thinking of the loss of property involved, immense and serious as that is, but only of the wanton and wholesale destruction of the lives of noncombatants, men, women, and children, engaged in pursuits which have always, even in the darkest periods of modern history, been deemed innocent and legitimate. Property can be paid for; the lives of peaceful and innocent people cannot be. The present German submarine warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind.

It is a war against all nations. American ships have been sunk, American lives taken, in ways which it has stirred us very deeply to learn of, but the ships and people of other neutral and friendly nations have been sunk and overwhelmed in the waters in the same way. There has been no discrimination. The challenge is to all mankind. Each nation must decide for itself how it will meet it. The choice we make for ourselves must be made with a moderation of counsel and a temperateness of judgment befitting our character and our motives as a nation. We must put excited feeling away. Our motive will not be revenge or the victorious assertion of the physical might of the nation, but only the vindication of right, of human right, of which we are only a single champion.
(Source: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/ind...)

President Wilson's War Message (April 2, 1917) Part II:

When I addressed the Congress on the twenty-sixth of February last I thought that it would suffice to assert our neutral rights with arms, our right to use the seas against unlawful interference, our right to keep our people safe against unlawful violence. But armed neutrality, it now appears, is impracticable. Because submarines are in effect outlaws when used as the German submarines have been used against merchant shipping, it is impossible to defend ships against their attacks as the law of nations has assumed that merchantmen would defend themselves against privateers or cruisers, visible craft giving chase upon the open sea. It is common prudence in such circumstances, grim necessity indeed, to endeavor to destroy them before they have shown their own intention. They must be dealt with upon sight, if dealt with at all. The German Government denies the right of neutrals to use arms at all within the areas of the sea which it has proscribed, even in the defense of rights which no modern publicist has ever before questioned their right to defend. The intimation is conveyed that the armed guards which we have placed on our merchant ships will be treated as beyond the pale of law and subject to be dealt with as pirates would be. Armed neutrality is ineffectual enough at best; in such circumstances and in the face of such pretensions it is worse than ineffectual: it is likely only to produce what it was meant to prevent; it is practically certain to draw us into the war without either the rights or the effectiveness of belligerents. There is one choice we cannot make, we are incapable of making: we will not choose the path of submission and suffer the most sacred rights of our Nation and our people to be ignored or violated. The wrongs against which we now array ourselves are no common wrongs; they cut to the very roots of human life.

With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical character of the step I am taking and of the grave responsibilities which it involves, but in unhesitating obedience to what I deem my constitutional duty, I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing less than war against the government and people of the United States; that it formally accept the status of belligerent which has thus been thrust upon it, and that it take immediate steps not only to put the country in a more thorough state of defense but also to exert all its power and employ all its resources to bring the Government of the German Empire to terms and end the war.

What this will involve is clear. It will involve the utmost practicable cooperation in counsel and action with the governments now at war with Germany, and, as incident to that, the extension to those governments of the most liberal financial credit, in order that our resources may so far as possible be added to theirs. It will involve the organization and mobilization of all the material resources of the country to supply the materials of war and serve the incidental needs of the Nation in the most abundant and yet the most economical and efficient way possible. It will involve the immediate full equipment of the navy in all respects but particularly in supplying it with the best means of dealing with the enemy's submarines. It will involve the immediate addition to the armed forces of the United States already provided for by law in case of war at least five hundred thousand men, who should, in my opinion, be chosen upon the principle of universal liability to service, and also the authorization of subsequent additional increments of equal force so soon as they may be needed and can be handled in training. It will involve also, of course, the granting of adequate credits to the Government, sustained, I hope, so far as they can equitably be sustained by the present generation, by well conceived taxation.

I say sustained so far as may be equitable by taxation because it seems to me that it would be most unwise to base the credits which will now be necessary entirely on money borrowed. It is our duty, I most respectfully urge, to protect our people so far as we may against the very serious hardships and evils which would be likely to arise out of the inflation which would be produced by vast loans.

In carrying out the measures by which these things are to be accomplished we should keep constantly in mind the wisdom of interfering as little as possible in our own preparation and in the equipment of our own military forces with the duty- for it will be a very practical duty-of supplying the nations already at war with Germany with the materials which they can obtain only from us or by our assistance. They are in the field and we should help them in every way to be effective there.

I shall take the liberty of suggesting, through the several executive departments of the Government, for the consideration of your committees, measures for the accomplishment of the several objects I have mentioned. I hope that it will be your pleasure to deal with them as having been framed after very careful thought by the branch of the Government upon which the responsibility of conducting the war and safeguarding the Nation will most directly fall.

While we do these things, these deeply momentous things, let us be very clear, and make very clear to all the world what our motives and our objects are. My own thought has not been driven from its habitual and normal course by the unhappy events of the last two months, and I do not believe that the thought of the Nation has been altered or clouded by them. I have exactly the same things in mind now that I had in mind when I addressed the Senate on the twenty-second of January last, the same that I had in mind when I addressed the Congress on the third of February and on the twenty-sixth of February. Our object now, as then, is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power and to set up amongst the really free and selfgoverned peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth insure the observance of those principles Neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable where the peace of the world is involved and the freedom of its peoples, and the menace to that peace and freedom lies in the existence of autocratic governments backed by organized force which is controlled wholly by their will, not by the will of their people. We have seen the last of neutrality in such circumstances. We are at the beginning of an age in which it will be insisted that the same standards of conduct and of responsibility for wrong done shall be observed among nations and their governments that are observed among the individual citizens of civilized states.
(Source: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/ind...)

President Wilson's War Message (April 2, 1917) Part III:

We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling towards them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their impulse that their government acted in entering this war. It was not with their previous knowledge or approval. It was a war determined upon as wars used to be determined upon in the old, unhappy days when peoples were nowhere consulted by their rulers and wars were provoked and waged in the interest of dynasties or of little groups of ambitious men who were accustomed to use their fellow men as pawns and tools. Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor states with spies or set the course of intrigue to bring about some critical posture of affairs which will give them an opportunity to strike and make conquest. Such designs can be successfully worked out only under cover and where no one has the right to ask questions. Cunningly contrived plans of deception or aggression, carried, it may be, from generation to generation, can be worked out and kept from the light only within the privacy of courts or behind the carefully guarded confidences of a narrow and privileged class. They are happily impossible where public opinion commands and insists upon full information concerning all the nation's affairs.

A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants. It must be a league of honor, a partnership of opinion. Intrigue would eat its vitals away; the plottings of inner circles who could plan what they would and render account to no one would be a corruption seated at its very heart. Only free peonies can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.

Does not every American feel that assurance has been added to our hope for the future peace of the world by the wonderful and heartening things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia? Russia was known by those who knew it best to have been always in fact democratic at heart, in all the vital habits of her thought, in all the intimate relationships of her people that spoke their natural instinct, their habitual attitude towards life. The autocracy that crowned the summit of her political structure, long as it had stood and terrible as was the reality of its power, was not in fact Russian in origin, character, or purpose; and now it has been shaken off and the great, generous Russian people have been added in all their naive majesty and might to the forces that are fighting for freedom in the world, for justice, and for peace. Here is a fit partner for a League of Honor.

One of the things that has served to convince us that the Prussian, autocracy was not and could never be our friend is that from the very outset of the present war it has filled our unsuspecting communities and even our offices of government with spies and set criminal intrigues everywhere afoot against our national unity of counsel, our peace Within and without, our industries and our commerce. Indeed it is now evident that its spies were here even before the war began; and it is unhappily not a matter of conjecture but a fact proved in our courts of justice that the intrigues which have more than once come perilously near to disturbing the peace and dislocating the industries of the country have been carried on at the instigation, with the support, and even under the personal direction of official agents of the Imperial Government accredited to the Government of the United States. Even in checking these things and trying to extirpate them we have sought to put the most generous interpretation possible upon them because we knew that their source lay, not in any hostile feeling or purpose of the German people towards us (who were, no doubt, as ignorant of them as we ourselves were), but only in the selfish designs of a Government that did what it pleased and told its people nothing. But they have played their part in serving to convince us at last that that Government entertains no real friendship for us and means to act against our peace and security at its convenience. That it means to stir up enemies against us at our very doors the intercepted note to the German Minister at Mexico City is eloquent evidence.

We are accepting this challenge of hostile purpose because we know that in such a Government, following such methods, we can never have a friend; and that in the presence of its organized power, always lying in wait to accomplish we know not what purpose, there can be no assured security for the democratic Governments of the world. We are now about to accept gauge of battle with this natural foe to liberty and shall, if necessary, spend the whole force of the nation to check and nullify its pretensions and its power. We are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretense about them to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included: for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them.

Just because we fight without rancor and without selfish object, seeking nothing for ourselves but what we shall wish to share with all free peoples, we shall, I feel confident, conduct our operations as belligerents without passion and ourselves observe with proud punctilio the principles of right and of fair play we profess to be fighting for.

I have said nothing of the Governments allied with the Imperial Government of Germany because they have not made war upon us or challenged us to defend our right and our honor. The Austro-Hungarian Government has, indeed, avowed its unqualified endorsement and acceptance of the reckless and lawless submarine warfare adopted now without disguise by the Imperial German Government, and it has therefore not been possible for this Government to receive Count Tarnowski, the Ambassador recently accredited to this Government by the Imperial and Royal Government of Austria-Hungary; but that Government has not actually engaged in warfare against citizens of the United States on the seas, and I take the liberty, for the present at least, of postponing a discussion of our relations with the authorities at Vienna. We enter this war only where we are clearly forced into it because there are no other means of defending our rights.

It will be all the easier for us to conduct ourselves as belligerents in a high spirit of right and fairness because we act without animus, not in enmity towards a people or with the desire to bring any injury or disadvantage upon them, but only in armed opposition to an irresponsible government which has thrown aside all considerations of humanity and of right and is running amuck. We are, let me say again, the sincere friends of the German people, and shall desire nothing so much as the early reestablishment of intimate relations of mutual advantage between us,- however hard it may be for them, for the time being, to believe that this is spoken from our hearts. We have borne with their present Government through all these bitter months because of that friendship,-exercising a patience and forbearance which would otherwise have been impossible. We shall, happily, still have an opportunity to prove that friendship in our daily attitude and actions towards the millions of men and women of German birth and native sympathy who live amongst us and share our life, and we shall be proud to prove it towards all who are in fact loyal to their neighbors and to the Government in the hour of test. They are, most of them, as true and loyal Americans as if they had never known any other fealty or allegiance. They will be prompt to stand with us in rebuking and restraining the few who may be of a different mind and purpose. If there should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with with a firm hand of stern repression; but, if it lifts its head at all, it will lift it only here and there and without countenance except from a lawless and malignant few.

It is a distressing and oppressive duty, Gentlemen of the Congress, which I have performed in thus addressing you. There are, it may be many months of fiery trial and sacrifice ahead of us. It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts-for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own Governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free. To such a task we can dedicate our Eves and our fortunes, every thing that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.
(Source: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/ind...)

President Wilson's Annual Message (December 7, 1915) Part I:

Since I last had the privilege of addressing you on the state of the Union the war of nations on the other side of the sea, which had then only begun to disclose its portentous proportions, has extended its threatening and sinister scope until it has swept within its flame some portion of every quarter of the globe, not excepting our own hemisphere, has altered the whole face of international affairs, and now presents a prospect of reorganization and reconstruction such as statesmen and peoples have never been called upon to attempt before.

We have stood apart, studiously neutral. It was our manifest duty to do so. Not only did we have no part or interest in the policies which seem to have brought the conflict on; it was necessary, if a universal catastrophe was to be avoided, that a limit should be set to the sweep of destructive war and that some part of the great family of nations should keep the processes of peace alive, if only to prevent collective economic ruin and the breakdown throughout the world of the industries by which its populations are fed and sustained. It was manifestly the duty of the self-governed nations of this hemisphere to redress, if possible, the balance of economic loss and confusion in the other, if they could do nothing more. In the day of readjustment and recuperation we earnestly hope and believe that they can be of infinite service.

In this neutrality, to which they were bidden not only by their separate life and their habitual detachment from the politics of Europe but also by a clear perception of international duty, the states of America have become conscious of a new and more vital community of interest and moral partnership in affairs, more clearly conscious of the many common sympathies and interests and duties which bid them stand together.

There was a time in the early days of our own great nation and of the republics fighting their way to independence in Central and South America when the government of the United States looked upon itself as in some sort the guardian of the republics to the South of her as against any encroachments or efforts at political control from the other side of the water; felt it its duty to play the part even without invitation from them; and I think that we can claim that the task was undertaken with a true and disinterested enthusiasm for the freedom of the Americas and the unmolested Selfgovernment of her independent peoples. But it was always difficult to maintain such a role without offense to the pride of the peoples whose freedom of action we sought to protect, and without provoking serious misconceptions of our motives, and every thoughtful man of affairs must welcome the altered circumstances of the new day in whose light we now stand, when there is no claim of guardianship or thought of wards but, instead, a full and honorable association as of partners between ourselves and our neighbors, in the interest of all America, north and south. Our concern for the independence and prosperity of the states of Central and South America is not altered. We retain unabated the spirit that has inspired us throughout the whole life of our government and which was so frankly put into words by President Monroe. We still mean always to make a common cause of national independence and of political liberty in America. But that purpose is now better understood so far as it concerns ourselves. It is known not to be a selfish purpose. It is known to have in it no thought of taking advantage of any government in this hemisphere or playing its political fortunes for our own benefit. All the governments of America stand, so far as we are concerned, upon a footing of genuine equality and unquestioned independence.

We have been put to the test in the case of Mexico, and we have stood the test. Whether we have benefited Mexico by the course we have pursued remains to be seen. Her fortunes are in her own hands. But we have at least proved that we will not take advantage of her in her distress and undertake to impose upon her an order and government of our own choosing. Liberty is often a fierce and intractable thing, to which no bounds can be set, and to which no bounds of a few men's choosing ought ever to be set. Every American who has drunk at the true fountains of principle and tradition must subscribe without reservation to the high doctrine of the Virginia Bill of Rights, which in the great days in which our government was set up was everywhere amongst us accepted as the creed of free men. That doctrine is, "That government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the people, nation, or community"; that "of all the various modes and forms of government, that is the best which is capable of producing the greatest degree of happiness and safety, and is most effectually secured against the danger of maladministration; and that, when any government shall be found inadequate or contrary to these purposes, a majority of the community hath an indubitable, inalienable, and indefeasible right to reform, alter, or abolish it, in such manner as shall be judged most conducive to the public weal." We have unhesitatingly applied that heroic principle to the case of Mexico, and now hopefully await the rebirth of the troubled Republic, which had so much of which to purge itself and so little sympathy from any outside quarter in the radical but necessary process. We will aid and befriend Mexico, but we will not coerce her; and our course with regard to her ought to be sufficient proof to all America that we seek no political suzerainty or selfish control.

The moral is, that the states of America are not hostile rivals but cooperating friends, and that their growing sense of community or interest, alike in matters political and in matters economic, is likely to give them a new significance as factors in international affairs and in the political history of the world. It presents them as in a very deep and true sense a unit in world affairs, spiritual partners, standing together because thinking together, quick with common sympathies and common ideals. Separated they are subject to all the cross currents of the confused politics of a world of hostile rivalries; united in spirit and purpose they cannot be disappointed of their peaceful destiny.

This is Pan-Americanism. It has none of the spirit of empire in it. It is the embodiment, the effectual embodiment, of the spirit of law and independence and liberty and mutual service.

A very notable body of men recently met in the City of Washington, at the invitation and as the guests of this Government, whose deliberations are likely to be looked back to as marking a memorable turning point in the history of America. They were representative spokesmen of the several independent states of this hemisphere and were assembled to discuss the financial and commercial relations of the republics of the two continents which nature and political fortune have so intimately linked together. I earnestly recommend to your perusal the reports of their proceedings and of the actions of their committees. You will get from them, I think, a fresh conception of the ease and intelligence and advantage with which Americans of both continents may draw together in practical cooperation and of what the material foundations of this hopeful partnership of interest must consist,-of how we should build them and of how necessary it is that we should hasten their building.

There is, I venture to point out, an especial significance just now attaching to this whole matter of drawing the Americans together in bonds of honorable partnership and mutual advantage because of the economic readjustments which the world must inevitably witness within the next generation, when peace shall have at last resumed its healthful tasks. In the performance of these tasks I believe the Americas to be destined to play their parts together. I am interested to fix your attention on this prospect now because unless you take it within your view and permit the full significance of it to command your thought I cannot find the right light in which to set forth the particular matter that lies at the very font of my whole thought as I address you to-day. I mean national defense.

No one who really comprehends the spirit of the great people for whom we are appointed to speak can fail to perceive that their passion is for peace, their genius best displayed in the practice of the arts of peace. Great democracies are not belligerent. They do not seek or desire war. Their thought is of individual liberty and of the free labor that supports life and the uncensored thought that quickens it. Conquest and dominion are not in our reckoning, or agreeable to our principles. But just because we demand unmolested development and the undisturbed government of our own lives upon our own principles of right and liberty, we resent, from whatever quarter it may come, the aggression we ourselves will not practice. We insist upon security in prosecuting our self-chosen lines of national development. We do more than that. We demand it also for others. We do not confine our enthusiasm for individual liberty and free national development to the incidents and movements of affairs which affect only ourselves. We feel it wherever there is a people that tries to walk in these difficult paths of independence and right. From the first we have made common cause with all partisans of liberty on this side the sea, and have deemed it as important that our neighbors should be free from all outside domination as that we ourselves should be.- have set America aside as a whole for the uses of independent nations and political freemen.

Out of such thoughts grow all our policies. We regard war merely as a means of asserting the rights of a people against aggression. And we are as fiercely jealous of coercive or dictatorial power within our own nation as of aggression from without. We will not maintain a standing army except for uses which are as necessary in times of peace as in times of war; and we shall always see to it that our military peace establishment is no larger than is actually and continuously needed for the uses of days in which no enemies move against us. But we do believe in a body of free citizens ready and sufficient to take care of themselves and of the governments which they have set up to serve them. In our constitutions themselves we have commanded that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed," and our confidence has been that our safety in times of danger would lie in the rising of the nation to take care of itself, as the farmers rose at Lexington.

But war has never been a mere matter of men and guns. It is a thing of disciplined might. If our citizens are ever to fight effectively upon a sudden summons, they must know how modern fighting is done, and what to do when the summons comes to render themselves immediately available and immediately effective. And the government must be their servant in this matter, must supply them with the training they need to take care of themselves and of it. The military arm of their government, which they will not allow to direct them, they may properly use to serve them and make their independence secure,-and not their own independence merely but the rights also of those with whom they have made common cause, should they also be put in jeopardy. They must be fitted to play the great role in the world, and particularly in this hemisphere, for which they are qualified by principle and by chastened ambition to play.
(Source: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/ind...)

President Wilson's Annual Message (December 7, 1915) Part II:

It is with these ideals in mind that the plans of the Department of War for more adequate national defense were conceived which will be laid before you, and which I urge you to sanction and put into effect as soon as they can be properly scrutinized and discussed. They seem to me the essential first steps, and they seem to me for the present sufficient.

They contemplate an increase of the standing force of the regular army from its present strength of five thousand and twenty-three officers and one hundred and two thousand nine hundred and eightyfive enlisted men of all services to a strength of seven thousand one hundred and thirty-six officers and one hundred and thirty-four thousand seven hundred and seven enlisted men, or 141,843, all told, all services, rank and file, by the addition of fifty-two companies of coast artillery, fifteen companies of engineers, ten regiments of infantry, four regiments of field artillery, and four aero squadrons, besides seven hundred and fifty officers required for a great variety of extra service, especially the all important duty of training the citizen force of which I shall presently speak, seven hundred and ninety-two noncommissioned officers for service in drill, recruiting and the like, and the necessary quota of enlisted men for the Quartermaster Corps, the Hospital Corps, the Ordnance Department, and other similar auxiliary services. These are the additions necessary to render the army adequate for its present duties, duties which it has to perform not only upon our own continental coasts and borders and at our interior army posts, but also in the Philippines, in the Hawaiian Islands, at the Isthmus, and in Porto Rico.

By way of making the country ready to assert some part of its real power promptly and upon a larger scale, should occasion arise, the plan also contemplates supplementing the army by a force of four hundred thousand disciplined citizens, raised in increments of one hundred and thirty-three thousand a year throughout a period of three years. This it is proposed to do by a process of enlistment under which the serviceable men of the country would be asked to bind themselves to serve with the colors for purposes of training for short periods throughout three years, and to come to the colors at call at any time throughout an additional "furlough" period of three years. This force of four hundred thousand men would be provided with personal accoutrements as fast as enlisted and their equipment for the field made ready to be supplied at any time. They would be assembled for training at stated intervals at convenient places in association with suitable units of the regular army. Their period of annual training would not necessarily exceed two months in the year.

It would depend upon the patriotic feeling of the younger men of the country whether they responded to such a call to service or not. It would depend upon the patriotic spirit of the employers of the country whether they made it possible for the younger men in their employ to respond under favorable conditions or not. I, for one, do not doubt the patriotic devotion either of our young men or of those who give them employment,--those for whose benefit and protection they would in fact enlist. I would look forward to the success of such an experiment with entire confidence.

At least so much by way of preparation for defense seems to me to be absolutely imperative now. We cannot do less.

The programme which will be laid before you by the Secretary of the Navy is similarly conceived. It involves only a shortening of the time within which plans long matured shall be carried out; but it does make definite and explicit a programme which has heretofore been only implicit, held in the minds of the Committees on Naval Affairs and disclosed in the debates of the two Houses but nowhere formulated or formally adopted. It seems to me very clear that it will be to the advantage of the country for the Congress to adopt a comprehensive plan for putting the navy upon a final footing of strength and efficiency and to press that plan to completion within the next five years. We have always looked to the navy of the country as our first and chief line of defense; we have always seen it to be our manifest course of prudence to be strong on the seas. Year by year we have been creating a navy which now ranks very high indeed among the navies of the maritime nations. We should now definitely determine how we shall complete what we have begun, and how soon.

The programme to be laid before you contemplates the construction within five years of ten battleships, six battle cruisers, ten scout cruisers, fifty destroyers, fifteen fleet submarines, eighty-five coast submarines, four gunboats, one hospital ship, two ammunition ships, two fuel oil ships, and one repair ship. It is proposed that of this number we shall the first year provide for the construction of two battleships, two battle cruisers, three scout cruisers, fifteen destroyers, five fleet submarines, twenty-five coast submarines, two gunboats, and one hospital ship; the second year, two battleships, one scout cruiser, ten destroyers, four fleet submarines, fifteen coast submarines, one gunboat, and one fuel oil ship; the third year, two battleships, one battle cruiser, two scout cruisers, five destroyers, two fleet sub marines, and fifteen coast submarines; the fourth year, two battleships, two battle cruisers, two scout cruisers, ten destroyers, two fleet submarines, fifteen coast submarines, one ammunition ship, and one fuel oil ship; and the fifth year, two battleships, one battle cruiser, two scout cruisers, ten destroyers, two fleet submarines, fifteen coast submarines, one gunboat, one ammunition ship, and one repair ship.

The Secretary of the Navy is asking also for the immediate addition to the personnel of the navy of seven thousand five hundred sailors, twenty-five hundred apprentice seamen, and fifteen hundred marines. This increase would be sufficient to care for the ships which are to be completed within the fiscal year 1917 and also for the number of men which must be put in training to man the ships which will be completed early in 1918. It is also necessary that the number of midshipmen at the Naval academy at Annapolis should be increased by at least three hundred in order that the force of officers should be more rapidly added to; and authority is asked to appoint, for engineering duties only, approved graduates of engineering colleges, and for service in the aviation corps a certain number of men taken from civil life.

If this full programme should be carried out we should have built or building in 1921, according to the estimates of survival and standards of classification followed by the General Board of the Department, an effective navy consisting of twenty-seven battleships of the first line, six battle cruisers, twenty-five battleships of the second line, ten armored cruisers, thirteen scout cruisers, five first class cruisers, three second class cruisers, ten third class cruisers, one hundred and eight destroyers, eighteen fleet submarines, one hundred and fifty-seven coast submarines, six monitors, twenty gunboats, four supply ships, fifteen fuel ships, four transports, three tenders to torpedo vessels, eight vessels of special types, and two ammunition ships. This would be a navy fitted to our needs and worthy of our traditions.

But armies and instruments of war are only part of what has to be considered if we are to provide for the supreme matter of national self-sufficiency and security in all its aspects. There are other great matters which will be thrust upon our attention whether we will or not. There is, for example, a very pressing question of trade and shipping involved in this great problem of national adequacy. It is necessary for many weighty reasons of national efficiency and development that we should have a great merchant marine. The great merchant fleet we once used to make us rich, that great body of sturdy sailors who used to carry our flag into every sea, and who were the pride and often the bulwark of the nation, we have almost driven out of existence by inexcusable neglect and indifference and by a hope lessly blind and provincial policy of so-called economic protection. It is high time we repaired our mistake and resumed our commercial independence on the seas.

For it is a question of independence. If other nations go to war or seek to hamper each other's commerce, our merchants, it seems, are at their mercy, to do with as they please. We must use their ships, and use them as they determine. We have not ships enough of our own. We cannot handle our own commerce on the seas. Our independence is provincial, and is only on land and within our own borders. We are not likely to be permitted to use even the ships of other nations in rivalry of their own trade, and are without means to extend our commerce even where the doors are wide open and our goods desired. Such a situation is not to be endured. It is of capital importance not only that the United States should be its own carrier on the seas and enjoy the economic independence which only an adequate merchant marine would give it, but also that the American hemisphere as a whole should enjoy a like independence and self-sufficiency, if it is not to be drawn into the tangle of European affairs. Without such independence the whole question of our political unity and self-determination is very seriously clouded and complicated indeed.

Moreover, we can develop no true or effective American policy without ships of our own,--not ships of war, but ships of peace, carrying goods and carrying much more: creating friendships and rendering indispensable services to all interests on this side the water. They must move constantly back and forth between the Americas. They are the only shuttles that can weave the delicate fabric of sympathy, -comprehension, confidence, and mutual dependence in which we wish to clothe our policy of America for Americans.

The task of building up an adequate merchant marine for America private capital must ultimately undertake and achieve, as it has undertaken and achieved every other like task amongst us in the past, with admirable enterprise, intelligence, and vigor; and it seems to me a manifest dictate of wisdom that we should promptly remove every legal obstacle that may stand in the way of this much to be desired revival of our old independence and should facilitate in every possible way the building, purchase, and American registration of ships. But capital cannot accomplish this great task of a sudden. It must embark upon it by degrees, as the opportunities of trade develop. Something must be done at once; done to open routes and develop opportunities where they are as yet undeveloped; done to open the arteries of trade where the currents have not yet learned to run,-especially between the two American continents, where they are, singularly enough, yet to be created and quickened; and it is evident that only the government can undertake such beginnings and assume the initial financial risks. When the risk has passed and private capital begins to find its way in sufficient abundance into these new channels, the government may withdraw. But it cannot omit to begin. It should take the first steps, and should take them at once. Our goods must not lie piled up at our ports and stored upon side tracks in freight cars which are daily needed on the roads; must not be left without means of transport to any foreign quarter. We must not await the permission of foreign ship-owners and foreign governments to send them where we will.
(Source: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/ind...)

President Wilson's Annual Message (December 7, 1915) Part III:

With a view to meeting these pressing necessities of our commerce and availing ourselves at the earliest possible moment of the present unparalleled opportunity of linking the two Americas together in bonds of mutual interest and service, an opportunity which may never return again if we miss it now, proposals will be made to the present Congress for the purchase or construction of ships to be owned and directed by the government similar to those made to the last Congress, but modified in some essential particulars. I recommend these proposals to you for your prompt acceptance with the more confidence because every month that has elapsed since the former proposals were made has made the necessity for such action more and more manifestly imperative. That need was then foreseen; it is now acutely felt and everywhere realized by those for whom trade is waiting but who can find no conveyance for their goods. I am not so much interested in the particulars of the programme as I am in taking immediate advantage of the great opportunity which awaits us if we will but act in this emergency. In this matter, as in all others, a spirit of common counsel should prevail, and out of it should come an early solution of this pressing problem.

There is another matter which seems to me to be very intimately associated with the question of national safety and preparation for defense. That is our policy towards the Philippines and the people of Porto Rico. Our treatment of them and their attitude towards us are manifestly of the first consequence in the development of our duties in the world and in getting a free hand to perform those duties. We must be free from every unnecessary burden or embarrassment; and there is no better way to be clear of embarrassment than to fulfil our promises and promote the interests of those dependent on us to the utmost. Bills for the alteration and reform of the government of the Philippines and for rendering fuller political justice to the people of Porto Rico were submitted to the sixty-third Congress. They will be submitted also to you. I need not particularize their details. You are most of you already familiar with them. But I do recommend them to your early adoption with the sincere conviction that there are few measures you could adopt which would more serviceably clear the way for the great policies by which we wish to make good, now and always, our right to lead in enterpriscs of peace and good will and economic and political freedom.

The plans for the armed forces of the nation which I have outlined, and for the general policy of adequate preparation for mobilization and defense, involve of course very large additional expenditures of money,-expenditures which will considerably exceed the estimated revenues of the government. It is made my duty by law, whenever the estimates of expenditure exceed the estimates of revenue, to call the attention of the Congress to the fact and suggest any means of meeting the deficiency that it may be wise or possible for me to suggest. I am ready to believe that it would be my duty to do so in any case; and I feel particularly bound to speak of the matter when it appears that the deficiency will arise directly out of the adoption by the Congress of measures which I myself urge it to adopt. Allow me, therefore, to speak briefly of the present state of the Treasury and of the fiscal problems which the next year will probably disclose.

On the thirtieth of June last there was an available balance in the general fund of the Treasury Of $104,170,105.78. The total estimated receipts for the year 1916, on the assumption that the emergency revenue measure passed by the last Congress will not be extended beyond its present limit, the thirty-first of December, 1915, and that the present duty of one cent per pound on sugar will be discontinued after the first of May, 1916, will be $670,365,500. The balance of June last and these estimated revenues come, therefore, to a grand total of $774,535,605-78. The total estimated disbursements for the present fiscal year, including twenty-five millions for the Panama Canal, twelve millions for probable deficiency appropriations, and fifty thousand dollars for miscellaneous debt redemptions, will be $753,891,000; and the balance in the general fund of the Treasury will be reduced to $20,644,605.78. The emergency revenue act, if continued beyond its present time limitation, would produce, during the half year then remaining, about forty-one millions. The duty of one cent per pound on sugar, if continued, would produce during the two months of the fiscal year remaining after the first of May, about fifteen millions. These two sums, amounting together to fifty-six millions, if added to the revenues of the second half of the fiscal year, would yield the Treasury at the end of the year an available balance Of $76,644,605-78.

The additional revenues required to carry out the programme of military and naval preparation of which I have spoken, would, as at present estimated, be for the fiscal year, 1917, $93,800,000. Those figures, taken with the figures for the present fiscal year which I have already given, disclose our financial problem for the year 1917. Assuming that the taxes imposed by the emergency revenue act and the present duty on sugar are to be discontinued, and that the balance at the close of the present fiscal year will be only $20,644,605.78, that the disbursements for the Panama Canal will again be about twenty-five millions, and that the additional expenditures for the army and navy are authorized by the Congress, the deficit in the general fund of the Treasury on the thirtieth of June, 1917, will be nearly two hundred and thirty-five millions. To this sum at least fifty millions should be added to represent a safe working balance for the Treasury, and twelve millions to include the usual deficiency estimates in 1917; and these additions would make a total deficit of some two hundred and ninety-seven millions. If the present taxes should be continued throughout this year and the next, however, there would be a balance in the Treasury of some seventy-six and a half millions at the end of the present fiscal year, and a deficit at the end of the next year of only some fifty millions, or, reckoning in sixty-two millions for deficiency appropriations and a safe Treasury balance at the end of the year, a total deficit of some one hundred and twelve millions. The obvious moral of the figures is that it is a plain counsel of prudence to continue all of the present taxes or their equivalents, and confine ourselves to the problem of providing one hundred and twelve millions of new revenue rather than two hundred and ninety-seven millions.

How shall we obtain the new revenue? We are frequently reminded that there are many millions of bonds which the Treasury is authorized under existing law to sell to reimburse the sums paid out of current revenues for the construction of the Panama Canal; and it is true that bonds to the amount of approximately $222,000,000 are now available for that purpose. Prior to 1913, $134,631,980 of these bonds had actually been sold to recoup the expenditures at the Isthmus; and now constitute a considerable item of the public debt. But I, for one, do not believe that the people of this country approve of postponing the payment of their bills. Borrowing money is short-sighted finance. It can be justified only when permanent things are to be accomplished which many generations will certainly benefit by and which it seems hardly fair that a single generation should pay for. The objects we are now proposing to spend money for cannot be so classified, except in the sense that everything wisely done may be said to be done in the interest of posterity as well as in our own. It seems to me a clear dictate of prudent statesmanship and frank finance that in what we are now, I hope, about to undertake we should pay as we go. The people of the country are entitled to know just what burdens of taxation they are to carry, and to know from the outset, now. The new bills should be paid by internal taxation.

To what sources, then, shall we turn? This is so peculiarly a question which the gentlemen of the House of Representatives are expected under the Constitution to propose an answer to that you will hardly expect me to do more than discuss it in very general terms. We should be following an almost universal example of modern governments if we were to draw the greater part or even the whole of the revenues we need from the income taxes. By somewhat lowering the present limits of exemption and the figure at which the surtax shall begin to be imposed, and by increasing, step by step throughout the present graduation, the surtax itself, the income taxes as at present apportioned would yield sums sufficient to balance the books of the Treasury at the end of the fiscal year 1917 without anywhere making the burden unreasonably or oppressively heavy. The precise reckonings are fully and accurately set out in the report of the Secretary of the Treasury which will be immediately laid before you.

And there are many additional sources of revenue which can justly be resorted to without hampering the industries of the country or putting any too great charge upon individual expenditure. A tax of one cent per gallon on gasoline and naphtha would yield, at the present estimated production, $10,000,000; a tax of fifty cents per horse power on automobiles and internal explosion engines, $15,000,000; a stamp tax on bank cheques, probably $18,000,000; a tax of twenty-five cents per ton on pig iron, $10,000,000; a tax of twenty-five cents per ton on fabricated iron and steel, probably $10,000,000. In a country of great industries like this it ought to be easy to distribute the burdens of taxation without making them anywhere bear too heavily or too exclusively upon any one set of persons or undertakings. What is clear is, that the industry of this generation should pay the bills of this generation.
(Source: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/ind...)

President Wilson's Annual Message (December 7, 1915) Part IV:

have spoken to you to-day, Gentlemen, upon a single theme, the thorough preparation of the nation to care for its own security and to make sure of entire freedom to play the impartial role in this hemisphere and in the world which we all believe to have been providentially assigned to it. I have had in my mind no thought of any immediate or particular danger arising out of our relations with other nations. We are at peace with all the nations of the world, and there is reason to hope that no question in controversy between this and other Governments will lead to any serious breach of amicable relations, grave as some differences of attitude and policy have been land may yet turn out to be. I am sorry to say that the gravest threats against our national peace and safety have been uttered within our own borders. There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life; who have sought to bring the authority and good name of our Government into contempt, to destroy our industries wherever they thought it effective for their vindictive purposes to strike at them, and to debase our politics to the uses of foreign intrigue. Their number is not great as compared with the whole number of those sturdy hosts by which our nation has been enriched in recent generations out of virile foreign stock; but it is great enough to have brought deep disgrace upon us and to have made it necessary that we should promptly make use of processes of law by which we may be purged of their corrupt distempers. America never witnessed anything like this before. It never dreamed it possible that men sworn into its own citizenship, men drawn out of great free stocks such as supplied some of the best and strongest elements of that little, but how heroic, nation that in a high day of old staked its very life to free itself from every entanglement that had darkened the fortunes of the older nations and set up a new standard here,that men of such origins and such free choices of allegiance would ever turn in malign reaction against the Government and people who bad welcomed and nurtured them and seek to make this proud country once more a hotbed of European passion. A little while ago such a thing would have seemed incredible. Because it was incredible we made no preparation for it. We would have been almost ashamed to prepare for it, as if we were suspicious of ourselves, our own comrades and neighbors! But the ugly and incredible thing has actually come about and we are without adequate federal laws to deal with it. I urge you to enact such laws at the earliest possible moment and feel that in doing so I am urging you to do nothing less than save the honor and self-respect of the nation. Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out. They are not many, but they are infinitely malignant, and the hand of our power should close over them at once. They have formed plots to destroy property, they have entered into conspiracies against the neutrality of the Government, they have sought to pry into every confidential transaction of the Government in order to serve interests alien to our own. It is possible to deal with these things very effectually. I need not suggest the terms in which they may be dealt with.

I wish that it could be said that only a few men, misled by mistaken sentiments of allegiance to the governments under which they were born, had been guilty of disturbing the self-possession and misrepresenting the temper and principles of the country during these days of terrible war, when it would seem that every man who was truly an American would instinctively make it his duty and his pride to keep the scales of judgment even and prove himself a partisan of no nation but his own. But it cannot. There are some men among us, and many resident abroad who, though born and bred in the United States and calling themselves Americans, have so forgotten themselves and their honor as citizens as to put their passionate sympathy with one or the other side in the great European conflict above their regard for the peace and dignity of the United States. They also preach and practice disloyalty. No laws, I suppose, can reach corruptions of the mind and heart; but I should not speak of others without also speaking of these and expressing the even deeper humiliation and scorn which every self-possessed and thoughtfully patriotic American must feel when lie thinks of them and of the discredit they are daily bringing upon us.

While we speak of the preparation of the nation to make sure of her security and her effective power we must not fall into the patent error of supposing that her real strength comes from armaments and mere safeguards of written law. It comes, of course, from her people, their energy, their success in their undertakings, their free opportunity to use the natural resources of our great home land and of the lands outside our continental borders which look to us for protection, for encouragement, and for assistance in their development; from the organization and freedom and vitality of our economic life. The domestic questions which engaged the attention of the last Congress are more vital to the nation in this its time of test than at any other time. We cannot adequately make ready for any trial of our strength unless we wisely and promptly direct the force of our laws into these all-important fields of domestic action. A matter which it seems to me we should have very much at heart is the creation of the right instrumentalities by which to mobilize our economic resources in any time of national necessity. I take it for granted that I do not need your authority to call into systematic consultation with the directing officers of the army and navy men of recognized leadership and ability from among our citizens who are thoroughly familiar, for example, with the transportation facilities of the country and therefore competent to advise how they may be coordinated when the need arises, those who can suggest the best way in which to bring about prompt cooperation among the manufacturers of the country, should it be necessary, and those who could assist to bring the technical skill of the country to the aid of the Government in the solution of particular problems of defense. I only hope that if I should find it feasible to constitute such an advisory body the Congress would be willing to vote the small sum of money that would be needed to defray the expenses that would probably be necessary to give it the clerical and administrative Machinery with which to do serviceable work.

What is more important is, that the industries and resources of the country should be available and ready for mobilization. It is the more imperatively necessary, therefore, that we should promptly devise means for doing what we have not yet done: that we should give intelligent federal aid and stimulation to industrial and vocational education, as we have long done in the large field of our agricultural industry; that, at the same time that we safeguard and conserve the natural resources of the country we should put them at the disposal of those who will use them promptly and intelligently, as was sought to be done in the admirable bills submitted to the last Congress from its committees on the public lands, bills which I earnestly recommend in principle to your consideration; that we should put into early operation some provision for rural credits which will add to the extensive borrowing facilities already afforded the farmer by the Reserve Bank Act, adequate instrumentalities by which long credits may be obtained on land mortgages; and that we should study more carefully than they have hitherto been studied the right adaptation of our economic arrangements to changing conditions.

Many conditions about which we have repeatedly legislated are being altered from decade to decade, it is evident, under our very eyes, and are likely to change even more rapidly and more radically in the days immediately ahead of us, when peace has returned to the world and the nations of Europe once more take up their tasks of commerce and industry with the energy of those who must bestir themselves to build anew. just what these changes will be no one can certainly foresee or confidently predict. There are no calculable, because no stable, elements in the problem. The most we can do is to make certain that we have the necessary instrumentalities of information constantly at our service so that we may be sure that we know exactly what we are dealing with when we come to act, if it should be necessary to act at all. We must first certainly know what it is that we are seeking to adapt ourselves to. I may ask the privilege of addressing you more at length on this important matter a little later in your session.

In the meantime may I make this suggestion? The transportation problem is an exceedingly serious and pressing one in this country. There has from time to time of late been reason to fear that our railroads would not much longer be able to cope with it successfully, as at present equipped and coordinated I suggest that it would be wise to provide for a commission of inquiry to ascertain by a thorough canvass of the whole question whether our laws as at present framed and administered are as serviceable as they might be' in the solution of the problem. It is obviously a problem that lies at the very foundation of our efficiency as a people. Such an inquiry ought to draw out every circumstance and opinion worth considering and we need to know all sides of the matter if we mean to do anything in the field of federal legislation.

No one, I am sure, would wish to take any backward step. The regulation of the railways of the country by federal commission has had admirable results and has fully justified the hopes and expectations of those by whom the policy of regulation was originally proposed. The question is not what should we undo. It is, whether there is anything else we can do that would supply us with effective means, in the very process of regulation, for bettering the conditions under which the railroads are operated and for making them more useful servants of the country as a whole. It seems to me that it might be the part of wisdom, therefore, before further legislation in this field is attempted, to look at the whole problem of coordination and efficiency in the full light of a fresh assessment of circumstance and opinion, as a guide to dealing with the several parts of it.

For what we are seeking now, what in my mind is the single thought of this message, is national efficiency and security. We serve a great nation. We should serve it in the spirit of its peculiar genius. It is the genius of common men for self-government, industry, justice, liberty and peace. We should see to it that it lacks no instrument, no facility or vigor of law, to make it sufficient to play its part with energy, safety, and assured success. In this we are no partisans but heralds and prophets of a new age.
(Source: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/ind...)

Haymarket (1886):



On May 1, 1886, Chicago unionists, reformers, socialists, anarchists, and ordinary workers combined to make the city the center of the national movement for an eight-hour day. Between April 25 and May 4, workers attended scores of meetings and paraded through the streets at least 19 times. On Saturday, May 1, 35,000 workers walked off their jobs. Tens of thousands more, both skilled and unskilled, joined them on May 3 and 4. Crowds traveled from workplace to workplace urging fellow workers to strike. Many now adopted the radical demand of eight hours' work for ten hours' pay. Police clashed with strikers at least a dozen times, three with shootings.

At the McCormick reaper plant, a long-simmering strike erupted in violence on May 3, and police fired at strikers, killing at least two. Anarchists called a protest meeting at the West Randolph Street Haymarket, advertising it in inflammatory leaflets, one of which called for “Revenge!”

The crowd gathered on the evening of May 4 on Des Plaines Street, just north of Randolph, was peaceful, and Mayor Carter H. Harrison, who attended, instructed police not to disturb the meeting. But when one speaker urged the dwindling crowd to “throttle” the law, 176 officers under Inspector John Bonfield marched to the meeting and ordered it to disperse.

Then someone hurled a bomb at the police, killing one officer instantly. Police drew guns, firing wildly. Sixty officers were injured, and eight died; an undetermined number of the crowd were killed or wounded.

The Haymarket bomb seemed to confirm the worst fears of business leaders and others anxious about the growing labor movement and radical influence in it. Mayor Harrison quickly banned meetings and processions. Police made picketing impossible and suppressed the radical press. Chicago newspapers publicized unsubstantiated police theories of anarchist conspiracies, and they published attacks on the foreign-born and calls for revenge, matching the anarchists in inflammatory language. The violence demoralized strikers, and only a few well-organized strikes continued.

Police arrested hundreds of people, but never determined the identity of the bomb thrower. Amidst public clamor for revenge, however, eight anarchists, including prominent speakers and writers, were tried for murder. The partisan Judge Joseph E. Gary conducted the trial, and all 12 jurors acknowledged prejudice against the defendants. Lacking credible evidence that the defendants threw the bomb or organized the bomb throwing, prosecutors focused on their writings and speeches. The jury, instructed to adopt a conspiracy theory without legal precedent, convicted all eight. Seven were sentenced to death. The trial is now considered one of the worst miscarriages of justice in American history.

Many Americans were outraged at the verdicts, but legal appeals failed. Two death sentences were commuted, but on November 11, 1887, four defendants were hanged in the Cook County jail; one committed suicide. Hundreds of thousands turned out for the funeral procession of the five dead men. In 1893, Governor John Peter Altgeld granted the three imprisoned defendants absolute pardon, citing the lack of evidence against them and the unfairness of the trial.
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Homestead Strike (1892):



The 1892 Homestead strike in Pennsylvania and the ensuing bloody battle instigated by the steel plant's management remain a transformational moment in U.S. history, leaving scars that have never fully healed after five generations.

The skilled workers at the steel mills in Homestead, seven miles southeast of downtown Pittsburgh, were members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers who had bargained exceptionally good wages and work rules. Homestead's management, with millionaire Andrew Carnegie as owner, was determined to lower its costs of production by breaking the union.

Carnegie Steel Co. was making massive profits—a record $4.5 million just before the 1892 confrontation, which led Carnegie himself to exclaim, "Was there ever such a business!" But he and his chairman, Henry Frick, were furious workers had a voice with the union. "The mills have never been able to turn out the product they should, owing to being held back by the Amalgamated men," Frick complained to Carnegie.

Even more galling for them was that, as Pittsburghlabor historian Charles McCollester later wrote in The Point of Pittsburgh, "The skilled production workers at Homestead enjoyed wages significantly higher than at any other mill in the country."

So management acted.

First, as the union's three-year contract was coming to an end in 1892, the company demanded wage cuts for 325 employees, even though the workers had already taken large pay cuts three years before. During the contract negotiations, management didn't make proposals to negotiate. It issued ultimatums to the union. The local newspaper pointed out that "it was not so much a question of disagreement as to wages, but a design upon labor organization."

Carnegie and Frick made little effort to hide what they had in mind. Their company advertised widely for strikebreakers and built a 10-foot-high fence around the plant that was topped by barbed wire. Management was determined to provoke a strike.

Meanwhile, the workers organized the town on a military basis. They were "establishing pickets on eight-hour shifts, river patrols and a signaling system," according to McCollester.

Frick did what plenty of 19th-century businessmen did when they were battling unions. He hired the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which was notorious for such activities as infiltrating its agents into unions and breaking strikes-and which at its height had a larger work force than the entire U.S. Army.

When Frick plotted to sneak in 300 Pinkerton agents on river barges before dawn on July 6, word spread across town as they were arriving and thousands of workers and their families rushed to the river to keep them out. Gunfire broke out between the men on the barge and the workers on land. In the mayhem that ensued, the Pinkertons surrendered and came ashore, where they were beaten and cursed by the angry workers.

At the end of the battle between the Pinkertons and nearly the entire town, seven workers and three Pinkertons were dead. Four days later, 8,500 National Guard forces were sent at the request of Frick to take control of the town and steel mill. After winning his victories, Frick announced, "Under no circumstances will we have any further dealing with the Amalgamated Association as an organization. This is final." And in November, the Amalgamated Association collapsed.

According to labor historian David Brody, in his highly acclaimed Steelworkers in America: The Nonunion Era, the daily wages of the highly skilled workers at Homestead shrunk by one-fifth between 1892 and 1907, while their work shifts increased from eight hours to 12 hours.
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Pinkerton Government Services, Inc., founded as the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, usually shortened to the Pinkertons, is a private security guard and detective agency established in the U.S. by Allan Pinkerton in 1850 and currently a subsidiary of Securitas AB. Pinkerton became famous when he claimed to have foiled a plot to assassinate president-elect Abraham Lincoln, who later hired Pinkerton agents for his personal security during the Civil War. Pinkerton's agents performed services ranging from security guarding to private military contracting work. At its height, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency employed more agents than there were members of the standing army of the United States of America, causing the state of Ohio to outlaw the agency due to fears it could be hired as a private army or militia.[citation needed] Pinkerton was the largest private law enforcement organization in the world at the height of its power.

During the labor unrest of the late 19th century and early 20th century, businessmen hired the Pinkerton Agency to provide agents that would infiltrate unions, to supply guards to keep strikers and suspected unionists out of factories, and sometimes to recruit goon squads to intimidate workers. The best known such confrontation was the Homestead Strike of 1892, in which Pinkerton agents were called in to enforce the strikebreaking measures of Henry Clay Frick, acting on behalf of Andrew Carnegie, who was abroad; the ensuing conflicts between Pinkerton agents and striking workers led to several deaths on both sides. The Pinkertons were also used as guards in coal, iron, and lumber disputes in Illinois, Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania, as well as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.

The company now operates as Pinkerton Consulting and Investigations, a division of the Swedish security company Securitas AB, although its government division is still known as Pinkerton Government Services. The organization was pejoratively called the "Pinks" by the outlaws and opponents.

Origins
In the 1850s, Allan Pinkerton met Chicago attorney Edward Rucker in a local Masonic Hall and formed the North-Western Police Agency, later known as the Pinkerton Agency.

Historian Frank Morn writes: "By the mid-1850s a few businessmen saw the need for greater control over their employees; their solution was to sponsor a private detective system. In February 1855, Allan Pinkerton, after consulting with six midwestern railroads, created such an agency in Chicago."

Government work
In 1871, Congress appropriated $50,000 to the new Department of Justice (DOJ) to form a suborganization devoted to "the detection and prosecution of those guilty of violating federal law." The amount was insufficient for the DOJ to fashion an integral investigating unit, so the DOJ contracted out the services to the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.

However, since passage of the Anti-Pinkerton Act in 1893, federal law has stated that an "individual employed by the Pinkerton Detective Agency, or similar organization, may not be employed by the Government of the United States or the government of the District of Columbia."

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Emma Goldman (June 27 [O.S. June 15] 1869 – May 14, 1940) was an anarchist known for her political activism, writing and speeches. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.

Born in Kovno in the Russian Empire (present-day Kaunas, Lithuania), Goldman emigrated to the US in 1885 and lived in New York City, where she joined the burgeoning anarchist movement. Attracted to anarchism after the Haymarket affair, Goldman became a writer and a renowned lecturer on anarchist philosophy, women's rights, and social issues, attracting crowds of thousands. She and anarchist writer Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend, planned to assassinate industrialist and financier Henry Clay Frick as an act of propaganda of the deed. Although Frick survived the attempt on his life, Berkman was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. Goldman was imprisoned several times in the years that followed, for "inciting to riot" and illegally distributing information about birth control. In 1906, Goldman founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth.

In 1917, Goldman and Berkman were sentenced to two years in jail for conspiring to "induce persons not to register" for the newly instated draft. After their release from prison, they were arrested—along with hundreds of others—and deported to Russia. Initially supportive of that country's Bolshevik revolution, Goldman quickly voiced her opposition to the Soviet use of violence and the repression of independent voices. In 1923, she wrote a book about her experiences, My Disillusionment in Russia. While living in England, Canada, and France, she wrote an autobiography called Living My Life. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, she traveled to Spain to support the anarchist revolution there. She died in Toronto on May 14, 1940, aged 70.

During her life, Goldman was lionized as a free-thinking "rebel woman" by admirers, and derided by critics as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution. Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality. Although she distanced herself from first-wave feminism and its efforts toward women's suffrage, she developed new ways of incorporating gender politics into anarchism. After decades of obscurity, Goldman's iconic status was revived in the 1970s, when feminist and anarchist scholars rekindled popular interest in her life.

Deportation
Goldman and Berkman were released during America's Red Scare of 1919–20 when public anxiety about wartime pro-German activities had morphed into a pervasive fear of Bolshevism and the prospect of an imminent radical revolution. Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover, head of the U.S. Department of Justice's General Intelligence Division, were intent on using the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1918 to deport any non-citizens they could identify as advocates of anarchy or revolution. "Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman," Hoover wrote while they were in prison, "are, beyond doubt, two of the most dangerous anarchists in this country and return to the community will result in undue harm."

At her deportation hearing on October 27, she refused to answer questions about her beliefs on the grounds that her American citizenship invalidated any attempt to deport her under the Anarchist Exclusion Act, which could be enforced only against non-citizens of the U.S. She presented a written statement instead: "Today so-called aliens are deported. Tomorrow native Americans will be banished. Already some patrioteers are suggesting that native American sons to whom democracy is a sacred ideal should be exiled." Louis Post at the Department of Labor, which had ultimate authority over deportation decisions, determined that the revocation of her husband's American citizenship in 1908 had revoked hers as well. After initially promising a court fight, she decided not to appeal his ruling.

The Labor Department included Goldman and Berkman among 249 aliens it deported en masse, mostly people with only vague associations with radical groups who had been swept up in government raids in November. Buford, a ship the press nicknamed the "Soviet Ark," sailed from New York on December 21. Some 58 enlisted men and four officers provided security on the journey and pistols were distributed to the crew. Most of the press approved enthusiastically. The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote: "It is hoped and expected that other vessels, larger, more commodious, carrying similar cargoes, will follow in her wake." The ship landed her charges in Hanko, Finland on Saturday, January 17, 1920. Upon arrival in Finland, authorities there conducted the deportees to the Russian frontier under a flag of truce.

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The Emma Goldman papers: http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/goldman/

Alexander Berkman (November 21, 1870 – June 28, 1936) was an anarchist known for his political activism and writing. He was a leading member of the anarchist movement in the early 20th century.

Berkman was born in Vilnius in the Russian Empire and emigrated to the United States in 1888. He lived in New York City, where he became involved in the anarchist movement. He was the lover and lifelong friend of anarchist Emma Goldman. In 1892, Berkman attempted to assassinate businessman Henry Clay Frick as an act of propaganda of the deed. Though Frick survived the attempt on his life, Berkman served 14 years in prison. His experience in prison was the basis for his first book, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist.

After his release from prison, Berkman served as editor of Goldman's anarchist journal, Mother Earth, and he established his own journal, The Blast. In 1917, Berkman and Goldman were sentenced to two years in jail for conspiracy against the newly instated draft. After their release from prison, they were arrested—along with hundreds of others—and deported to Russia. Initially supportive of that country's Bolshevik revolution, Berkman quickly voiced his opposition to the Soviet use of violence and the repression of independent voices. In 1925, he published a book about his experiences, The Bolshevik Myth.

While living in France, Berkman continued his work in support of the anarchist movement, producing the classic exposition of anarchist principles, Now and After: The ABC of Communist Anarchism. Suffering from ill health, Berkman committed suicide in 1936.

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Charles Bonaparte:



The grand nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, Charles Joseph Bonaparte made a name for himself while serving as both secretary of the Navy and attorney general in Theodore Roosevelt's cabinet. Bonaparte was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on June 9, 1851, attending a French school and being privately tutored before entering Harvard College. He graduated in 1872 and then earned his law degree from Harvard Law School in 1874.

Bonaparte's work as founder of the Baltimore Reform League and the The Civil Service Reformer brought him into close contact with Theodore Roosevelt, who had been the civil service commissioner for the city of New York. The two soon became close friends. Bonaparte secured his first post in the presidential cabinet of Theodore Roosevelt as secretary of the Navy following the resignation of Paul Morton in 1905. He was an advocate for a larger navy and concurred with the President's desire for a big ship navy.

Bonaparte would assume another cabinet slot, becoming attorney general following the resignation of William Henry Moody. In that capacity, Bonaparte would become a member of TR's "trust-busting" team. His most important accomplishment came when he founded the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1908, hiring special agents to serve as an investigative force in the Justice Department. With Roosevelt's term ending in 1909, Bonaparte returned to his law practice in Baltimore. Bonaparte passed away at his Maryland country estate on June 28, 1921.
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Thomas Watt Gregory:



Born to the son of a Confederate Army captain on November 6, 1861, in Crawfordsville, Mississippi, Thomas W. Gregory graduated from Southwestern Presbyterian University in Clarkesville, Tennessee, in 1883. Studying law at the University of Virginia, Gregory earned his degree from the University of Texas in 1885 and served as Austin assistant city attorney between 1891 and 1894. Gregory became involved in national politics while a delegate to the Democratic national conventions of 1904 and 1912. President Wilson brought him into the Justice Department, appointing him special assistant to Attorney General James McReynolds.

Following McReynolds' resignation, Wilson named Gregory attorney general on August 29, 1914. In that capacity, Gregory prosecuted violators of American neutrality before World War I; enforced the sedition, espionage, sabotage, and trading-with-the-enemy acts; reformed the federal prison administration; and advised Wilson at the Versailles Peace Conference.

Before he resigned in March 1919, Gregory declined a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1916 because of a hearing ailment. Following his tenure in the cabinet, Gregory practiced law in Washington, D.C., and Houston, Texas. He died on February 26, 1933, in New York City.
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A. Bruce Bielaski:



was an American lawyer and director of the Bureau of Investigation (now the Federal Bureau of Investigation).
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Eugene Debs:



Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana in 1855, the son of poor Alsatian immigrants. Though his parents encouraged an intellectual spirit, Debs left high school after one year to become a locomotive paint-scraper. There, among the rough-and-tumble of railway men, Debs found his calling. From his membership in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen to his role co-founding the Industrial Workers of the World (the "wobblies"), Debs raised his voice in defense of the common man.

The years leading up to the turn of the twentieth century brought America unprecedented prosperity -- but relatively few people, men like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller Sr., controlled the new wealth. For the nation's working class, and leaders like Eugene Debs, it was a time to be angry. From steel fabrication to mining American industries saw major protests as workers tried to secure 8-hour workdays, living wages, and other fundamental improvements.

After leading the American Railway Union in a confrontation with federal troops sent to break up the Pullman strike of 1894, Debs was jailed for six months for contempt of court. It was then that he came to a set of beliefs that roughly mirrored the socialist tenets of the European labor movements. Upon his release, Debs became a featured speaker for the Socialist Party, and ran for president in 1900 as their nominee. He lost, but continued to be the partyís candidate in several subsequent elections.

Debs found his greatest success in the 1912 Election, when he campaigned against Democratic nominee Woodrow Wilson, incumbent President William Howard Taft, and former President Theodore Roosevelt. Debs received almost a million votes - six percent of the ballots cast.

After four consecutive losing presidential campaigns, in 1916 Debs decided to run for an Indiana Congressional seat. He campaigned on a pacifist platform of American neutrality in the First World War, and was elected. Once the United States entered the war, Debs was arrested for violating the Espionage Act after making what the district attorney of Canton, Ohio called an anti-war speech in 1918. Debs in fact only mentioned the war once, but under this repressive new law, was sentenced to ten years in a federal penitentiary. Nominated for a fifth time as the Socialist Party's presidential candidate in 1920, Debs campaigned from his jail cell and garnered over a million votes. Despite repeated pleas from Debs' supporters, President Wilson refused to release Debs from prison. President Harding finally ordered him set free on Christmas Day 1921.

Debs lived until 1926, leaving a legacy best summed up in his own words. "Yes, I am my brother's keeper," he wrote. "I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by maudlin sentimentality, but by the higher duty I owe myself."
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Bernard J. Brommel
Ray Ginger

Espionage Act of 1917:

The Espionage Act was passed by Congress in 1917 after the United States entered the First World War. It prescribed a $10,000 fine and 20 years' imprisonment for interfering with the recruiting of troops or the disclosure of information dealing with national defence. Additional penalties were included for the refusal to perform military duty. Over the next few months around 900 went to prison under the Espionage Act.

Criticised as unconstitutional, the act resulted in the imprisonment of many of the anti-war movement. This included the arrest of left-wing political figures such as Eugene V. Debs, Bill Haywood, Philip Randolph, Victor Berger, John Reed, Max Eastman, and Emma Goldman. Debs was sentenced to ten years for a speech in Canton, Ohio, on 16th June, 1918, attacking the Espionage Act.

On 23rd August six members of the Frayhayt, a group of Jewish anarchists based in New York were arrested. Charged under the Espionage Act, the group were accused of publishing articles in the Der Shturm that undermined the American war effort. This included criticizing the United States government for invading Russia after the Bolshevik government signed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty.

One of the group, Jacob Schwartz, was so badly beaten by the police when he was arrested that he died soon afterwards. Mollie Steimer was found guilty and sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment. Three of the men, Samuel Lipman, Hyman Lachowsky and Jacob Abrahams received twenty years. Zechariah Chafee of the Harvard Law School led the protests against the severity of the sentences. He pointed out had been convicted solely for advocating non-intervention in the affairs of another nation: "After priding ourselves for over a century on being an asylum for the oppressed of all nations, we ought not suddenly jump to the position that we are only an asylum for men who are no more radical than ourselves."

Others who joined in the protests included Felix Frankfurter, Norman Thomas, Roger Baldwin, Margaret Sanger, Lincoln Steffens, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Hutchins Hapgood, Leonard Dalton Abbott, Alice Stone Blackwell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Neith Boyce. A group, the League of Amnesty of Political Prisoners was formed and it published a leaflet on the case, Is Opinion a Crime? Steimer and the the other three anarchists were released on bail to await the results of their appeal.

Over 450 conscientious objectors were imprisoned as a result of this legislation including Rose Pastor Stokes who was sentenced to ten years in prison for saying, in a letter to the Kansas City Star, that "no government which is for the profiteers can also be for the people, and I am for the people while the government is for the profiteers." Soon afterwards Kate Richards O'Hare was sentenced to five years for making an anti-war speech in North Dakota.

The socialist journal, The Masses was prosecuted in 1918 under the Espionage Act. It was claimed by the authorities that articles by Floyd Dell and Max Eastman and cartoons by Art Young, Boardman Robinson and H. J. Glintenkamp had undermined the war effort. The legal action that followed forced the journal to cease publication.

Emma Goldman complained about the treatment of Mollie Steimer: "The entire machinery of the United States government was being employed to crush this slip of a girl weighing less than eighty pounds." On the 30th October, 1919, she was arrested she was taken to Blackwell Island. While in prison the Supreme Court upheld her conviction under the Espionage Act. However, two justices, Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes, issued a strong dissenting opinion. Steimer was now transferred to the Jefferson City Prison in Missouri.

During this period A. Mitchell Palmer, the attorney general and his special assistant, John Edgar Hoover, used the Sedition Act to launch a campaign against radicals and their organizations. Using this legislation it was decided to remove immigrants who had been involved in left-wing politics. This included Mollie Steimer, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman and 245 other people who were deported to Russia. A fellow anarchist, Marcus Graham, wrote: "In Russia their activity is yet more needed. For there, a government rules masquerading under the name of the proletariat and doing everything imaginable to enslave the proletariat."

During the Red Scare (1919-20) A. Mitchell Palmer, the attorney general and his special assistant, John Edgar Hoover, used the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act to launch a campaign against radicals and left-wing organizations. Under these two laws 1500 people were arrested for disloyalty.
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Rose Pastor Stokes:



Rose Pastor Stokes (1879-1933), born Rose Wieslander in Russian Poland, was a leading Jewish-American socialist, birth control advocate, and after the Russian revolution, a communist. Stokes helped organize garment workers in New York City, wrote for the Jewish Daily News, The Massesand other left periodicals, and was the author of several feminist plays. Stokes was married to wealthy socialist James Phelps Stokes from 1905-1925, married communist leader Jerome Isaac Romaine (also known as Victor J. Jerome) in 1927, and died of cancer in Berlin in 1933.
(Source: http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/...)

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Pas...
http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/s...
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Lee Overman:



a Senator from North Carolina; born in Salisbury, Rowan County, N.C., January 3, 1854; attended private schools and graduated from Trinity College (now Duke University), Durham, N.C., in 1874; taught school two years; private secretary to the Governor 1877-1879; studied law; admitted to the bar in 1878 and began practice in Salisbury, N.C., in 1880; member, State house of representatives 1883, 1885, 1887, 1893, 1899, and served as speaker in 1893; president of the North Carolina Railroad Co. in 1894; unsuccessful Democratic candidate for United States Senator in 1895; president of the Salisbury Savings Bank; member of the board of trustees of the University of North Carolina and Duke University; presidential elector on the Democratic ticket in 1900; elected as a Democrat to the United States Senate in 1903; reelected in 1909, 1914, 1920 and 1926 and served from March 4, 1903, until his death; chairman, Committee on Revolutionary Claims (Sixty-first Congress), Committee on Woman Suffrage (Sixty-second Congress), Committee on Rules (Sixty-third through Sixty-fifth Congresses), Committee on Engrossed Bills (Sixty-sixth Congress); died in Washington, D.C., December 12, 1930; funeral services were held in the Chamber of the United States Senate; interment in Chestnut Hill Cemetery, Salisbury, N.C.
(Source: http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/...)

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http://www.northcarolinahistory.org/e...

Departmental Reorganization Act (Overman Act):

In 1918 the Overman Act was passed by Congress, in the midst of World War I (1914–1918). It gave President Woodrow Wilson (1913–1921) power to coordinate government agencies for the war effort. The legislation was sponsored by Democratic Senator Lee Slater Overman (1854–1930) of North Carolina.

Wilson created the War Industry Board, National War Labor Board, and the Committee on Public Information.

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http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3...

American Protective League:

Attorney General Thomas Watt Gregory, meanwhile, who was concerned about legal authority to act against suspected agents, claimed jurisdiction for his Bureau of Investigation (BI, which later evolved into the Federal Bureau of Investigation, FBI), and worked to obtain legal authority from Congress to expand counterespionage work and his Bureau. Locked in competition with a Secretary of Treasury, who was urging his agents to expose "German intrigues," and apparently intent on exploiting publicity for these stunning revelations, Attorney General Gregory accepted the offer of a Chicago advertising executive to organize a volunteer group of businessmen to assist in investigating German suspects.

This volunteer group, known as the American Protective League (APL), headquartered in Washington with branches throughout the county became a quasi-official investigating arm of the Justice Department, with the official task of investigating war-related internal security cases. The APL led the Wilson administration deeply into controversy over the question of how much authority the United States government could or should give to volunteers in investigating suspected spies and saboteurs. What began as an agreement to allow patriotic citizens to help the Justice Department defend the country, and coincidently maintain its dominance in internal security, eventually led the government deeply into citizen quarrels, such as personal grudges, labor disputes, and serious differences over economic and political policy.

After the fears of the first few months of war abated, there was little for the volunteers to do. With few German agents to investigate, after the early days of the war the Justice Department assigned APL units a variety of more prosaic tasks for the military. These ranged from plant protection to hunting for slackers, jobs which quickly involved volunteers, with their quasi-official authority and "auxiliary to the Justice Department" badges, in the affairs of ordinary citizens. APL units frequently organized plant protection inside factories with government contracts, establishing a secret hierarchy that stretched from company officials and War Department agents to the shop floor where privates watched fellow workers. Volunteer operatives searched for men who refused to register for the draft. They patrolled zones established around cantons where the military wanted liquor and prostitution restricted.

The Justice Department kept its APL volunteers working, in part to preempt the expansion of the Secret Service and Military Intelligence Division (MID) into internal security. After forcing the Secret Service out of the field, the Justice Department negotiated with the War Department to use the APL instead of its own volunteer groups. Although the APL worked for Military Intelligence and assigned one of its national directors as a liaison with it, the Justice Department nominally controlled the volunteers. The Justice Department agreed to supply APL members for the many tasks the military felt it should perform at home, but had insufficient trained military personnel. The plan also fit into a larger administration goal, to separate the military from civilians. The Selective Service, as the draft was called, had as its goal maintaining a civilian buffer between the military and the groups from which young men were now being called for military training.

The Wilson administration presided over a country divided about the wisdom of going to war, and that fact also dictated the caution with which officials used the military on the home front. Still, the fear of foreign danger fueled support for the war and the expansion of the government at home. The line between countering espionage and sabotage and stifling dissent was difficult to maintain. Volunteers often interpreted opposition to war policies as even more dangerous than enemy spying or sabotage because it hindered the war effort at the front. What was acceptable activity during war was unclear, and the guidelines about which laws could be applied to which activities were vague. Who was to determine what should be done and where the line should be drawn?

The APL had inherent weaknesses because of its volunteer status. Members were not selected, trained, or disciplined by the federal government. The group self-selected members, exercised only limited authority over its far-flung units, and had no way to discipline members, who often defined a broad range of legal activities as disloyal and in need of investigation.

Some APL units were composed of previously formed groups. The Minute Men was one such private organization that had already ruthlessly suppressed the Industrial Workers of the World in many areas of Washington State when the APL merged with it. Once recognized as authorized investigators, members went after a wide variety of suspects, including teachers accused of teaching "hun" courses in history. In four months, the Minute Men branch of the APL conducted over two thousand investigations in Seattle alone.

In a number of states the APL worked with Committees of Public Safety (CPS), which directed state war efforts and had broad powers to protect persons and property. Ostensibly formed for state defense, these committees were sometimes under the control of men who saw enemies everywhere and who were eager to use the APL in all kinds of vendettas. Judge John McGee, a member of the Minnesota CPS, whose very active intelligence bureau cooperated with APL members, attacked Swedish and German aliens as a whole, attempted to oust the Socialist mayor of Minneapolis, and opposed the attempts of farmers to organize the Non Partisan League because it wanted more government control of the economy. In April of 1918, McGee went before a Senate committee to argue the government should have formed firing squads after the declaration of war against Germany. They should be formed immediately, he urged, and "work overtime in order to make up for lost time." Behind such overblown rhetoric was the argument by men like McGee that the civilians should hand over control of the home front to the military.

These attacks led the Justice Department to expand the APL still further. The "web," as the APL called its network of operatives, claimed over 300,000 members by the end of 1918. As it expanded and spread through the United States, the APL turned its attention first from aliens to dissenters, and then eventually to larger numbers of ordinary citizens. By 1918, the APL was probing deeply into the lives of ordinary citizens as it collected domestic intelligence for the War Department. Those reports helped convince the War Department that the government needed protection against its own civilians. In the early 1920s, it developed plans coded War Plans White to counter a domestic revolution.

The Justice Department tolerated the APL because of necessity. It had too few agents for the investigations it wished to make. It also exploited the APL to preempt internal security work by other federal agencies at the national level, and by states at the regional level. It used a private group of investigators against whom the Bill of Rights provided no defense. In the 1950s, the federal government obtained legal sanction from the Supreme Court for supremacy in guarding the home front, but at that time, Congress also extended constitutional safeguards to protect against possible abuse of that power. Any strengthening of federal posers in internal security seemed dangerous to American freedoms unless accompanied by a similar expansion of protections of civil liberties.

By the end of World War I, Attorney General Gregory and his Director of the War Emergency Division, John Lord O'Brian were concerned about growing APL involvement in the lives of Americans. General Gregory ordered the APL disbanded in early 1919. He offered members the government's thanks for their work, granted them "honorable discharges," and at various mustering out celebrations in major cities had his subordinates tell the volunteers to go home.

A number of APL units vigorously protested their dismissal, arguing the group should become a permanent "auxiliary" of the federal government. When Gregory and John Lord O'Brian stood firm, disgruntled volunteers found local support for their continued activities and reappeared under a variety of new names. In Chicago, APL veterans formed the Patriotic American League, in Cleveland the Loyalty League, in Cincinnati they became part of the Home Guard. In Minneapolis, APL members transformed themselves into the "Committee of Thirteen." Even when officially gone, the APL provided a model for citizen sleuthing. Ku Klux Klan founder William Simons claimed the idea for his surveillance of Americans came from the Atlanta APL. Northern factory owners copied plant protection formulas in forming surveillance groups to report on their workers' union activities.

APL members were recalled to serve government agencies of various sorts in the 1920s. Former members worked again for the Justice Department under Attorney General Mitchell Palmer during the Red Raids and for the War Department's head of the Military Intelligence Division, Brigadier General Marlborough Churchill, as well as for assorted state and local investigative bodies concerned with what they considered disloyal or un-American activities. Gregory had attempted to collect all the case files opened by the APL during the war, but instead local units held many of them for future use, often by local police or regional military intelligence offices. The national government finally ceased using APL veterans only in 1924.
(Source: http://hnn.us/articles/960.html)

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A. Mitchell Palmer:



Born to a Quaker family near White Haven, Pennsylvania, on May 4, 1872, A. Mitchell Palmer attended a Moravian parochial high school in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, graduating later from Swarthmore College in 1891. He began working as the official stenographer of the Forty-third Pennsylvania Judicial District in 1892. Palmer studied law while working as a stenographer and was admitted to the Pennsylvania state bar in 1893.

He entered national politics while a member of the Democratic state executive committee, winning a congressional seat from the Twenty-sixth Congressional District in 1908. He was re-elected twice, serving as the House Democratic Caucus chairman during his last term. Palmer ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1914, later declining an appointment as an appellate justice on account of a low salary. President Woodrow Wilson appointed him to the post of Alien Property Custodian on October 22, 1917; in that position, Palmer oversaw and confiscated the property of German-Americans during World War I.

When Attorney General Thomas Gregory resigned in March 1919, Wilson sought to appoint someone other than Palmer to the post. Failing in that matter, Wilson tapped Palmer to head the Justice Department; he would remain in that post until the end of the Wilson administration. Palmer initiated a series of raids on "subversive" elements in American society -- many of them Communists and Socialists -- touching off what came to be known as the "Red Scare." Following his time in government, Palmer returned to his law practice, dying on May 11, 1936.
(Source: http://millercenter.org/president/wil...)

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http://www.justice.gov/ag/aghistpage....

William Flynn:



William J. Flynn was born in New York City in 1867. He began his government career in 1897 after a public school education. His first assignment was as an agent in the United States Secret Service. Mr. Flynn gained recognition in 1911 when he successfully reorganized the New York City Detective force and returned to the Secret Service as chief. During World War I, Mr. Flynn served as chief of the United States Railroad Secret Service, investigating threats of sabotage.

In 1919, Mr. Flynn was named Director of the Bureau of Investigation. Attorney General Palmer praised his new appointee as “the leading, organizing detective of America...Flynn is an anarchist chaser...the greatest anarchist expert in the United States.”

On September 27, 1921, Mr. Flynn resigned, saying he had a “private business matter to accept.” Attorney General Harry Daugherty accepted the resignation immediately and appointed William J. Burns to the position.
(Source: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/history/d...)

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Immigration Acts (Anarchist Exclusion Acts):

1903:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigrat...

1917:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigrat...

1918:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigrat...

John Reed:



was an American journalist, poet, and communist activist, best remembered for his first-hand account of the Bolshevik Revolution, Ten Days that Shook the World. He was married to writer and feminist Louise Bryant. Reed died in Russia in 1920, and was buried at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.

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http://www.marxists.org/archive/reed/
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John Reed

Union of Russian Workers:

was an anarchist political association of Russian emigrants in the United States. The group was established shortly after the failure of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and was essentially annihilated in America by the 1919 Red Scare in which it was specifically targeted by the Bureau of Investigation of the U.S. Department of Justice. Thousands of the group's adherents were arrested and hundreds deported in 1919 and 1920; still more voluntarily returned to Soviet Russia. During its brief existence the organization, which was only loosely affiliated with the anarchosyndicalist Industrial Workers of the World, published numerous books and pamphlets in the Russian language by anarchist writers, operated reading rooms and conducted courses to teach newly-arrived Russians the English language, and fulfilled a social function for emigrants half a world from home.
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_of...)

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U.S. Communist Party:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communis...
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Boston Police Strike (1919):



The political climate after World War I was characterized by immense fear, instilled by “government and business propaganda” about a Communist takeover of the United States. One of the main targets of this propaganda was the Labor Movement, which organized workers in order to collectively bargain for fair wages and hours. The Red Scare was increased as police forces across the nation began to organize in unions. Propaganda made it seem as if the Communists were attempting a take over from within.

Nothing fueled the anti-union, Red Scare propagandists more than the Boston Police Strike of 1919. Police in Boston had a number of reasons why they wanted to join a union. Like any other worker in any other sector, they felt that their wages were too low and their hours were too long. “Their wages were even significantly lower than the earnings of most unskilled factory workers. For this meager pay they were asked to work as many as seventy-two to ninety-eight hours a week.” The Boston Police force, discouraged by lack of attention paid to their numerous grievances, joined the “Boston Social Club, affiliated with the AFL” in August of 1919. Police Commissioner Edwin Curtis believed that a police officer could not belong to a union and serve his proper duty at the same time. As a result of his misguided beliefs, Curtis promptly suspended nineteen police officers who were working as union organizers.

In retaliation to the suspension of the nineteen union officers and the Police Commissioner’s refusal to allow the them to join the AFL, the Boston Police went on strike. A few people took advantage of the situation, looting stores and breaking windows. As a result, the State Guard was called in to stop the criminals. Public opinion began to turn against the Police, and national AFL President Samuel Gompers suggested that the officers return to work and to the bargaining table. Commissioner Curtis opted to not allow the striking officers their jobs and to completely replace the force. The Commissioner had the full support of President Woodrow Wilson and then Governor Calvin Coolidge, who had made himself a national hero by quelling the strike.

Public response to the strike was staggering. Few sided with the police, and the strike became damaging to the entire Labor Movement due to the increasing fear of Communist Revolution in the United States. After the strike the LA Times wrote, “...no man's house, no man's wife, no man's children will be safe if the police force in unionized and made subject to the orders of Red Unionite bosses." Since the strike, public opinion of public sector strikes has been much less sympathetic than toward strikes in the private sector. None of the striking Police Officers ever returned to the force. An entirely new Police Force was hired at “at increased wages and with better working conditions.”
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Francis Russell

William Z. Foster:

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Member of the American Socialist Party, a union organizer, leader of the 1919 US Steel strike and a founding leader of the American CP. He was the CP's candidate for president in 1924, 1928, and 1932, and its chairman after World War II.
(Source: http://www.marxists.org/glossary/peop...)

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James R. Barrett

These are great adds Bryan.

Thanks, Bentley, some great history here!

Fascinating period of time - I did a paper on Goldman in college - oh my - many years ago now. I'm currently reading Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (2011) but haven't got to Hoover's interest yet. In part because of Enemies, I'm looking forward to that part.

by Manning Marable

Interesting, Becky, Goldman sounds fascinating. If memory serves, she became radicalized by the Homestead strike along with many other radicals in that time period.

Palmer Raids:



were attempts by the United States Department of Justice to arrest and deport radical leftists, especially anarchists, from the United States. The raids and arrests occurred in November 1919 and January 1920 under the leadership of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Though more than 500 foreign citizens were deported, including a number of prominent leftist leaders, Palmer's efforts were largely frustrated by officials at the U.S. Department of Labor who had responsibility for deportations and who objected to Palmer's methods. The Palmer Raids occurred in the larger context of the Red Scare, the term given to fear of and reaction against political radicals in the U.S. in the years immediately following World War I.
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_R...)

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Christopher Finan
(no image)The Palmer Raids 1919-1920 by Edwin Palmer Hoyt

Felix Frankfurter:



was born in Vienna, Austria, on November 15, 1882. When he was twelve years old, his family emigrated to the United States and settled in New York, New York. Frankfurter was graduated from the College of the City of New York in 1902 and Harvard Law School in 1906. Upon graduation, he took a position with a New York law firm, but within the year he was appointed an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. In 1910, Frankfurter began four years of service in the War Department’s Bureau of Insular Affairs as a legal officer. In 1914, he accepted an appointment to the faculty of Harvard Law School. He returned to Washington in 1917 to become assistant to the Secretary of War. He later became Secretary and counsel to the President’s Mediation Commission and, subsequently, Chairman of the War Labor Policies Board. After World War I he rejoined the Harvard Law School faculty. President Franklin D. Roosevelt nominated Frankfurter to the Supreme Court of the United States on January 20, 1939, and the Senate confirmed the appointment on January 30, 1939. After twenty-three years of service, Frankfurter retired from the Supreme Court on August 28, 1962. He died on February 22, 1965, at the age of eighty-two.
(Source: http://www.supremecourthistory.org/hi...)

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Louis F. Post:



Born in New Jersey, Post was educated in New York City. After working at a variety of jobs, including three years at a New York law office, he was admitted to the bar in 1870. He moved to South Carolina to take a position as a clerk in the office of a U.S. attorney; Post was then elected to the state's Reconstruction legislature. He assisted in deposing witnesses for KKK trials in the 1870s. In 1871, he married Anna Johnson. In 1874, he returned to New York and served as assistant U.S. attorney. He quit in 1875 in disgust over the demands of Republican political bosses, and entered a private law partnership. He ended his law practice in 1880s, and became editor and publisher of a variety of newspapers in New York, Cleveland, and Chicago. During the 1880s, he was also active in campaigning for the "Single Tax" movement. His wife died in 1891, and in 1893 he remarried to Alice Thacher, a fellow Swedenborgian. Post was appointed to the Chicago school board ca. 1900, and fought against the embezzlement of school funds, restrictions on academic freedom, and for the right of teachers to organize. In 1913, President Wilson appointed Post as Assistant Secretary of Labor. Post objected to the 1918 Anarchist Exclusion Act, and in 1920, he was the subject of impeachment proceedings after clashing with J. Edgar Hoover and A. Mitchell Palmer over immigrant rights and the deportation of "radical" aliens. He was Acting Secretary of Labor from 1920 to 1927, and died in Washington after a short illness in 1928.
(Source: http://cuomeka.wrlc.org/exhibits/show...)

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Wall Street Bombing (1920):



The lunch rush was just beginning as a non-descript man driving a cart pressed an old horse forward on a mid-September day in 1920. He stopped the animal and its heavy load in front of the U.S. Assay Office, across from the J. P. Morgan building in the heart of Wall Street. The driver got down and quickly disappeared into the crowd.

Within minutes, the cart exploded into a hail of metal fragments—immediately killing more than 30 people and injuring some 300. The carnage was horrific, and the death toll kept rising as the day wore on and more victims succumbed.

Who was responsible? In the beginning it wasn't obvious that the explosion was an intentional act of terrorism. Crews cleaned the damage up overnight, including physical evidence that today would be crucial to identifying the perpetrator. By the next morning Wall Street was back in business—broken windows draped in canvass, workers in bandages, but functioning none-the-less.

Conspiracy theories abounded, but the New York Police and Fire Departments, the Bureau of Investigation (our predecessor), and the U.S. Secret Service were on the job. Each avidly pursued leads. The Bureau interviewed hundreds of people who had been around the area before, during, and after the attack, but developed little information of value. The few recollections of the driver and wagon were vague and virtually useless. The NYPD was able to reconstruct the bomb and its fuse mechanism, but there was much debate about the nature of the explosive, and all the potential components were commonly available.

The most promising lead had actually come prior to the explosion. A letter carrier had found four crudely spelled and printed flyers in the area, from a group calling itself the "American Anarchist Fighters" that demanded the release of political prisoners. The letters, discovered later, seemed similar to ones used the previous year in two bombing campaigns fomented by Italian Anarchists. The Bureau worked diligently, investigating up and down the East Coast, to trace the printing of these flyers, without success.

Based on bomb attacks over the previous decade, the Bureau initially suspected followers of the Italian Anarchist Luigi Galleani. But the case couldn't be proved, and the anarchist had fled the country. Over the next three years, hot leads turned cold and promising trails turned into dead ends. In the end, the bombers were not identified. The best evidence and analysis since that fateful day of September 16, 1920, suggests that the Bureau's initial thought was correct—that a small group of Italian Anarchists were to blame. But the mystery remains.
(Source: http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2007/...)

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Charles H. McCormick
Beverly Gage

President Warren Harding:



A Life in Brief

A conservative politician from Ohio, Warren G. Harding had few enemies because he rarely took a firm enough stand on an issue to make any. Who would have suspected that the man to succeed Woodrow Wilson, America's most visionary President, would be a man who saw the President's role as largely ceremonial?

Warren Harding was raised in a small town in Ohio. His wholesome and picture book childhood—farm chores, swimming in the local creek, and playing in the village band—was the basis of his down-home appeal later in life. As a young man, Harding brought a nearly bankrupt newspaper, the Marion Star, back to life. The paper became a favorite with Ohio politicians of both parties because of Harding's evenhanded reporting. Always well-liked for his good-natured manner, Harding won a seat in the Ohio State Senate, serving two terms before becoming a U.S. senator from Ohio in 1914. During his term as senator, Harding missed more sessions than he attended, being absent for key debates on prohibition and women's suffrage. Taking no stands meant making no enemies, and his fellow Republicans awarded Harding the 1920 presidential nomination, sensing the nation's fatigue with the reform agenda of Woodrow Wilson. Running with the slogan, "A Return to Normalcy," Harding beat progressive Democrat James M. Cox in a massive landslide.

Weak and Mediocre Presidency

Once in office, Harding admitted to his close friends that the job was beyond him. The capable men that Harding appointed to his cabinet included Charles Evans Hughes as secretary of state, Andrew Mellon as secretary of the treasury, and Herbert Hoover as secretary of commerce. But he also surrounded himself with dishonest cheats, who came to be known as "the Ohio gang." Many of them were later charged with defrauding the government, and some of them went to jail. Though Harding knew of the limitations of men like Harry Dougherty, the slick friend he appointed attorney general, he liked to play poker with them, drink whiskey, smoke, tell jokes, play golf, and keep late hours.

Known as a "good fellow," Harding enjoyed being liked more than he prized being a good leader. Though Harding was never linked to any crooked deals, the public was aware of his affairs with at least two women. Carrie Phillips, who had been a German sympathizer during the war, tried to blackmail Harding and was paid hush money by the Republican Party. Nan Britton, a pretty blond thirty years younger than the President, was given a job in Washington, D.C., so that she could be near Harding. The two often met in the Oval Office, and their affair continued until Harding's death.

Decidedly conservative on trade and economic issues, Harding favored pro-business government policies. He allowed Andrew Mellon to push through tax cuts for the rich, stopped antitrust actions, and opposed organized labor.

Harding knew little about foreign affairs when he assumed office, preferring to give Secretary of State Hughes a free hand. Hughes was concerned with securing foreign markets for wealthy American banks, such as the one run by John D. Rockefeller. Hughes and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover used the Fordney-McCumber Tariff to secure oil markets in the Middle East, especially in modern-day Iraq and Iran. His administration revised Germany's war debts downward through legislation, passed in 1923, known as the Dawes Plan. Hughes also called for a naval conference with nine other nations to freeze naval spending in an effort to reduce spending.

Shaken by the talk of corruption among the friends he had appointed to office, Harding and his wife, Florence "Flossie" Harding, organized a tour of the western states and Alaska in an attempt to meet people and explain his policies. After becoming ill with what was at the time attributed to ptomaine (food) poisoning, Harding had a heart attack and died quietly in his sleep. The rumors flew that Flossie had poisoned the President to save him from being engulfed in the charges of corruption that swept his administration. The Hardings never had any children; Flossie died of kidney disease in 1924.

Most historians regard Harding as the worst President in the nation's history. In the end, it was not his corrupt friends, but rather, Harding's own lack of vision that was most responsible for the tarnished legacy.
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John Wesley Dean III
Eugene P. Trani

Harry Daugherty:



Harry Micajah Daugherty served as United States Attorney General during President Warren G. Harding's administration.

Daugherty was born on January 26, 1860. He graduated from the University of Michigan Law School when he was just twenty years old. He then embarked upon both a legal and political career in Washington Court House, Ohio. A member of the Republican Party, Daugherty served on the city council of Washington Court House and eventually became a prosecuting attorney in Fayette County, Ohio. From 1890 to 1894, Daugherty served in the Ohio General Assembly, where he represented Fayette County. He sought additional political offices, including the Ohio governor's seat and a seat in the United States House of Representatives, but Daugherty lost these elections. Despite these setbacks, by the late 1910s, Daugherty had emerged as one of the most powerful members of the Republican Party in Ohio. Because of Daugherty's prominence, in 1920, he served as campaign manager for Warren G. Harding, who was seeking to become President of the United States. Harding, an Ohioan, won the election and rewarded Daugherty with the position of attorney general.

As president, for the most part, Harding proved to be a poor manager of the federal government. He delegated authority to his cabinet officials. These men became known as the "Ohio Gang," because they supposedly were a gang of thieves from Ohio. In reality, most of the men linked to the Ohio Gang were not from Harding's home state.

Daugherty was a member of the Ohio Gang, and he, unlike most of the Ohio Gang members, actually was from Ohio. Unfortunately for Harding, Daugherty and his personal assistant, Jess Smith, appeared to engage in wrongdoing during Harding's presidency. While Daugherty served as attorney general, Smith held no formal position in the federal government. He simply served as an unofficial assistant to Daugherty. Smith lived with Daugherty at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, DC, and it was rumored, at the time, that the two men were engaged in a homosexual relationship. Smith was single, while Daugherty was married.

As rumors spread about corrupt officials in Harding's administration, eventually Attorney General Daugherty launched various investigations. Critics, especially in the United States Congress, claimed that Daugherty did not vigorously pursue the investigations. Eventually, it was suggested that Daugherty was also working with bootleggers. Bootlegging was a direct violation of the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. This amendment established Prohibition in the United States. Smith also was supposedly involved in Daugherty's illegal activities. Rather than face legal charges and a possible prison sentence, Smith committed suicide. Daugherty eventually claimed that Smith's suicide resulted from poor health, including an appendicitis and diabetes, but most contemporaries linked Smith's death to his legal troubles. The United States Senate launched an investigation of Daugherty. The investigation failed to find any wrongdoing by Daugherty. Still, on March 28, 1924, while the Senate investigation was ongoing, Daugherty resigned as attorney general. Daugherty's supposed actions, along with those of several other of Harding's cabinet officials, caused a great deal of distrust of government officials among the American people and also solidified Harding's reputation as a poor president.

Upon resigning as attorney general, Daugherty returned to his law practice. He also devoted significant time to authoring a book that he hoped would exonerate him of all wrongdoing during Harding's presidency. In 1940, Daugherty suffered two heart attacks and had a bout with pneumonia. Basically bed-ridden for the rest of his life, Daugherty died on October 12, 1941.
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(no image)The Ohio Gang: The World of Warren G. Harding by Charles L. Mee

Jess Smith:



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