BOOK REVIEW: UNSAFE FOR DEMOCRACY - World War I and the U. S. Justice Department's Covert Campaign to Suppress Dissent

little-known government surveillance during World War I

UNSAFE FOR DEMOCRACY - World War I and the U. S. Justice Department's Covert Campaign to Suppress Dissent by William H. Thomas, Jr. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI; 800-621-2736/www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress/. 2008. 251+x pages. $34.95 hardcover, ISBN 978-0-299-22890-3. illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.

Using scores of individual cases, the independent scholar Thomas records the varied ways U.S. Justice Department agents tried to intimidate dissenters and suspected traitors into silence during World War I and the years after it when Wilson was promoting the League of Nations. The more sensational Palmer raids rounding up masses of immigrants on the basis of little more than rumors or vague suspicions are known as the standard example of government wartime practices going to excesses. But the scale of these and related, longlasting controversy obscured the widespread questionable practices Thomas relates in this work. The "focus on prosecutions had the effect of understating the scope of the department's activities. Far more commonly, department investigators watched, warned, and reprimanded suspected seditionists." In this, the Justice Department agents had a "tremendous degree of latitude" in making individual decisions about "speech [which] interfered with the war effort."

The latitude given to agents led to such practices as warnings on taking certain political positions, threats of arrest, entrapment schemes, approaching relatives or neighbors for damaging evidence, and impersonations. The wide, ill-defined net cast included clergy, African-Americans and other minorities, union members, and leftist activists and sympathizers. In most cases, these were Americans citizens simply exercising what they regarded as their right of free expression, association, or political activism guaranteed by the Constitution and taken for granted. In some cases, individuals were treated as dissidents simply for arguing that the War would last longer than the political leaders were saying it would.

The government excesses Thomas records could have been taken from newspapers in the months leading up to the Iraq War. For they are more or less the same as those used by the Bush Administration to stifle dissent and concerns over the Iraq War. By reaching back in history, Thomas informs or reminds one that such activities are not unprecedented, and in fact are predictable even in a democracy. Knowing about them, one can be on guard against them and in most cases prevent the institutionalization and unquestioned rationalization of them which would make them a permanent part of society.