Perhaps the most common myth about war is that it ends when the textbooks say it does, when the cease-fires begin and the documents are signed. Ostensibly, by the time the George Washington left New York harbor, the European war had ended and the American president was embarking on his dramatic experiment to end all wars. But a world accustomed to conflict cannot with a mere pen stroke shut down the machinery of war or change the mentality of measuring the world in Manichaean terms of good and evil.
In Europe, in the weeks after the Armistice, bombs exploded in train stations; railways were often too unsafe for Allied troops to use; local skirmishes abounded; two hundred prisoners of war were found dead at a Belgian rail station; and military intelligence officers reported a plague of distrust regarding the Armistice, with troops believing it to be a German ruse to demobilize the Allies. In northern Russia, American soldiers continued to fight in icy swamps and snowfields while influenza and pneumonia swept through the outposts. And in America, “the shadow war” was far from over. This was the war behind the war, in which a vast network of secret agents spied on American civilians in the name of national security, reporting on the private lives of men and women who behaved in a way that was thought to threaten America’s ability to win the war.
In the days immediately following the Armistice, the U.S. government, most specifically the Justice Department, made it clear to every domestic spy, whether paid or volunteer, that the job of securing the nation against Prussian deceptions wasn’t over. There would be no war’s-end relaxation for those who protected the nation at home. Now the task was to stop the propagandists who favored leniency for Germany at the peace table and to keep a “vigilant watch over anarchists, plotters and aliens,” as the Justice Department told the Washington Post on Armistice Day. Seth Wheeler, Jr., a volunteer spy in Albany, New York, told his local paper on November 18, “I’m as busy in my patriotic work as at any time since assuming the post.”
Espionage was hardly new to America. By 1917, when America entered the war, the private investigation business was thriving, with thousands of agents at more than three hundred firms, such as Pinkerton’s, and in the intelligence departments of numerous corporations. What happened to domestic intelligence during the war, however, was far more extensive: it was, in fact, revolutionary.
By the time of the signing of the Armistice, a massive, highly organized intelligence community had evolved in the United States, composed of agents from the Office of Naval Intelligence, the army’s Military Intelligence Division (typically referred to as the MID), the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation (the BI), the Treasury Department’s Secret Service, the U.S. Postal Service, and other agencies, including the U.S. Railroad Administration and the U.S. Food Administration. In addition, police departments in big cities had their own intelligence forces that coordinated with the army’s MID. Even the YMCA had a battalion of spies.
The largest of all such groups was the MID, whose manpower was far greater than the navy’s intelligence force or the Secret Service. The MID was even larger, in 1917 and 1918, than the Bureau of Investigation, and by the end of the war it had become the main clearinghouse for other agencies’ reports on civilians. The MID also worked with the State Department on the sensitive work of screening passports. Modeled after the British counterespionage system, it named its branches MI1 through MI8. Domestic spies worked out of MI4.
Even more vast in numbers, however, than any of the federal intelligence staffs was a mammoth web of patriotic organizations enlisting thousands of volunteer spies, all of whom reported their findings to Naval Intelligence, the MID, or the Bureau of Investigation. As one historian later wrote, by November of 1918, “the U.S. had fielded a corps of sleuths larger than any country had done in all of history.” Among them were the Liberty League, the American Defense Society, the Home Defense League, the National Security League, the Anti–Yellow Dog League, the All-Allied Anti-German League, the Knights of Liberty, the Boy Spies of America, the American Anti-Anarchy Association, and the Sedition Slammers. The most powerful was the American Protective League, or APL, a clandestine “club” of volunteers that was a major force behind the shadow war.
The APL began in the early spring of 1917 in Chicago, where the large German population was a matter of grave concern to advertising executive A.M. Briggs, who volunteered to help the regional office of the Justice Department investigate leads on German agents. President Wilson had just severed relations with Germany, war was imminent, and the Justice Department had only fifteen agents to cover all of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. It also had no motor cars. Briggs first offered himself and several of his friends as drivers, chauffeuring the small squadron of federal agents. Then he organized a group of wealthy men to buy several dozen motor cars for the Justice Department. Finally, he went to Washington to seek permission to go one step further: to launch a covert volunteer force headquartered in the People’s Gas Building in Chicago. Approval came swiftly. And after war was declared, the APL became an unofficial branch of the federal government whose agents routinely sent reports to the Justice Department, the MID, and Naval Intelligence. Soon it would move its headquarters to a four-story building on I Street in Washington.
In its manual, the APL described itself as “the largest company of detectives the world ever saw” and “the mysterious power behind our Government.” Its letterhead carried the banner headline, “Organized with the Approval and Operating under the Direction of the United States Department of Justice, Bureau of Investigation.” The Justice Department, however, never dared to boast publicly about its volunteer branches. Still, both the BI and the MID benefited hugely, not only by expanding their manpower but also by extending legal capabilities, sometimes using Leaguers for their dirty work. In one case in New Jersey, for example, an APL member was acquainted with the Justice Department’s main suspect and while at the suspect’s home pocketed a much needed document for evidence in an upcoming trial. Although judges could not allow evidence seized illegally by a federal official to be used in court, they could, as in this case, use evidence confiscated by a civilian. In another case, in Illinois, the MID called in APL members to obtain confessions from twenty-one black soldiers accused of assaulting a white woman. Fifteen confessed and were court-martialed.
Although the Justice Department did not authorize the volunteers to make arrests or carry weapons, some local police departments, welcoming the unpaid backup, did. Also, Leaguers, as they were called, carried badges, which looked official and proclaimed membership in the Secret Service. This didn’t exactly please the secretary of the treasury, who headed up the Secret Service, and who worried about how to control abuses and zealotry in such a vast volunteer force. Indeed, there was no central or official membership list. And there were plenty of instances of Leaguers overlapping efforts or stepping clumsily where they shouldn’t. Two Leaguers might hide a taping device independently in different parts of the same person’s house or even the wrong house. In one case, a New York member planted a dictograph in a female suspect’s apartment and another Leaguer’s amorous adventures with the suspect, not knowing she was a suspect, were recorded, thus making him a suspect. He later found a dictograph in his own apartment, placed by a fellow Leaguer. After all, anyone associating with a suspect became a suspect, both being potential enemies of the government.
“SPIES ARE EVERYWHERE,” a New York Tribune headline read in the spring of 1917, referring to German spies. But it could easily also have described the corps of American spies organizing to counteract such a threat. Indeed, most factories and public utilities nationwide employed one or more APL members to identify workers the government considered troublemakers. Posing as anarchists or socialists at labor meetings, Leaguers sometimes worked as provocateurs to entrap labor activists. At theaters, the first performance of a production brought in Leaguers like fans seeking autographs, but instead they were asking for every male actor’s draft card. If there was a problem, they would remove the suspect and escort him to the local police, despite the scheduled play or concert.
By the autumn of 1918, there were at least 300,000 APL spies hidden in the folds of American society, watching, trailing, and taping their bosses, colleagues, employees, neighbors, even the local butcher or their children’s schoolteachers. “It is my plan to enroll the responsible heads of the most important banks, trust companies, steamship lines and stock exchange houses, together with the large insurance companies and real estate concerns,” wrote a New York banker in charge of organizing the Manhattan branch of the APL.
Riding a tidal wave of intolerance, Leaguers listened for the telltale whispers of a treacherous enemy force that could be conspiring to destroy America. No matter where they were—amusement parks, theaters, saloons, private parties—they stopped every man of draft age and demanded to see his registration card. If he could not produce it, they called the local police to have him arrested, or, flashing their badges, they demanded the civilian come with them to be interrogated. Even a day at the beach could be disrupted by an APL slacker raid, in search of draft dodgers. One August night in 1918 at 10 P.M., at least seventy-five Leaguers stood at the end of each of four piers in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Thousands of men, women, and children were told they could not leave until the men showed their registration cards. The searches continued until 7 A.M. In the end, seven hundred men were apprehended, of which sixty were slackers—draft dodgers.
The initial purpose of this war behind the war was to stamp out perceived threats to the security of a nation at war—in other words to find and destroy German spy rings, to crush German businessmen sending funds to their homeland, and to identify German sympathizers. The 1910 census listed 8,282,618 Americans who had been born in Germany or who had at least one German-born parent. The government was thus confronted with an unprecedented and alarming challenge: how to detect the enemies at home. How many German citizens were acting as agents? How many were truly loyal to the American flag? How should the government define a threat? Who should be targeted? In a war that was unpopular on the day Congress declared it, critics of government policy became immediate targets and were labeled as unpatriotic, threats to national security, and worse still, potential German allies. But what indeed constituted a threat?
On the day after the declaration of war against Germany, President Wilson vaguely answered that question when he ordered all government agencies to authorize supervisors to dismiss employees for any “disloyal talk.” Wilson knew about the APL and even told his attorney general that he believed such a volunteer force could be dangerous. But he did not try to stop it, because the government needed the manpower. Further, he bestowed censorship and propaganda powers on the new Committee on Public Information, which under the leadership of former journalist George Creel established propaganda as a powerful tool of the U.S. government for snuffing out criticism and critics—a tool the government would continue to use long after the end of the war. Creel’s propaganda machine transformed a nation that had elected a president who campaigned on a platform of peace in 1916 to a nation beating the drums of war and ready to persecute and incarcerate anyone who resisted. To counteract criticism of government policy and to stimulate patriotic zeal, Creel employed numerous strategies, including the dispatching of at least 75,000 men—known as the Four-Minute Men—to movie theaters, churches, schools, and labor halls to give over 750,000 four-minute speeches that promoted the importance of the war and issued a warning about the threat of domestic sedition.
And even further, Wilson put into motion several new laws to assist the government in identifying and eliminating troublemakers. One was the Selective Service Act in 1917, which made it a crime to obstruct the draft. Another was the 1917 Espionage Act, which made it a crime to obstruct the war. And that made it a crime to criticize the war, to discourage enlistment, to encourage mutiny, and to impede in any way the government’s campaign to build a military force. The Espionage Act also gave the postmaster general the right to censor what he might consider “seditious” magazines and newspapers and to impound the mail of unpatriotic organizations.
In 1918, Congress passed the Alien Act, which gave the government the right to deport aliens who were anarchists or who advocated the overthrow of the American government. And in 1918, after heated debates in Congress, Wilson signed an amended version of the Espionage Act, which vastly extended the already long arm of the law. Under the new iteration of the 1917 law, it was a crime not only to obstruct the draft but to attempt to obstruct it. It was a crime to block the sale of Liberty Bonds. It was a crime to disrupt the production of goods deemed necessary to the war effort. And it was a crime “to willfully utter, print, write or publish” any expression of disloyalty toward or criticism of the U.S. government, its Constitution, its flag, even its military uniforms. The law also added to the postmaster general’s censorship powers by giving him the authority to identify “upon evidence satisfactory to him” which individuals were using the mails to promote seditious ideas in violation of the new act and then to allow him to halt their mail deliveries. The penalties were fines up to $10,000 and prison up to twenty years.
In the June 1918 issue of its newsletter, The Spy Glass, the American Protective League rejoiced in the new sedition law: “Signed by President Wilson on May 16 [1918], the amended espionage law opens a new chapter in the work of the American Protective League. For the first time we have an inclusive law under which to operate—a law broad enough in its scope and classifications to cover and define as serious crimes a multitude of offenses which were classed as minor by our peace-time code.”
Others feared the new law, especially the ninth clause, in which the word “willfully,” included in all other clauses of the law, was left out. “Whoever shall by word or act support or favor the cause of any country with which the United States is at war, or by word or act oppose the cause of the United States therein,” it said in part. This meant that, unlike the other clauses, a person could be convicted without having to prove any disloyal intent. “Like murder or burglary, espionage and sedition are now positive crimes,” so said the APL newsletter. “No one who commits them can plead innocent intent…. The amended law is a powerful weapon put into our hands.”
What began as a wartime measure to protect Americans on their own soil and to outmaneuver German spies evolved into a homeland war waged against anyone who did not agree with what the government was doing, especially with regard to the war. The APL’s profile of the enemy included anyone who happened on one occasion to put together one sentence indicating opposition to the war, without any intention to betray his or her nation and without an underlying scheme of working for the Germans. Too often these were innocent citizens practicing their democratic rights of protesting, speaking their minds, writing their hearts.
Socialists, anarchists, pacifists, labor activists, African-Americans, and foreigners were the usual and obvious targets. All who associated with them or happened to attend a meeting organized by such groups were automatically at risk.
Russians, as well as Germans, were high on the list of the suspicious. This was because intelligence operatives and officials were certain that Germany was behind the Russian Revolution. The new Bolshevik government had pulled Russia out of the war in March of 1918, causing German troops to withdraw from the east and strengthen their offensive against the Allies on the Western Front.
All labor organizers—especially members of the determined yet small Industrial Workers of the World, known as the IWW or the Wobblies—had been targets before the war and continued to be during the war. Indeed, the volunteer spy corps, which drew so heavily from the business community, used national security and the Espionage Act as reasons to break up labor meetings and to detain labor leaders. Before the war, labor had struggled for union recognition and a portion of Gilded Age profits, encountering stiff, sometimes deadly, resistance from businessmen and industrialists. During the war, the battle against labor took on a new form—“patriots” fighting against workers who might disrupt war production and therefore be part of an enemy plot. Now, after the war, workers would again be targeted, this time as Bolsheviks and Bolshevik sympathizers.
African-Americans were also deemed suspicious. Alienation and unrest in black communities must be the fault of outside agitators, said the government. Thus, the MID had a special section of spies devoted to “Negro Subversion.” During the war, unrest was a sign that Germans had stirred up blacks; after the war, unrest was a manifestation of the covert action of the Bolsheviks plotting to use blacks to foment revolution in the United States. Black soldiers returning from Europe were especially worrisome. As Wilson told a fellow passenger on the George Washington, they could be the “greatest medium in conveying Bolshevism to America.”
So focused had most Americans been on the war in Europe and on the flu epidemic at home that they hardly noticed the shadow war. Those who did were often indifferent to it. Others applauded its mission of sweeping the radical rubbish out of sight using whatever methods might work—prison, deportation, beatings, lynchings—constitutional or not. There were those, however, who did what they could to obstruct such a covert war, claiming it had gone beyond protecting domestic security by targeting innocent civilians. On Armistice Day, they were the ones who cheered for the end of two wars, or so they hoped.
A week after the Armistice, despite the Justice Department’s November 11 statement in the Washington Post about ongoing domestic surveillance, the head of the MID, Marlborough Churchill, sent an internal memo to his intelligence officers instructing them to drop all investigations of civilians, to dismiss all volunteers, and to collect the identification cards and any other credentials distributed to civilian spies. “The emergency no longer exists,” he wrote, and any “unfinished disloyalty” cases were to be turned over to the Department of Justice. The army’s battle against subversive civilians was over, claimed Churchill, who then prepared to join Wilson in Paris as head of intelligence at the peace conference.
But more than memos and edicts would be needed to stop the hundreds of thousands of shadow warriors from continuing their war on those they viewed as America’s domestic enemies. Most MID branches ignored Churchill’s edict. Some believed the German threat had not subsided. Others conjured new threats. Still others, consumed with self-importance, were unwilling to end what they had put so much energy and identity into creating. And then there was the fact that despite any internal memos, the government was telling the media that regardless of the impending peace, the nation must remain vigilant. “The need for the League is as great now as it has been in the past and I am entirely satisfied that the need for this organization will continue for some time to come, entirely without regard to the progress of peace negotiations,” A. B. Bielaski, the chief of the Bureau of Investigation, told the press.
Even before Churchill’s memo, the New York City division of the MID decided not to disband, thanks in part to the head of its propaganda section, Archibald E. Stevenson. The day after the Armistice, Stevenson turned in a staggering report outlining his perceptions of the latest dangers to national security, principally the spread of Bolshevism. The tone was urgent. All of Eastern Europe was soon to follow the path of the Bolsheviks, he wrote, as well as Italy and France. And the “congested and industrial districts” of the United States were especially at risk. Consider that there are four million people in New York alone, he wrote, who are either immigrants or children of immigrants, all vulnerable to the propaganda of Bolshevist infiltrators. In New York, he knew there were at least ten revolutionary meetings each week, perhaps fifteen. And the reports he received from agents and stenographers attending those meetings were proof enough for him that “without a question there is an organized conspiracy to overthrow the present form of the American government.” His report was sent on to Washington, where the MID acting director, in Churchill’s absence, encouraged Stevenson enthusiastically to continue his observations and studies—a decision the MID would one day regret.
At the same time, the Espionage Act was still alive and well in Washington. Immediately after the Armistice, the Justice Department and its U.S. attorneys in major cities announced that these wartime laws would stay in effect until the war was officially over. Effectively nothing would change until the peace negotiations ended and the U.S. had signed and ratified a treaty. More than just keeping the laws on the books, they claimed they would continue to utilize them to expose any un-American sentiment that might be expressed. “There are still many individuals who have to be watched and reported upon, and there will be no cessation of vigilance in that direction,” an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles told the press. “We want the loyal people of Los Angeles to still keep an eye on the violators of the Espionage Act and make reports to us when they see such infractions. Arrests will be made for violations of the war laws, just as they have been in the past.”
This attitude became pervasive nationwide. When a New York member of the Socialist Party spoke his mind at a November 1918 meeting in Manhattan, an attending MID agent and stenographer reported every word. In the days ahead the speaker was arrested under the act, convicted, and sentenced to fifteen years in jail. The Washington office filed a statement on the case and commented that it was essential for the New York branch of the MID to proceed in its coverage of “radical” meetings, concluding that “the wheels of justice continue to turn in spite of the Armistice”—running into and over everyone who had, as the Sedition Act instructed, even the appearance of disloyalty. Among those caught in the wide net of domestic intelligence was Carl Sandburg.
A few weeks after the George Washington left New York harbor, the SS Bergensfjord from Stockholm, Sweden, pulled in. It was Christmas Day 1918. After leaving the Bergensfjord, Carl Sandburg had planned to catch a train to Cleveland, where he would drop off a bundle of papers to his editor, and, as soon as he could, take a train home to Chicago. Sandburg had been on assignment in Sweden since early October and he was a new father who had not yet seen his one-month-old daughter. He ached for the moment when he could open the door of his Chicago home and wrap himself in the harmonious, safe world of his family. But that was not going to happen anytime soon.
Waiting for Sandburg in New York was Captain John B. Trevor, the head of the New York branch of the MID. Although the United States had not been at war with any of the nations about which Sandburg had been writing, mainly Finland and Russia, or in which he had been living, Sweden, Trevor nonetheless arrested him the moment he stepped off the boat on charges of violating the 1917 wartime law known as the Trading with the Enemy Act. Government agents from the Secret Service, the army, and customs confiscated all written materials in Sandburg’s baggage and on his person and sent them to be analyzed by government censors. And then they commenced to interrogate him. It was an irksome, frustrating process that would last for several days—as long as three hours one day—followed by weeks of negotiations in a tug-of-war over the allegations against him.
Since July of 1918, Sandburg, then forty years old, had worked for the Newspaper Enterprise Association, a Scripps news service that placed its stories in three hundred or more publications with a collective circulation of at least 4.5 million readers. Sandburg’s assignment was to cover Eastern Europe for the NEA from Stockholm, which his editor, Sam Hughes, believed would be an excellent place to find fresh, important stories from Germany and Russia. Onward from the day in the summer of 1918 when he first got the assignment, however, Sandburg grappled with a suspicious government and annoying red tape. It was possible, he soon learned, that the State Department might not even grant him a passport.
The destination was problematic. All branches of intelligence were closely watching the flow of human traffic through Stockholm, where intrigue seemed to be on the rise and where spies from the Allied and Central Powers congregated. But Sandburg himself was also a problem. An avowed socialist, Sandburg was sympathetic to those caught in the web of the Espionage and Sedition Acts, and he had many friends, including the outspoken radicals John Reed and his wife, Louise Bryant, who supported the Russian Revolution. Well aware of his liabilities, he asked his book editor, Alfred Harcourt of the New York publishing house Henry Holt, in addition to the highly respected attorney Clarence Darrow and labor leader Samuel Gompers, to write strong letters noting his patriotism and his reputation for objective journalism. Not until late September was Sandburg approved for a passport, and finally on October 4 he left for Stockholm. There he wrote numerous stories, as well as poems, and garnered excellent journalistic sources, including a Russian man who had taught school in Chicago and now had high-level contacts in the Russian government.
That autumn, Sandburg’s NEA editor Hughes began to suspect that misinformation abounded in the United States about the Bolsheviks. Believing that Americans deserved to know the truth, he wanted to publish an article or series about the Bolsheviks, one that informed the American public truthfully about Russia’s new ruling party. Hughes relied heavily on Sandburg to gather as much Russian material as he could—photographs, films, pamphlets, anecdotes, newspaper clips, interviews—while in Stockholm. By the time Sandburg was packing to return to the United States, he had filled two trunks with Russian books, newspapers, and pamphlets for the NEA, which he sent by mail. Knowing it would take two months or longer for Hughes to get the trunks, he also carried plenty of material with him on board the Bergensfjord, including notebooks from his interviews with as many as two hundred people, clips about Russia and Germany from Scandinavian newspapers, files of the Soviet Izvestia Congress from June 1918, and a recent three-volume history of Russia. Tucked in the inner pocket of his coat, he transported, with great sensitivity to its historical and current value, a published English translation of V. I. Lenin’s A Letter to American Workingmen from the Socialist Soviet Republic of Russia printed by the Socialist Publication Society. He also carried with him some money: 400 kronor from the Russian source who had taught school in Chicago, for his wife who was still in America; and two drafts of $5,000 each for the head of the Finnish Information Bureau in the United States. When he was arrested the money was seized.
Writing to Secretary of War Newton Baker, Hughes protested Sandburg’s detention and the confiscation of his papers. These were the sources of a journalist on assignment. Besides, America was no longer at war, and Sweden had been neutral. Calling Sandburg’s detention an unconscionable act of censorship, Hughes would fight it, he wrote. Baker wrote back that Sandburg was carrying “revolutionary literature” and the money was for Finn revolutionaries. Hughes then informed Baker that he believed the government was detaining Sandburg because he was a socialist. Hughes pointed out that the government incorrectly believed Sandburg to be a German. After all, the government had spelled his name “berg” instead of “burg” in its files on him. This caused the suspicion, Hughes believed. What they were doing was wrong and when it was over, Hughes told Baker that he would tell Sandburg to write—for publication—what he knew to be true and what he felt was right, despite any shadow of government censorship. “Isn’t it fine for the government to treat such a man like a dog of a traitor?” Hughes wrote in his letter to Baker.
Sandburg tried to remain calm. “Busier than a cranberry merchant these days,” he wrote to his wife on December 27. “American and British intelligence officers and an assistant district attorney spent three hours asking questions.” No amount of reasoning, however, could explain to him why his notebooks and clips were such a threat.
In a letter to Hughes, Sandburg wrote, “Day by day the retention of the Russian ‘revolutionary literature,’ which is NEA property and which was brought in under instructions, becomes more preposterous. Of the total of stuff printed in the Russian language probably less than a half can be construed as ‘revolutionary.’ Of this more than 75 per cent has already been printed in publications in the United States and is now in the public libraries or on sale nation-wide at newsstands.”