WILSON'S FASCIST POLICE STATE
Today we unreflectively associate fascism with militarism. But it should be remembered that fascism was militaristic because militarism was "progressive" at the beginning of the twentieth century. Across the intellectual landscape, technocrats and poets alike saw the military as the best model for organizing and mobilizing society. Mussolini's "Battle of the Grains" and similar campaigns were publicized on both sides of the Atlantic as the enlightened application of James's doctrine of the "moral equivalent of war." There was a deep irony to America's war aim to crush "Prussian militarism," given that it was Prussian militarism which had inspired so many of the war's American cheerleaders in the first place. The idea that war was the source of moral values had been pioneered by German intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the influence of these intellectuals on the American mind was enormous. When America entered the war in 1917, progressive intellectuals, versed in the same doctrines and philosophies popular on the European continent, leaped at the opportunity to remake society through the discipline of the sword.
It is true that some progressives thought World War I was not well-advised on the merits, and there were a few progressives — Robert La Follette, for example — who were decidedly opposed (though La Follette was no pacifist, having supported earlier progressive military adventures). But most supported the war enthusiastically, even fanatically (the same goes for a great many American Socialists). And even those who were ambivalent about the war in Europe were giddy about what John Dewey called the "social possibilities of war." Dewey was the New Republic's in-house philosopher during the lead-up to the war, and he ridiculed self-described pacifists who couldn't recognize the "immense impetus to reorganization afforded by this war." One group that did recognize the social possibilities of war were the early feminists who, in the words of Harriot Stanton Blatch, looked forward to new economic opportunities for women as "the usual, and happy, accompaniment of war." Richard Ely, a fervent believer in "industrial armies," was a zealous believer in the draft: "The moral effect of taking boys off street corners and out of saloons and drilling them is excellent, and the economic effects are likewise beneficial." Wilson clearly saw things along the same lines. "I am an advocate of peace," he began one typical declaration, "but there are some splendid things that come to a nation through the discipline of war." Hitler couldn't have agreed more. As he told Joseph Goebbels, "The war...made possible for us the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times."50
We should not forget how the demands of war fed the arguments for socialism. Dewey was giddy that the war might force Americans "to give up much of our economic freedom...We shall have to lay by our good-natured individualism and march in step." If the war went well, it would constrain "the individualistic tradition" and convince Americans of "the supremacy of public need over private possessions." Another progressive put it more succinctly: "Laissez-faire is dead. Long live social control."51
Croly's New Republic was relentless in its push for war. In the magazine's very first editorial, written by Croly, the editors expressed their hope that war "should bring with it a political and economic organization better able to redeem its obligations at home." Two years later Croly again expressed his hope that America's entry into the war would provide "the tonic of a serious moral adventure." A week before America joined the war, Walter Lippmann (who would later write much of Wilson's Fourteen Points) promised that hostilities would bring out a "transvaluation of values as radical as anything in the history of intellect." This was a transparent invocation of Nietzsche's call for overturning all traditional morality. Not coincidentally, Lippmann was a protege of William James's, and his call to use war to smash the old order illustrates how similar Nietzscheans and American pragmatists were in their conclusions and, often, their principles. Indeed, Lippmann was sounding the pragmatist's trumpet when he declared that our understanding of such ideas as democracy, liberty, and equality would have to be rethought from their foundations "as fearlessly as religious dogmas were in the nineteenth century."52
Meanwhile, socialist editors and journalists — including many from the Masses, the most audacious of the radical journals that Wilson tried to ban — rushed to get a paycheck from Wilson's propaganda ministry. Artists such as Charles Dana Gibson, James Montgomery Flagg, and Joseph Pennell and writers like Booth Tarkington, Samuel Hopkins Adams, and Ernest Poole became cheerleaders for the war-hungry regime. Musicians, comedians, sculptors, ministers — and of course the movie industry — were all happily drafted to the cause, eager to wear the "invisible uniform of war." Isadora Duncan, an avant-garde pioneer of what today would be called sexual liberation, became a toe tapper in patriotic pageants at the Metropolitan Opera House. The most enduring and iconic image of the time is Flagg's "I Want You" poster of Uncle Sam pointing the shaming finger of the state-made-flesh at uncommitted citizens.
Almost alone among progressives, the brilliant, bizarre, disfigured genius Randolph Bourne seemed to understand precisely what was going on. The war revealed that a generation of young intellectuals, trained in pragmatic philosophy, were ill equipped to prevent means from becoming ends. The "peculiar congeniality between the war and these men" was simply baked into the cake, Bourne lamented. "It is," he sadly concluded, "as if the war and they had been waiting for each other."53
Wilson the great centralizer and would-be leader of men moved overnight to empower these would-be social engineers, creating a vast array of wartime boards, commissions, and committees. Overseeing it all was the War Industries Board, or WIB, chaired by Bernard Baruch, which whipped, cajoled, and seduced American industry into the loving embrace of the state long before Mussolini or Hitler contemplated their corporatist doctrines. The progressives running the WIB had no illusions about what they were up to. "It was an industrial dictatorship without parallel — a dictatorship by force of necessity and common consent which step by step at last encompassed the Nation and united it into a coordinated and mobile whole," declared Grosvenor Clarkson, a member and subsequent historian of the WIB.54
More important than socializing industry was nationalizing the people for the war effort. "Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way," Wilson threatened in June 1917. Harking back to his belief that "leaders of men" must manipulate the passions of the masses, he approved and supervised one of the first truly Orwellian propaganda efforts in Western history. He set the tone himself when he defended the first military draft since the Civil War. "It is in no sense a conscription of the unwilling: it is, rather, selection from a nation which has volunteered in mass."55
A week after the war started, Walter Lippmann — no doubt eager to set about the work of unleashing a transvaluation of values — sent a memo to Wilson imploring him to commence with a sweeping propaganda effort. Lippmann, as he argued later, believed that most citizens were "mentally children or barbarians" and therefore needed to be directed by experts like himself. Individual liberty, while nice, needed to be subordinated to, among other things, "order."56
Wilson tapped the progressive journalist George Creel to head the Committee on Public Information, or CPI, the West's first modern ministry for propaganda. Creel was a former muckraking liberal journalist and police commissioner in Denver who had gone so far as to forbid his cops from carrying nightsticks or guns. He took to the propaganda portfolio immediately, determined to inflame the American public into "one white-hot mass" under the banner of "100 percent Americanism." "It was a fight for the minds of men, for the 'conquest of their convictions,' and the battle line ran through every home in every country," Creel recalled. Fear was a vital tool, he argued, "an important element to be bred into the civilian population. It is difficult to unite a people by talking only on the highest ethical plane. To fight for an ideal, perhaps, must be coupled with thoughts of self-preservation."57