Acceding to Creel’s request, the NBHS set up a committee, comprised of Jameson, the head of the Department of Historical Research of the Carnegie Institution, and Samuel Harper, a professor of Russian language at the University of Chicago, to review the documents. They confirmed the authenticity of most of the fraudulent documents. The Nation charged that the documents and NBHS report spoiled “the good name of the Government and the integrity of American historical scholarship.”35 In 1956, George Kennan proved once and for all what most suspected: the documents were indeed forgeries.36
Historians’ and other academics’ complicity in selling wartime propaganda brought well-deserved opprobrium down on their heads during the interwar period. In 1927, H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury deplored the knee-jerk patriotic conformity that sullied all the country’s top colleges and universities. Charles Angoff wrote, “Bacteriologists, physicists and chemists vied with philosophers, philologians and botanists in shouting maledictions upon the Hun, and thousands took to snooping upon their brethren as entertained the least doubt about the sanctity of the war…. Such guilt against American idealism was sufficient cause, in the eyes of all patriotic university presidents and boards of trustees, for the immediate dismissal of the traitors.”37
Despite the well-deserved criticism, controlling public opinion became a central element in all future war planning. Harold Lasswell identified its importance in his 1927 book Propaganda Technique in the World War. Lasswell wrote:
During the war period it came to be recognized that the mobilization of men and means was not sufficient; there must be a mobilization of opinion. Power over opinion, as over life and property, passed into official hands, because the danger from license was greater than the danger of abuse. Indeed, there is no question but that government management of opinion is the unescapable corollary of large-scale modern war. The only question is the degree to which the government should try to conduct its propaganda secretly, and the degree to which it should conduct it openly.38
Campuses became hotbeds of intolerance. University professors who spoke against the war were fired. Others were cowed into silence. As Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler exclaimed in announcing the end of academic freedom on campus:
What had been tolerated before became intolerable now. What had been wrongheadedness was now sedition. What had been folly was now treason… there is and will be no place in Columbia University, either on the rolls of its Faculties or on the rolls of its students, for any person who opposes or counsels opposition to the effective enforcement of the laws of the United States, or who acts, speaks, or writes treason. The separation of any such person from Columbia University will be as speedy as the discovery of his offense.39
This was no idle threat. The following October, Columbia announced the firing of two prominent faculty members for their outspoken opposition to the war. Professors James McKeen Cattell, one of the nation’s leading psychologists, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana of the Department of English and Comparative Literature, a grandson of the poet, were condemned by the faculty and trustees as well as by Butler. The official university statement charged that they “had done grave injury to the university by their public agitation against the conduct of the war.” The New York Times commented, “Since the declaration of war against Germany Professor Cattell has been especially obnoxious to the Columbia Faculty because of his unhesitating denunciation of a war policy by our Government.” Dana was ousted because of his active role in the antiwar People’s Council.40 Applauding Columbia’s action, the Times editorialized, “The fantasies of ‘academic freedom’… cannot protect a professor who counsels resistance to the law and speaks, writes, disseminates treason. That a teacher of youth should teach sedition and treason, that he should infect, or seek to infect, youthful minds with ideas fatal to their duty to the country, is intolerable.”41
The following week, Professor Charles Beard, arguably the nation’s leading historian in the first half of the twentieth century, resigned in protest. Although an early and fervent supporter of the war and a harsh critic of German imperialism, he condemned the control of the university by a “small and active group of trustees who have no standing in the world of education, who are reactionary and visionless in politics, narrow and mediaeval in religion.” Beard explained that, despite his own enthusiastic support for the war, “thousands of my countrymen do not share this view. Their opinions cannot be changed by curses or bludgeons. Arguments addressed to their reason and understandings are the best hope.”42 Beard had already incurred the ire of several trustees the previous spring when he declared at a conference, “If we have to suppress everything we don’t like to hear, this country is on a pretty wobbly basis. This country was founded on disrespect and the denial of authority, and it is no time to stop free discussion.” At least two other faculty members also resigned in solidarity, and historian James H. Robinson and philosopher John Dewey condemned the firings and expressed regret at Beard’s resignation.43 In December, Beard charged that reactionary trustees saw the war as an opportunity “to drive out or humiliate or terrorize every man who held progressive, liberal, unconventional views on political matters in no way connected with the war.” Similar purges of left-wing professors, as well as the application of “very strong” pressure on grammar and high school teachers, occurred throughout the country.44
The War Department went one step further, turning the docile campuses into military training grounds. On October 1, 1918, 140,000 students on more than five hundred campuses across the country were simultaneously inducted into the army as part of the Student Army Training Corps (SATC). Given the rank of private, they were thereafter educated, housed, clothed, equipped, and fed at government expense.45 They also received privates’ pay. The Chicago Tribune reported, “Rah-rah days are over for American college boys…. College hereafter is to mean business—largely intensive preparation for the business of war.”46 Eleven hours per week were slated for military drills, on top of forty-two hours of courses on largely military-oriented “essential” and “allied” subjects. As part of this training, students at participating institutions were required to take a propaganda-laden “War Issues Course.”47
Having drawn blood in his personal campaign to make the universities “safe for democracy,” Butler set his sights higher, calling for the ouster of Robert La Follette from the U.S. Senate for his treasonous opposition to the war. Butler told three thousand wildly cheering delegates to the annual convention of the American Bankers Association in Atlantic City that they “might just as well put poison into the food of every boy” who went to war “as to permit this man to make war upon the nation in the halls of congress.”48 La Follette was also targeted by members of the University of Wisconsin faculty, over 90 percent of whom signed a petition condemning his antiwar position and several of whom began a drive to “put La Follette and all his supporters out of business,” according to one of the campaign’s leaders.49
La Follette survived the national campaign to force his ouster, but the Bill of Rights didn’t fare as well. Congress passed some of the most repressive legislation in the country’s history. The Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 curbed speech and created a climate of intolerance toward dissent. Under the Espionage Act, people faced $10,000 fines and up to twenty years in jail for obstructing military operations in wartime. It targeted “Whoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty in the military or naval forces of the United States, or shall willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the U.S.”50 The act empowered Postmaster General Albert Burleson, who, socialist Norman Thomas said, “didn’t know socialism from rheumatism,” to ban from the mail any literature he believed advocated treason or insurrection or opposed the draft.51 The following year, Attorney General Thomas W. Gregory convinced Congress to expand the act to ban anyone who might “utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States… and 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.”52