Notice: Trying to get property 'ID' of non-object in /code/wp-content/themes/thenation-2023/functions.php on line 3332 The Senator Who Took On the CIAhttps://www.thenation.com/article/society/frank-church-cia-james-thomas-risen/Adam HochschildSep 5, 2023

Frank Church and the committee that investigated the US intelligence agencies.

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Books & the Arts / September 5, 2023

The Senator Who Took On the CIA

Frank Church and the committee that investigated the US intelligence agencies.

Adam Hochschild
Illustration by Lily Qian.

On November 3, 1791, in what today is western Ohio, some 1,400 US soldiers under Maj. Gen. Arthur St. Clair, accompanied by more than 100 wives, children, prostitutes, and other camp followers, stopped for the night on the banks of the Wabash River. The inept St. Clair failed to order his men to prepare any breastworks or defenses. The next morning, as they were cooking breakfast over their campfires, the troops were overwhelmed by a well-planned attack by roughly 1,000 Native Americans angry about the tide of newcomers invading their lands. Discipline collapsed, and only a few hundred soldiers managed to break out and flee. The battle left 657 troops dead and 271 wounded. It would be the greatest military defeat that Native Americans ever inflicted on the US Army.

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The defeat shocked the infant republic, and early the next year the House of Representatives set up a select committee to investigate. The seven-member panel began to hold public hearings, paying witnesses $1 a day. The politically well-connected St. Clair attended most of the sessions, and his presence—and perhaps some unrecorded lobbying by him and his supporters—seems to have intimidated the committee into exonerating him: After a month, it issued a report declaring that St. Clair had “discharged the various duties which devolved upon him with ability, activity, and zeal.” The select committee blamed the disaster, unconvincingly, on the quartermaster and contractors, who had allegedly supplied the troops with faulty gunpowder, saddles, axes, and shoes.

In its timidity about holding the powerful to account, this first congressional investigation was typical of far too many to come. No such failure was made, however, by the most recent significant investigation, also by a select committee of the House, into the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. Its riveting hearings and brilliantly edited video were enough to make even the most jaded radical feel that there’s something worthwhile in our Constitution after all.

The 230 years between these two sets of hearings have seen hundreds of other congressional investigations, but arguably the most significant of them all was that of the Church Committee, as it came to be known, from 1975 to 1976. Chaired by Frank Church, a Democratic senator from Idaho, the committee’s several months of hearings and voluminous written report exposed an astounding variety of misdeeds by US intelligence agencies. The FBI, the committee found, had directed a massive campaign of surveillance, harassment, and attempted blackmail against Martin Luther King Jr. It had infiltrated activist groups and monitored the legitimate political activities of thousands of Americans. The CIA had plotted to assassinate—both successfully and unsuccessfully—a variety of leaders in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It had enlisted the Mafia in its attempts to kill Fidel Castro and had tested large doses of LSD on unwitting subjects. It is hard to recall any other moment in American history when so much horrifying skulduggery was revealed.

The Church Committee, and Church himself, is the subject of a new book by the veteran correspondent James Risen, collaborating with his son Thomas, an aviation and business journalist. James Risen is one of our finest investigative reporters: His long and dogged pursuit of intelligence-agency overreach spanning several decades has led him to clashes with his former longtime employer, The New York Times. In addition to his books, he now writes mostly for The Intercept. What is notable about the Risens’ new volume, however, is that the revelations it explores were made not by journalists but by legislators.

Frank Church was born in Boise, Idaho, to a Catholic family; his father was the owner of a sporting goods store. Politically ambitious since childhood, Church served as an Army intelligence officer in China during World War II—a useful thing to have on your résumé if you were planning a run for office. He got a head start in Idaho politics by marrying Bethine Clark, whose father and uncle had both served as governor. Church was elected to the US Senate in 1956 at the age of 32, a bare two years above the constitutional minimum of 30. No matter how striking that early success, Church seemed an unlikely person to ever lead a pathbreaking investigation into US national security abuses. His was a rural, increasingly conservative state with a large Mormon population and more sheep than people, and Church correctly predicted that he would be “the last Democrat elected to the Senate from Idaho.” Furthermore, for most of his first decade in Washington, he was a conventional cold warrior, voting for the notorious Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, the legal underpinning of President Lyndon Johnson’s fateful escalation of the Vietnam War.

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But as Church’s son wrote later, his father “regretted that vote to the end of his life.” Almost as soon as he cast it, Church began to develop doubts, not just about Vietnam but about the wider arrogance of a United States that was trying to shape events on the other side of the Pacific. Later he would compare it to the Soviet Union’s ruthless suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968. He was, as the Risens put it, “radicalized by Vietnam,” although some would dispute their claim that Church “did more than any other member of Congress to rein in Nixon’s war and bring about peace.”

Church’s break from the mainstream over the Vietnam War opened his mind in other ways as well. Soon he became concerned about the power that private companies wielded over US foreign policy, and in 1972 he managed to get himself appointed chair of the new Senate Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations. He led the first congressional investigation into an issue that remains central today: the American oil industry’s close ties to Saudi Arabia. His subcommittee’s hearings revealed one scandal after another involving big business buying favors from the US or foreign governments. Among the culprits were ITT, Northrop, and, above all, Lockheed, which had bribed officials in half a dozen countries to purchase its high-priced airplanes. The Risens relate a telling moment when Church, grilling Lockheed chairman Dan Haughton, asked him, “What’s the difference between a bribe and a kickback?”

Haughton argued that a kickback is “something in the price that you return to the buyer. A bribe is where you ask for a service…though I’m no authority….”

“If you aren’t an authority,” Church replied acidly, “I don’t know who is.”

Church’s fellow senators became alarmed that he was going too far. Two of them, Democrat Hubert Humphrey and Republican Jacob Javits, resigned from the subcommittee and then orchestrated its abolition and replacement by a tamer one on foreign economic policy.

Meanwhile, the Watergate scandal had produced a chain of revelations. At the end of 1974, the journalist Seymour Hersh had published a massive New York Times story detailing illegal CIA spying on at least 10,000 American citizens during the Vietnam War. Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield had long fretted about the lack of congressional oversight of the CIA, and the exposé gave him the chance to finally act, forming a select investigative committee in early 1975.

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Church lobbied successfully to become its chair. He faced plenty of obstacles: Dick Cheney, then the deputy White House chief of staff, and Henry Kissinger, the secretary of state and national security adviser, aggressively tried to stonewall his every move. President Gerald Ford at times overrode Cheney, but he also tried to distract attention from Church’s inquiry by appointing his own investigative commission, led by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller.

Once the Church Committee’s investigation was mostly complete, the White House tried to discredit it in a particularly nasty way. In December 1975, Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens, was assassinated by Greek left-wing guerrillas angry at the United States for its role in installing a military junta in their country. Through whispers to friendly reporters and members of Congress, the Ford administration blamed Welch’s death on the Church investigation. The charge was nonsense; Welch’s identity as the CIA station chief was no secret and had even been mentioned in the Greek press. But the administration’s attempt to tar Church was skillfully managed: The aircraft bringing Welch’s body home circled Andrews Air Force Base for 45 minutes so it could land at just the right moment to be filmed for the morning TV news programs. Although no president had ever before gone to the funeral of a CIA officer, Ford—along with Kissinger and other top officials—attended the service for Welch.

It is hardly surprising that the White House wanted to discredit the Church Committee, for its revelations were perhaps the most embarrassing blow that Congress has ever inflicted on the executive branch. Most shocking were the committee’s disclosures of the CIA’s attempts to assassinate foreign leaders. Not only had the agency tried to kill Castro in Cuba, but it had plotted to murder the democratically elected Patrice Lumumba in Congo. (Its assassins bungled the job, but the Belgians and Congolese, assuming they had the CIA’s blessing, carried it out.) The agency had also supplied weapons to the plotters who killed Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1961, and it supported the coup that deposed and killed South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem two years later. In 1970, the CIA supported the right-wing officers who shot and killed Gen. René Schneider, the commander in chief of the Chilean Army and a man who staunchly opposed proposals for the coup d’état that would eventually overthrow and kill the elected left-wing president, Salvador Allende.

The Church Committee’s discoveries led to other revelations. The disclosures about the vast amount of surveillance that the FBI and the CIA had performed on activists during the Vietnam War prompted many radicals to use the Freedom of Information Act to retrieve endless pages of such records about themselves, albeit with the names of informants blotted out. Others have used the act over the years to help pry out of a reluctant FBI ever more information about its obsession with Martin Luther King Jr. The Last Honest Man reminds us of some lesser-known details as well: For example, not only was the FBI intent on getting rid of King, preferably by suicide, but it had a replacement for him in mind as the presumptive leader of Black Americans. This was to be the Republican lawyer Samuel Pierce, who would later serve as Ronald Reagan’s secretary of housing and urban development.

Operating with a bipartisanship unimaginable today, the Church Committee fought back against both White House and CIA attempts to block the release of its findings. It issued a multivolume final report in 1976. Church made a short-lived run for the Democratic presidential nomination that same year, but former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter had it sewn up. The senator’s moment of glory was over, but he at least had the satisfaction of seeing Congress pass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978, which for the first time imposed some limits on the government’s ability to spy on American citizens. In 1980, Church lost his bid for reelection to the Senate. He died of cancer only a few years later, at the age of 59.

“What is left is the core truth,” the Risens write. “Frank Church and his committee took on the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA, and succeeded in bringing them under the rule of law for the first time.” Yes, but as the authors know better than anyone, these agencies haven’t always followed the law. Just how far they often stray has been shown by Edward Snowden’s brave whistleblowing, which revealed how the National Security Agency was tracing the phone calls and text messages of millions of Americans. It has also been demonstrated by Jeffrey Sterling in revealing (to James Risen, in fact) a badly bungled CIA attempt to supply faulty blueprints of nuclear warheads to Iran. And, of course, there was the unconscionable order by the George W. Bush–Dick Cheney administration for the CIA to use torture on its prisoners. Vast power always carries the possibility of vast abuse, and without vigilant oversight, that risk will remain.

Today, however, an enormous danger looms somewhere else entirely. Far greater than the information gathering carried out by the government is the surveillance done by private corporations. Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Twitter (or X, as it has since been rebranded under Elon Musk) know more about our actions, beliefs, loves, hates, and friend networks than even the most determined FBI agents of a half-century ago as they opened our mail or listened in on our phone calls. So far, that knowledge has mostly been put to work selling our attention to advertisers. But we have already seen how Facebook’s algorithm feeds material to its users that reinforces their beliefs, no matter how prejudiced or conspiratorial. And Musk provided Ron DeSantis with a platform for his presidential campaign kickoff and has repeatedly used Twitter to block opinions he doesn’t like and voices that a variety of governments want silenced. The ominous political potential of these vast corporations combining their powers of censorship with what they know about us from our billions of clicks and keystrokes can barely be imagined.

Even half a century ago, before all this was in sight, Frank Church seemed to sense the danger ahead. As he warned in 1975:

The United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air…. That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything…. There would be no place to hide…. I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge.

Unfortunately, we have indeed already crossed it, and we will need more than another Church Committee to find our way back.



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The Cult of J. Edgar Hooverhttps://www.thenation.com/article/society/hoover-fbi-gman-gospel/Adam Hochschild,Adam HochschildMar 7, 2023A zealot through and through, he ran the FBI like a religious sect.]]>

Edgar Hoover, we’ve always assumed, became the most powerful unelected American of his time because he had the goods on everybody: the mistresses, financial shenanigans, and underworld connections of presidents who might fire him and legislators who might investigate him. Two new books about the longtime FBI chief make you realize that there was something else as well. Hoover’s half-century of immense influence rested on his mastery of a very American art—the crafting of his image.

In the Yale historian Beverly Gage’s lengthy and judicious G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, there are few facets of Hoover’s career that go unexplored. By contrast, Lerone A. Martin’s The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism is more of a prosecutor’s brief. Martin, the director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Stanford (a copublisher of King’s papers), focuses not just on Hoover’s notorious racism but also on his promotion of a distinct brand of conservative evangelicalism. Despite their differences, however, both books document the prodigious effort Hoover put into self-promotion. The FBI director would leave behind more than 200 boxes of press clippings.

Hoover grew up in a lower-middle-class world far removed from glamorous headlines. His father, after failing to make ends meet working in a shoe shop, became a printing foreman in a government agency but long struggled—at one point in an asylum—with what was then called “melancholia.” In response, the young J. Edgar became ferociously determined to succeed, working by day while getting his college and law degrees at night. He then immediately joined the Justice Department, and in 1919, at the remarkably young age of 24, he got his first big break: an appointment to head the department’s new Radical Division just as the nation was in the midst of its first Red Scare. Ignited by the revolution in Russia and labor militancy at home, this period saw public hysteria and government prosecution directed against anarchists, socialists, and communists—and Hoover was there to do his part.

An early sign of his eye for media coverage appeared in 1920, when Hoover invited half a dozen journalists along on one of the notorious Palmer Raids against radicals that he personally led. He was rewarded when a newspaper reported how the intrepid raiders raced over the snow-covered streets of Paterson, N.J., in “a large bobsled drawn by two fast steeds” to catch their dangerous quarry. Another part of skillful PR is knowing when to keep your name out of the papers, and one suspects Hoover’s agile hand as well in stories vilifying the groups targeted in the raids, such as a New York Times article based on information “from an official source in Washington.”

In 1924, Hoover got his next promotion, to the position he would hold for the rest of his life: chief of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation (“Federal” would be added just over a decade later). Once a small, inconspicuous unit, the Bureau of Investigation had mushroomed dramatically during the Red Scare, and it would continue to grow with the rise of organized crime during Prohibition.

As Hoover settled into his new job, he became ever more zealous about winning himself and “the Bureau” royal treatment in the mass media of the 1930s and ’40s. One great gift, as Gage explains, turned out to be the Hays Code, which movie producers adopted in 1934 to fend off government censorship. Among other things, the code forbade the glamorization of gangsters, which meant, in effect, that “if American directors wanted to make movies about crime, the policemen now had to be the heroes.”

In the 1935 Warner Brothers film G-Men, one character says of his crime-fighting colleagues, “When they tackle a job, they stick to it till they’re finished, with no fat-faced politician standing around telling ‘em what to do.” A torrent of similar movies followed, with the increasingly influential Hoover ensuring that they glorified the FBI. A decade later, he even appeared briefly on-screen as himself, reading through papers at his desk in The House on 92nd Street, about the FBI’s cracking of a Nazi spy ring. The films kept coming, including The FBI Story, starring Jimmy Stewart. Hoover won the adulation he craved; movie directors, in return, received personal tours of FBI facilities and selected information from case files.

Hoover’s years in the spotlight spanned the Great Depression, World War II, and the tumultuous 1960s. In 1965, the TV series The FBI was born and would run for nearly a decade. Its star was Efrem Zimbalist Jr., who, before filming started, spent several weeks absorbing FBI culture at its training academy. “At Hoover’s direction,” Gage writes, “the show largely dispensed with women and romance.” Over time, he made other demands, “including the elimination of any portrayal of police brutality, wiretapping…and civil rights cases.” Hoover invited Zimbalist, a Goldwater Republican, to speak to some 750 bureau workers and their guests, who gave him a standing ovation after he voiced his “awe and admiration” for the FBI. For 40 minutes afterward, the actor signed autographs.

artin’s The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover explores a more neglected aspect of Hoover’s mastery of the media: its connection with religion. “His squadron of efficient Protestant and Catholic ghostwriters in the Crime Records Division [the name for the FBI’s huge public relations staff] pumped out material at an astonishing rate…. He was featured in Our Sunday Visitor, the nation’s most widely circulated Catholic weekly, as well as in the popular Sunday School Times. Nothing, however, surpassed the influence and prominence of Hoover’s presence in Christianity Today.”

That magazine, founded and overseen by Billy Graham, was the voice of conservative white evangelicals. To them, the ecumenically minded National Council of Churches, with its support of integration, was dangerously left-wing. By 1960, Christianity Today had a circulation upwards of 160,000—more than quadruple that of William F. Buckley’s National Review. Hoover—or rather the FBI wordsmiths who penned his articles, as well as the laudatory comments introducing them, supposedly from the magazine’s editors—wrote for the journal for years. Addressing the clergymen who were its main audience, he asked, “Have you, as a minister, preached any sermons describing the frightful challenge which communism poses for the spiritual heritage of America?” No one ever asked, it seems, whether suggesting sermon topics was a proper task for a nonpartisan civil servant. In Christianity Today’s pages, Hoover decried youth crime, the lack of faith, and more. The Campus Crusade for Christ reprinted portions of these articles, and daily newspapers ran other writings by Hoover. The director’s many friends in Congress—by the end of his life an astonishing 15 members were former FBI agents—inserted them in the Congressional Record.

Christianity Today’s imprimatur gave Hoover’s words more impact than if they had appeared in a press release, for it meant that the Crime Records Division could distribute well over 100,000 copies of his articles carrying both the FBI seal and the line “Reprinted from Christianity Today.” Large bundles went to the bureau’s field offices throughout the country, to US embassies around the world, to the many favored friends on Hoover’s “Special Correspondents List,” and to anyone who wrote in—one enthusiast in Garden Grove, Calif., requested 1,000 copies. Not only did all of this paint a halo of piety around Hoover’s image, Martin observes, but Christianity Today and its brand of evangelicalism received free promotion at taxpayer expense.

Hoover also mastered the art of cultivating reporters and feeding them scurrilous items about his enemies. And when any paper, large or small, reprinted a speech or article of his, he sent a thank-you letter acknowledging its contribution to the war on crime. The awed editor of the Shelbyville, Ky., Sentinel was thrilled to see his efforts appreciated by the figure he called the “Chief of America’s Heroic G-Men.”

Hoover lost no opportunity to shape how he was portrayed. An unlikely friendship with Morris Ernst, a onetime chief counsel for the ACLU, resulted in a chapter on Hoover in a memoir that Ernst wrote in 1945. Ernst sent it to Hoover for review; when Hoover had finished his edits, the chapter spoke of Ernst’s “increasing admiration” for him and concluded that any criticisms of the FBI director “do not stand up in the eyes of anyone desirous of looking at the complete record.”

Hoover also drew on his contacts to determine how stories were reported. When the FBI arrested a bumbling group of Nazi saboteurs put ashore by submarine during World War II, Hoover skillfully managed to take all the credit, even though it was the Coast Guard that had first spotted the men, and one of the saboteurs had lost his nerve, gone to the FBI, and confessed.

Another way Hoover won his glowing press was to turn even routine occasions into news events. For instance, there was usually a celebrity speaker at the FBI Academy’s graduation ceremony. One year, President Dwight Eisenhower appeared and was awarded an honorary gold badge. More than a decade later, President Richard Nixon went a step further and actually hosted the graduation in the White House.

Hoover’s PR operation conducted thousands of tours of the FBI’s headquarters: the basement shooting range (VIPs got to fire a tommy gun), the rooms holding the machine guns of John Dillinger and trophies of conquest from other gangsters; the vast rows of filing cabinets containing the secrets of dangerous subversives. The tours drew even more attention when the visitors themselves were newsworthy: Eleanor Roosevelt, the bandleader Guy Lombardo, the Detroit Tigers’ manager, and various movie stars.

The summit of Hoover’s conquest of the media was his 1958 book Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It. Yet another product of his busy ghostwriters, the book was syndicated in many newspapers and became a No. 1 best seller, which was all the more remarkable because by that point only a minuscule number of Americans were still enraptured by the USSR. Of the US Communist Party’s estimated 5,000 members, some 1,500 were FBI informants. Hoover “shared with the communists an interest in exaggerating their influence,” Gage observes.

The FBI itself gave the book its greatest push, mobilizing agents to extoll its virtues and hand out copies. Each field office was expected to contact local bookstores…. Those who did the best received bonuses and raises. On one occasion, [senior FBI official William] Sullivan traveled to Ohio to speak before the Citizens’ Committee of Cincinnati, a grassroots group invented by the local field office to impress Hoover. Sullivan arrived to find a fleet of trucks packed with copies of Masters of Deceit, with a free book promised to anyone who showed up for the event.

It was a publicity machine that lesser authors could only dream of.

uch of what’s included in G-Man and The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover is already familiar: the story of Hoover’s long, bitter vendetta against Martin Luther King Jr., for example, including his bugging of King’s extramarital affairs, his leaks about them to journalists and politicians, and his sending the recordings to King himself, along with a threatening anonymous letter intended to provoke him to suicide. Gage correctly reminds us, however, that Hoover was no lone wolf here. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy signed off on the wiretapping, and the results of it were shared with President Lyndon Johnson, just as, earlier, top Eisenhower administration officials and key members of Congress knew about COINTELPRO, the bureau’s “counterintelligence program” intended to infiltrate and disrupt left-wing organizations.

Curiously, though, the otherwise thorough Gage omits one instance when Hoover forced a president to submit to his will. On the spurious grounds of alleged communist connections, he torpedoed Johnson’s plan to appoint to his cabinet the University of California president Clark Kerr—a story Seth Rosenfeld tells in his important 2012 book Subversives.

We’re all too familiar by now with Hoover’s lifelong racial prejudice. He called King a “burrhead” and declared in 1965 that “white citizens are primarily decent,” while “the colored people are quite ignorant, mostly uneducated, and I doubt they would seek an education if they had an opportunity.” When he came under pressure to remedy the FBI’s paucity of Black agents, Hoover sent his chauffeur to the training academy and made him an agent but kept him on as his driver and gardener.

Also known for decades is Hoover’s long relationship with his aide Clyde Tolson, a bond so public that it’s hardly fair to call Hoover closeted. The two men drove to work together, vacationed together, went to the Stork Club and racetracks together, and even double-dated with Richard and Patricia Nixon. On ceremonial occasions, Tolson was always one step behind or to the side of his boss, like a royal or presidential spouse. Hoover brought Tolson to his home to recuperate from various illnesses. Successive presidents granted each man an exemption from the rule requiring federal civil servants to retire at 70. Although they both developed trouble walking, they kept tottering to their offices at FBI headquarters even when Hoover was taking long afternoon naps and Tolson was blind in one eye and having speech and memory problems. What the couple may have done together in the privacy of a bedroom, we will never know. Quite possibly nothing—and all that sublimated sexual energy instead went into putting additional coats of polish on Hoover’s image as a bold crusader against gangsters, communists, and Black radicals.

Their relationship did not prevent the FBI, however, from pursuing homosexual government employees, who lost jobs by the hundreds in the “Lavender Scare” of the 1950s. Martin tells the chilling story of an FBI agent whose adult son had changed his name and become a gay rights activist. According to an internal memo, the agent told his superiors “that he hopes that he might continue to occasionally contact his son but if the Bureau desires, he will stop seeing him.” Even this was not enough; the man was censured, put on probation, and transferred away from Washington.

revealing but largely unknown story about Hoover is mentioned in passing by Gage and elaborated on by Martin. It concerns Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux, an evangelist who became the first African American—and first minister of any race—to have his own TV show. Michaux’s politics were in line with Hoover’s: He preached a sermon, for example, in which he declared that Black Americans lagged behind the “intellectual culture of [their] White brother” by centuries and that slavery had been God’s way of introducing them to Christianity. But what Martin reveals is the extent to which the FBI was aware of Michaux’s extreme conservativism, rejoiced in it, and enlisted him in its vicious campaign against King. Early on, an agent identified Michaux as a “very vigorous exponent for race segregation. He believes everybody, White, Black, Yellow or Red has a definite place in life and that each should keep their place.” In 1950, Hoover sent Michaux a fan letter claiming that he watched him on television, and the next year a telegram: “Keep up the good work.” A half-dozen years later, when the civil rights movement was heating up, the FBI invited Michaux for a visit and told him, an agent reported, that “it might be necessary to call [you] into service.” Michaux said he would be ready “at any time.”

That time drew closer as the movement’s support soared after the 1963 March on Washington, where King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Hoover and his underlings were pleased when Michaux gave a radio sermon attacking King and insisting that civil rights legislation was useless because “God’s will must be done on this earth before you are made equal.” A year later, the FBI gave him a call.

In 1964, just two days after the bureau sent King the notorious poison-pen letter and recordings, Michaux met Hoover, apparently for the first time. Hoover shared his rage that King kept criticizing the FBI for its negligence on civil rights, with an aide noting that Michaux was “distressed to learn of…King’s false statements against the Director and…wanted to do something about the situation.”

Michaux returned for a second meeting with Hoover some two weeks later, where it was agreed that he would “issue to the wire services a public letter which he would write to King…and state that the Director and the FBI have been extremely effective in the Civil Rights Movement. He will also call upon Reverend King to issue a public apology to the Director so that Negro people may realize who their friends are.” Michaux delivered on his promise, condemning King for his “suspicious remarks” and demanding that he “aid the FBI.” He also quoted a Hoover speech and some statistics that the FBI had supplied him with and added a final flourish about how Americans needed to choose between “God and the Devil.”

A radio sermon on the same theme and another visit to FBI headquarters followed, along with several thank-you letters from Hoover. The following year, Michaux brought more than 100 of his parishioners to protest outside a Baltimore meeting of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which was planning a voter registration drive in the South and a campaign supporting the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Echoing Hoover’s obsession, Michaux told reporters that King’s followers were riddled with “Communist infiltrators.” Already the object of outrage in the Black community, Michaux and his protesters were quietly watched over by agents from the FBI’s Baltimore office—the kind of protection that Hoover almost never extended to civil rights demonstrators.

fter reading these books, it is hard not to picture Hoover’s FBI as a cult. Much like the followers of a highly demanding guru, FBI men—and for half a century, the agents were all men—understood their work as something more than just a job. It was a way of life, and the fewer connections you had outside that life, the better. Afraid that local ties might bias or distract them, Hoover did not post new agents to their hometowns or even their home states. Not surprisingly, bureau men largely ended up socializing with one another. Hoover created an FBI athletic league and also headed a Masonic lodge for Justice Department employees. Unlike priests, FBI agents could marry, but Hoover once fired an unmarried clerk when he learned that a woman had slept in the young man’s apartment for two nights.

As in most cults, the leader looked for certain kinds of people as his followers, and so some things gave you an inside track at the FBI, such as being a Mason, or an alumnus of Hoover’s alma mater, George Washington University, or a fraternity man there—especially a member of Kappa Alpha, whose chapter Hoover had headed. This fraternity was tight-knit, heavily Southern, and glorified the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy; the Kappa Alpha motto was even etched into the ceiling of the Mississippi statehouse.

Something else that helped your FBI career was being ardently Christian. There were special vesper services for Protestant agents and their families, a regular FBI mass and communion breakfast for Catholics, and retreats (no families allowed) open to agents of any faith. The Presbyterian Hoover was widely but incorrectly believed to be Catholic because of his fondness for Jesuits, the order cofounded by the “soldier-saint” Ignatius of Loyola. Hoover told one group of Jesuit students that their spiritual practices were “analogous to the FBI’s approach to training.” The bureau’s twice-yearly weekend retreats—to which no Black agents were invited—were even held at a Jesuit center in Maryland with a high-ranking agent serving as “retreat captain.” Hoover’s books, autographed by the director, were in the center’s library; awards given by him were on the wall; and an engraved silver communion chalice, purchased with donations from FBI agents, was presented by him as well. Back in Washington, Catholic agents knew it was politic to worship at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle, which several senior FBI officials (including one who was Episcopalian) attended faithfully. According to Martin, one of them also reported on attendance to Hoover.

The cult of Hoover even extended to how its members dressed. The FBI director, Gage writes, “cultivated a particular type of man as his ideal agent: tall, white, conservative, athletic, always in a dark suit and spit-shined shoes.” Hats were required outdoors. Hoover once harshly reprimanded a field office manager for hiring a man whose lips were too “large” and “prominent.” FBI men had to meet exacting physical standards—even though their day-to-day duties didn’t usually involve physical labor. The bureau circulated a chart specifying “Desirable Weight Ranges for Males,” which depended on height and whether one had a “Small,” a “Medium,” or a “Large Frame.” Like boxers, agents forever worried if they would “make the weight,” especially since some offices had surprise “weigh-ins” between annual medical exams. Overweight agents were put on probation, given punitive transfers to remote locations, or fired. Exempted from these requirements was Hoover himself. Although he doesn’t say how long it was used, Martin quotes an astonishing oath that new FBI agents had to take as of 1937: “I shall, as a minister, seek to supply comfort, advice and aid to those who may be in need of such benefits; as a soldier, I shall wage vigorous warfare against the enemies of my country.” Hoover was imagining his followers as both a church and an army.

What does a cult gain its creator? When it is centered not in an isolated ashram but at the very heart of national power, it can turn an outsider into an insider. In the eyes of Washington’s elite, Hoover might have appeared to be an outsider: short, overweight, and possibly homosexual, the son of a low-level federal employee with a history of mental illness, and the graduate of a college far from the Ivy League. But commanding the FBI, molding its agents into his version of holy warriors, and demonizing as un-American Martin Luther King, student radicals, Communist Party members, and Black Americans all turned Hoover into the ultimate insider. Although investigations, the shattering of his reputation, and reforms of the FBI would soon follow, nothing symbolized Hoover’s acceptance by Washington insiders as much as the solemn ceremonies after his death, from a heart attack, at the age of 77. His body lay in state in the Capitol rotunda; Chief Justice Warren Burger and President Nixon delivered eulogies; and when an honor guard finally folded the American flag that had covered his coffin, it was presented to Clyde Tolson.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/society/hoover-fbi-gman-gospel/
The American Socialism That Might Have Beenhttps://www.thenation.com/article/politics/american-socialism-eugene-debs/Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam HochschildOct 12, 2022

Donald Trump has had the urge to crush many things, including the last election. So I must admit I found it eerily amusing that when the FBI entered his estate at Mar-a-Lago recently, they did so under a warrant authorized by the Espionage Act of 1917. History certainly has a strange way of returning in our world and also of crushing alternatives. Whatever Trump did, that act has a sorry track record in both its own time and ours when it has been used, including by his administration, to silence the leakers of government information. And because my latest book, American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and America’s Forgotten Crisis, is about the crushing of alternatives a century ago in this country, in the midst of all this, I couldn’t help thinking about a part of our history that The Donald would undoubtedly have been the first to crush, if he had the chance.

But let me start with a personal event closer to the present. While visiting Denmark recently, I developed an infection in my hand and wanted to see a doctor. The hotel in the provincial city where I was staying directed me to a local hospital. I was quickly shown into a consulting room, where a nurse questioned me and told me to wait. Only a few minutes passed before a physician entered the room, examined me, and said in excellent English, yes, indeed, I did need an antibiotic. He promptly swiveled in his chair, opened a cabinet behind him, took out a bottle of pills, handed it to me, and told me to take two a day for 10 days. When I thanked him and asked where I should go to pay for the consultation and the medicine, he responded simply, “We have no facilities for that.”

No facilities for that.

It’s a phrase that comes back to me every time I’m reminded how, in the world’s richest nation, we still don’t have full national health insurance. And that’s far from the only thing we’re missing. In a multitude of ways, we’re known for having a far weaker social safety net than many other wealthy countries and behind that lies a history in which the Espionage Act played a crucial role.

A Danish friend who visited with me recently was appalled to find hundreds of homeless people living in tent encampments in Berkeley and Oakland, Calif. And mind you, this is a progressive, prosperous state. The poor are even more likely to fall through the cracks (or chasms) in many other states.

Visitors from abroad are similarly astonished to discover that American families regularly pay astronomical college tuitions out of their own pockets. And it’s not only well-off European countries that do better in providing for their citizenry. The average Costa Rican, with one-sixth the annual per capita income of his or her North American counterpart, will live two years longer, thanks largely to that country’s comprehensive national health care system.

Why hasn’t our country done better, compared to so many others? There are certainly many reasons, not least among them the relentless, decades-long propaganda barrage from the American right, painting every proposed strengthening of public health and welfare—from unemployment insurance to Social Security to Medicare to Obamacare—as an ominous step down the road to socialism.

This is nonsense, of course, since the classic definition of socialism is public ownership of the means of production, an agenda item not on any imaginable American political horizon. In another sense, though, the charge is historically accurate because, both here and abroad, significant advances in health and welfare have often been spearheaded by socialist parties.

The globe’s first national healthcare system, in Imperial Germany, was, for example, muscled through the Reichstag by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1883 precisely to outflank the German socialists, who had long been advocating similar measures. Nor was it surprising that Britain’s National Health Service was installed by the Labour Party when it took power after the Second World War.

And in the United States, early in the last century, some of President Theodore Roosevelt’s modest moves to regulate business and break up trusts were, in fact, designed to steal a march on this country’s socialists, whom he feared, as he wrote to a friend, were “far more ominous than any populist or similar movement in times past.”

Back then—however surprising it may seem today—the American Socialist Party was indeed part of our political reality and, in 1904, it had come out in favor of compulsory national health insurance. A dozen years after that, New York Socialist Congressman Meyer London introduced a bill strikingly similar to the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act of more than a century later. In 1911, another socialist congressman, Victor Berger of Wisconsin, proposed a national old-age pension, a goal that wouldn’t be realized for another quarter of a century with the passage of the Social Security Act of 1935.

Socialism was never as strong a movement in the United States as in so many other countries. Still, once it was at least a force to be reckoned with. Socialists became mayors of cities as disparate as Milwaukee, Pasadena, Schenectady, and Toledo. Party members held more than 175 state and local offices in Oklahoma alone. People commonly point to 1912 as the party’s high-water mark. That year, its candidate for president, Eugene V. Debs, won 6% of the popular vote, even running ahead of the Republican candidate in several states.

Still, the true peak of American socialism’s popularity came a few years later. The charismatic Debs decided not to run again in 1916, mistakenly accepting President Woodrow Wilson’s implied promise to keep the United States out of the First World War—something most Socialists cared about passionately. In April 1917, Wilson infuriated them by bringing the country into what had been, until then, primarily a European conflict, while cracking down fiercely on dissidents who opposed his decision. That fall, however, the Socialists made impressive gains in municipal elections, winning more than 20% of the vote in 14 of the country’s larger cities—more than 30% in several of them—and 10 seats in the New York State Assembly.

During that campaign, Wilson was particularly dismayed by the party’s popularity in New York City, where Socialist lawyer Morris Hillquit was running for mayor. The president asked his conservative Texan attorney general, Thomas Gregory, what could be done about Hillquit’s “outrageous utterances” against the war. Gregory responded that he feared prosecuting Hillquit “would enable him to pose as a martyr and would be likely to increase his voting strength. I am having my representatives in New York City watch the situation rather carefully, and if a point is reached where he can be proceeded against it will give me a great deal of pleasure.” Hillquit lost, but did get 22% of the vote.

Jubilant Socialists knew that if they did equally well in the 1918 midterm elections, their national vote total could for the first time rise into the millions. For Wilson, whose Democrats controlled the House of Representatives by the narrowest of margins, the possibility of Socialists gaining the balance of power there was horrifying. And so, already at war in Europe, his administration in effect declared war on the Socialists at home as well, using as its primary tool Wilson’s sweeping criminalization of dissent, the new 1917 Espionage Act. The toll would be devastating.

The Government’s Axe Falls

Already the party’s most popular woman, the fiery Kansas-born orator Kate Richards O’Hare —known as Red Kate for her politics and her mass of red hair—had been sentenced to five years under the Espionage Act for speaking out against the war. Still free on appeal, O’Hare, who knew the hardships of farm life firsthand and had run for both the House and the Senate, continued to draw audiences in the thousands when she spoke in the prairie states. Before long, however, her appeal was denied and she was sent to the Jefferson City, Missouri, penitentiary, where she found herself in the adjoining cell to anarchist firebrand Emma Goldman. The two would become lifelong friends.

In 1918, the government went after Debs. The pretext was a speech he had given from a park bandstand in Canton, Ohio, following a state convention of his beleaguered party. “They have always taught you that it is your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command,” he told the crowd. “But in all the history of the world you, the people, never had a voice in declaring war.”

That was more than enough. Two weeks later, he was indicted and swiftly brought before a federal judge who just happened to be the former law firm partner of President Wilson’s secretary of war. At that trial, Debs spoke words that would long be quoted: “Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest of the earth. I said then, I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

Spectators gasped as the judge pronounced sentence on the four-time presidential candidate: a fine of $10,000 and 10 years in prison. In the 1920 election, he would still be in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta when he received more than 900,000 votes for president.

The government didn’t merely prosecute luminaries like O’Hare and Debs however. It also went after rank-and-file party members, not to mention the former Socialist candidates for governor in Minnesota, New Jersey, and South Dakota, as well as state Socialist Party secretaries from at least four states and a former Socialist candidate for Congress from Oklahoma. Almost all of them would be sentenced under the Espionage Act for opposing the war or the draft.

Not faintly content with this, the Wilson administration would attack the Socialists on many other fronts as well. There were then more than 100 socialist dailies, weeklies, and monthlies and the Espionage Act gave Wilson’s postmaster general, segregationist Albert Burleson of Texas, the power to deem such publications “unmailable.” Before long, Burleson would bar from the mail virtually the entire socialist press, which, in the prewar years, had a combined circulation of two million. A few dailies, which did not need the Post Office to reach their readers, survived, but for most of them such a banning was a death blow.

The government crippled the socialist movement in many less formal ways as well. For instance, Burleson’s post office simply stopped delivering letters to and from the party’s Chicago headquarters and some of its state and local offices. The staff of a socialist paper in Milwaukee typically noticed that they were failing to receive business correspondence. Even their mail subscriptions to The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune were no longer arriving. Soon advertising income began to dry up. In the midst of this, Oscar Ameringer, a writer for the paper, called on a longtime supporter, a baker who had suddenly stopped buying ads. According to Ameringer, the man “slumped down in a chair, covered his eyes and, with tears streaming through his fingers, sobbed, ‘My God, I can’t help it.… They told me if I didn’t take my advertising out they would refuse me…flour, sugar and coal.’”

Also taking their cues from the administration in that wartime assault were local politicians and vigilantes who attacked socialist speakers or denied them meeting halls. After progressives and labor union members staged an antiwar march on the Boston Common, for example, vigilantes raided the nearby Socialist Party office, smashed its doors and windows, and threw furniture, papers, and the suitcase of a traveling activist out the shattered windows onto a bonfire.

In January 1918, the mayor of Mitchell, S.D., ordered the party’s state convention broken up and all delegates expelled from town. One party leader was seized “on the streets by five unknown men and hustled into an automobile in which he was driven five miles from town,” a local newspaper reported. “There he was set out upon the prairie and…told to proceed afoot to his home in Parkston [an 18-mile walk] and warned not to return.”

The Big “What if?” Question

The Socialists were far from alone in suffering the wave of repression that swept the country in Wilson’s second term. Other targets included the labor movement, the country’s two small rival Communist parties, and thousands of radicals who had never become American citizens and were targeted for deportation. But among all the victims, no organization was more influential than the Socialist Party. And it never recovered.

When Debs took to the road again after finally being released from prison in 1921, he was often, at the last minute, denied venues he had booked. In Cleveland, the City Club canceled its invitation; in Los Angeles, the only place he could speak was at the city zoo. Still, he had an easier time than the socialist writer Upton Sinclair who, when he began giving a speech in San Pedro, California, in 1923, was arrested while reading the First Amendment aloud.

By the time Debs died in 1926, the party that had once elected 33 state legislators, 79 mayors, and well over 1,000 city council members and other municipal officials had closed most of its offices and was left with less than 10,000 members nationwide. Kate Richards O’Hare wrote to her friend Emma Goldman, who had been deported from the United States in 1919, that she felt herself a “sort of political orphan now with no place to lay my head.”

Despite their minority status, the Socialists had been a significant force in American politics before patriotic war hysteria brought on an era of repression. Until then, Republican and Democratic legislators had voted for early-20th-century reform measures like child labor laws and the income tax in part to stave off demands from the Socialist Party for bigger changes.

If that party had remained intact instead of being so ruthlessly crushed, what more might they have voted for? This remains one of the biggest “what ifs” in American history. If the Socialist Party hadn’t been so hobbled, might it at least have pushed the mainstream ones into creating the sort of stronger social safety net and national health insurance systems that people today take for granted in countries like Canada or Denmark? Without the Espionage Act, might Donald Trump have been left to rot at Mar-a-Lago in a world in which so much might have been different?

The last time you tried to pay a medical bill, might you, in fact, have been told, “We have no facilities for that”?



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https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/american-socialism-eugene-debs/
Trump Isn’t the First President to Attack the Presshttps://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-censorship-woodrow-wilson/Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam HochschildMar 19, 2020

Every month, it seems, brings a new act in the Trump administration’s war on the media. In January, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo exploded at National Public Radio reporter Mary Louise Kelly when he didn’t like questions she asked—and then banned a colleague of hers from the plane on which he was leaving for a trip to Europe and Asia. In February, the Trump staff booted a Bloomberg News reporter out of an Iowa election campaign event.

The president has repeatedly called the press an “enemy of the people”—the very phrase that, in Russian (vrag naroda),was applied by Joseph Stalin’s prosecutors to the millions of people they sent to the gulag or to execution chambers. In that context, Trump’s term for BuzzFeed, a “failing pile of garbage,” sounds comparatively benign. Last year, Axios revealed that some of the president’s supporters were trying to raise a fund of more than $2 million to gather damaging information on journalists at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other media outfits. In 2018, it took a court order to force the White House to restore CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s press pass. And the list goes on.

Yet it remains deceptively easy to watch all the furor over the media with the feeling that it’s still intact and safely protected. After all, didn’t Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan rail against the press in their presidencies? And don’t we have the First Amendment? In my copy of Samuel Eliot Morison’s 1,150-page Oxford History of the American People, the word “censorship” doesn’t even appear in the index; while, in an article on “The History of Publishing,” the Encyclopedia Britannica reassures us that “in the United States, no formal censorship has ever been established.”

So how bad could it get? The answer to that question, given the actual history of this country, is: much worse.

Censoring the News, Big Time

Though few remember it today, exactly 100 years ago, this country’s media was laboring under the kind of official censorship that would undoubtedly thrill both Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo. And yet the name of the man who zestfully banned magazines and newspapers of all sorts doesn’t even appear in either Morison’s history, that Britannica article, or just about anywhere else either.

The story begins in the spring of 1917, when the United States entered the First World War. Despite his reputation as a liberal internationalist, the president at that moment, Woodrow Wilson, cared little for civil liberties. After calling for war, he quickly pushed Congress to pass what became known as the Espionage Act, which, in amended form, is still in effect. Nearly a century later, National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden would be charged under it, and in these years he would hardly be alone.

Despite its name, the act was not really motivated by fears of wartime espionage. By 1917, there were few German spies left in the United States. Most of them had been caught two years earlier when their paymaster got off a New York City elevated train leaving behind a briefcase quickly seized by the American agent tailing him.

Rather, the new law allowed the government to define any opposition to the war as criminal. And since many of those who spoke out most strongly against entry into the conflict came from the ranks of the Socialist Party, the Industrial Workers of the World (famously known as the “Wobblies”), or the followers of the charismatic anarchist Emma Goldman, this in effect allowed the government to criminalize much of the Left. (My new book, Rebel Cinderella, follows the career of Rose Pastor Stokes, a famed radical orator who was prosecuted under the Espionage Act.)

Censorship was central to that repressive era. As the Washington Evening Star reported in May 1917, “President Wilson today renewed his efforts to put an enforced newspaper censorship section into the espionage bill.” The Act was then being debated in Congress. “I have every confidence,” he wrote to the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, “that the great majority of the newspapers of the country will observe a patriotic reticence about everything whose publication could be of injury, but in every country there are some persons in a position to do mischief in this field.”

Subject to punishment under the Espionage Act of 1917, among others, would be anyone who “shall willfully 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.”

Who was it who would determine what was “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive?” When it came to anything in print, the Act gave that power to the postmaster general, former Texas Congressman Albert Sidney Burleson. “He has been called the worst postmaster general in American history,” writes the historian G. J. Meyer, “but that is unfair; he introduced parcel post and airmail and improved rural service. It is fair to say, however, that he may have been the worst human being ever to serve as postmaster general.”

Burleson was the son and grandson of Confederate veterans. When he was born, his family still owned more than 20 slaves. The first Texan to serve in a cabinet, he remained a staunch segregationist. In the Railway Mail Service (where clerks sorted mail on board trains), for instance, he considered it “intolerable” that whites and blacks not only had to work together but use the same toilets and towels. He pushed to segregate Post Office lavatories and lunchrooms.

He saw to it that screens were erected so blacks and whites working in the same space would not have to see each other. “Nearly all Negro clerks of long-standing service have been dropped,” the anguished son of a black postal worker wrote to the New Republic, adding,“Every Negro clerk eliminated means a white clerk appointed.” Targeted for dismissal from Burleson’s Post Office, the writer claimed, was “any Negro clerk in the South who fails to say ‘Sir’ promptly to any white person.”

One scholar described Burleson as having “a round, almost chubby face, a hook nose, gray and rather cold eyes and short side whiskers. With his conservative black suit and eccentric round-brim hat, he closely resembled an English cleric.” From President Wilson and other cabinet members, he quickly acquired the nickname “The Cardinal.” He typically wore a high wing collar and, rain or shine, carried a black umbrella. Embarrassed that he suffered from gout, he refused to use a cane.

Like most previous occupants of his office, Burleson lent a political hand to the president by artfully dispensing patronage to members of Congress. One Kansas senator, for example, got five postmasterships to distribute in return for voting the way Wilson wanted on a tariff law.

When the striking new powers the Espionage Act gave him went into effect, Burleson quickly refocused his energies on the suppression of dissenting publications of any sort. Within a day of its passage, he instructed postmasters throughout the country to immediately send him newspapers or magazines that looked in any way suspicious.

And what exactly were postmasters to look for? Anything, Burleson told them, “calculated to…cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny…or otherwise to embarrass or hamper the Government in conducting the war.” What did “embarrass” mean? In a later statement, he would list a broad array of possibilities, from saying that “the government is controlled by Wall Street or munition manufacturers or any other special interests” to “attacking improperly our allies.” Improperly?

He knew that vague threats could inspire the most fear and so, when a delegation of prominent lawyers, including the famous defense attorney Clarence Darrow, came to see him, he refused to spell out his prohibitions in any more detail. When members of Congress asked the same question, he declared that disclosing such information was “incompatible with the public interest.”

One of Burleson’s most prominent targets would be the New York City monthly The Masses. Named after the workers that radicals were then convinced would determine the revolutionary course of history, the magazine was never actually read by them. It did, however, become one of the liveliest publications this country has ever known and something of a precursor to the New Yorker. It published a mix of political commentary, fiction, poetry, and reportage, while pioneering the style of cartoons captioned by a single line of dialogue for which the New Yorker would later become so well known.

From Sherwood Anderson and Carl Sandburg to Edna St. Vincent Millay and the young future columnist Walter Lippmann, its writers were among the best of its day. Its star reporter was John Reed, future author of Ten Days That Shook the World, a classic eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution. His zest for being at the center of the action, whether in jail with striking workers in New Jersey or on the road with revolutionaries in Mexico, made him one of the finest journalists in the English-speaking world.

A “slapdash gathering of energy, youth, hope,” the critic Irving Howe later wrote, The Masses was “the rallying center…for almost everything that was then alive and irreverent in American culture.” But that was no protection. On July 17, 1917, just a month after the Espionage Act passed, the Post Office notified the magazine’s editor by letter that “the August issue of the Masses is unmailable.” The offending items, the editors were told, were four passages of text and four cartoons, one of which showed the Liberty Bell falling apart.

Soon after, Burleson revoked the publication’s second-class mailing permit. (And not to be delivered by the Post Office in 1917 meant not to be read.) A personal appeal from the editor to President Wilson proved unsuccessful. Half a dozenMassesstaff members including Reed would be put on trial—twice—for violating the Espionage Act. Both trials resulted in hung juries, but whatever the frustration for prosecutors, the country’s best magazine had been closed for good. Many more would soon follow.

No More “High-Browism”

When editors tried to figure out the principles that lay behind the new regime of censorship, the results were vague and bizarre. William Lamar, the solicitor of the Post Office (the department’s chief legal officer), told the journalist Oswald Garrison Villard, “You know I am not working in the dark on this censorship thing. I know exactly what I am after. I am after three things and only three things—pro-Germanism, pacifism, and high-browism.”

Within a week of the Espionage Act going into effect, the issues of at least a dozen socialist newspapers and magazines had been barred from the mail. Less than a year later, more than 400 different issues of American periodicals had been deemed “unmailable.” The Nation was targeted, for instance, for criticizing Wilson’s ally, the conservative labor leader Samuel Gompers; the Public, a progressive Chicago magazine, for urging that the government raise money by taxes instead of loans; and the Freeman’s Journal and Catholic Register for reminding its readers that Thomas Jefferson had backed independence for Ireland. (That land, of course, was then under the rule of wartime ally Great Britain.) Six hundred copies of a pamphlet distributed by the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, Why Freedom Matters, were seized and banned for criticizing censorship itself. After two years under the Espionage Act, the second-class mailing privileges of 75 periodicals had been canceled entirely.

From such a ban, there was no appeal, though a newspaper or magazine could file a lawsuit (none of which succeeded during Burleson’s tenure). In Kafkaesque fashion, it often proved impossible even to learn why something had been banned. When the publisher of one forbidden pamphlet asked, the Post Office responded: “If the reasons are not obvious to you or anyone else having the welfare of this country at heart, it will be useless…to present them.” When he inquired again, regarding some banned books, the reply took 13 months to arrive and merely granted him permission to “submit a statement” to the postal authorities for future consideration.

In those years, thanks to millions of recent immigrants, the United States had an enormous foreign-language press written in dozens of tongues, from Serbo-Croatian to Greek, frustratingly incomprehensible to Burleson and his minions. In the fall of 1917, however, Congress solved the problem by requiring foreign-language periodicals to submit translations of any articles that had anything whatever to do with the war to the Post Office before publication.

Censorship had supposedly been imposed only because the country was at war. The Armistice of November 11, 1918 ended the fighting and on the 27th of that month, Woodrow Wilson announced that censorship would be halted as well. But with the president distracted by the Paris peace conference and then his campaign to sell his plan for a League of Nations to the American public, Burleson simply ignored his order.

Until he left office in March 1921—more than two years after the war ended—the postmaster general continued to refuse second-class mailing privileges to publications he disliked. When a U.S. District Court found in favor of several magazines that had challenged him, Burleson (with Wilson’s approval) appealed the verdict and the Supreme Court rendered a timidly mixed decision only after the administration was out of power. Paradoxically, it was conservative Republican President Warren Harding who finally brought political censorship of the American press to a halt.

A Hundred Years Later

Could it all happen again?

In some ways, we seem better off today. Despite Donald Trump’s ferocity toward the media, we haven’t—yet—seen the equivalent of Burleson barring publications from the mail. And partly because he has attacked them directly, the president’s blasts have gotten strong pushback from mainstream pillars like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN, as well as from civil society organizations of all kinds.

A century ago, except for a few brave and lonely voices, there was no equivalent. In 1917, the American Bar Association was typical in issuing a statement saying, “We condemn all attempts…to hinder and embarrass the Government of the United States in carrying on the war.… We deem them to be pro-German, and in effect giving aid and comfort to the enemy.” In the fall of that year, even the Times declared that “the country must protect itself against its enemies at home. The Government has made a good beginning.”

In other ways, however, things are more dangerous today. Social media is dominated by a few companies wary of offending the administration, and has already been cleverly manipulated by forces ranging from Cambridge Analytica to Russian military intelligence. Outright lies, false rumors, and more can be spread by millions of bots and people can’t even tell where they’re coming from.

This torrent of untruth flooding in through the back door may be far more powerful than what comes through the front door of the recognized news media. And even at that front door, in Fox News, Trump has a vast media empire to amplify his attacks on his enemies, a mouthpiece far more powerful than the largest newspaper chain of Woodrow Wilson’s day. With such tools, does a demagogue who loves strongmen the world over and who jokes about staying in power indefinitely even need censorship?



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https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-censorship-woodrow-wilson/
Trump’s Demagoguery Is an Old American Traditionhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/trump-racism-american-tradition/Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam HochschildAug 1, 2019

Along rivers prone to overflowing, people sometimes talk of preparing for a 100-year flood—a dangerous surge of muddy, debris-filled water so overwhelming it appears only once a century.

In our political world, we are now seeing a 100-year flood of toxic debris. The sludge washing ashore includes President Trump’s continuing cries of “fake news!” and “traitors”; his rage at immigrants and refugees; his touting of an “invasion” at the southern border; and his recent round of attacks on “the squad,” four young congresswomen of color who, he raged, should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” (Three of them, of course, were born in the United States.) When he talked about the fourth, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a legal immigrant from Somalia, the inflamed crowd at his July 17 reelection rally in North Carolina began spontaneously chanting, “Send her back! Send her back! Send her back!”

Donald Trump, of course, has a long history of disliking people of color, going back to the days when he and his father tried to keep them out of their New York real estate dynasty’s apartment buildings. Presidents, however, usually find it politic to keep such feelings under wraps. Nonetheless, Trump’s particular brand of xenophobia, racism, and media hatred isn’t completely unprecedented. The last time we had a similar outpouring from Washington was almost exactly 100 years ago and it, too, involved a flood of angry rhetoric and a fear of immigrants—and it included repression on an enormous scale.

Fear of Immigrants, 1917 Version

The 100-year flood I’m thinking of lasted for three violent years during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson—from early 1917 to early 1920. Except for lynchings in the Jim Crow South, it would prove to be the harshest burst of political repression and fear-mongering in either 20th- or 21st-century America. It began suddenly when the United States entered the First World War in support of England and France and against the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Schools, colleges, and universities abruptly stopped teaching the “Kaiser’s tongue”—a move loudly backed by the ever-strident former president Theodore Roosevelt. Iowa forbade the use of German over the telephone or in public. In Shawnee, Oklahoma, a crowd burned German books to mark the Fourth of July. German music being out, marriages took place without Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March.” Berlin, Iowa, changed its name to Lincoln. Chicago’s Bismarck Hotel became the Hotel Randolf. Families named Schmidt became Smith and Griescheimer, Gresham. The hamburger became “the liberty sandwich.” German shepherds were redubbed Alsatian shepherds.

My grandfather was a Jewish immigrant from Germany and spoke German with his children. Now, however, they were terrified to do so on the street. In his 20s at the time, my father desperately tried to get into the Army, for a uniform was obvious protection from mob violence—and violence there was. In Collinsville, Illinois, for example, a crowd seized Robert Prager, a coal miner, and lynched him because he had been German-born. (He had tried to enlist in the Navy, but was turned down because of his glass eye.) In Washington, when a man failed to stand up as “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played, a sailor right behind him shot him dead.

Congress rushed the draconian Espionage Act to a vote two months after the country entered the war. It outlawed anything that would “cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty in the military.” There was, however, not the slightest danger of mutiny among American troops sent to the Western Front in France. Many were so eager to fight that their commanders found gung-ho rear-area soldiers “deserting to the front.” Nor was there much danger of espionage. In those years, only 10 people would be charged under the act with being German agents.

The president who oversaw this particular 100-Year Flood was no Donald Trump, not in his manner anyway. Rabid invective was hardly Woodrow Wilson’s style. He carefully kept his image as an above-the-fray idealist by outsourcing inflammatory rhetoric to others, such as his special emissary to Russia, Elihu Root.

A corporate lawyer and former secretary of war, secretary of state, and senator from New York, Root would prove the prototype of the “wise men” who moved between Wall Street and Washington to form the 20th-century foreign policy establishment. “Pro-German traitors” were threatening the war effort, Root declared to an audience at New York’s Union League Club in August 1917. “There are men walking about the streets of this city tonight who ought to be taken out at sunrise tomorrow and shot for treason.… There are some newspapers published in this city every day the editors of which deserve conviction and execution for treason.”

Fake news indeed! The actual bullying of those newspapers Wilson left to Postmaster General Albert Sidney Burleson, of Texas. The Espionage Act gave the Post Office great powers over the press. Newspapers were censored, editors jailed, and publications shut down, most famously Max Eastman’s The Masses, the Greenwich Village radical monthly that was one of the liveliest magazines this country has ever seen. Some 75 newspapers and periodicals either had specific issues banned or were forced to close entirely.

As today on the US-Mexico border, vigilante groups sprang up across the country. The largest was the American Protective League, an official auxiliary of the Justice Department, which even enjoyed the franking privilege of sending mail for free. With a membership that swelled to 250,000, its ranks were filled with men too old for the military who still wanted to do battle, at home if not abroad. So they regularly broke up anti-war meetings and, by the tens of thousands, beat up or made citizens’ arrests of suspected draft dodgers.

Such was the frenzy in the air that two policemen in Guthrie, Oklahoma, hearing a man reading something aloud that spoke of abuses and oppression, promptly arrested him. When he protested that it was the Declaration of Independence written by Thomas Jefferson, one cop responded: “Okay, where is this Jefferson? We want him, too!” When a leftist student at Rutgers University refused to speak at a rally to sell war bonds, he was stripped, blindfolded, covered with molasses and feathers, and paraded through town behind a sign that read: “This is what we do with pro-Germans!”

People who opposed the war were prosecuted by the hundreds. Among them were anarchist firebrand Emma Goldman and her comrade Alexander Berkman, put on trial for organizing against the draft. In court, addressing the “gentlemen of the jury,” Goldman asked, “May there not be different kinds of patriotism as there are different kinds of liberty?” Her own American patriotism, she explained, was like that of “the man who loves a woman with open eyes. He is enchanted by her beauty, yet he sees her faults.” The jury found her guilty and the pair was sentenced to two years in prison. “It took a world war,” The Wall Street Journal declared, “to put Goldman and Berkman where they should have been years ago.”

As in the age of Trump, deportation was used as a political weapon. The search for radicals who had never bothered to become American citizens lay behind the seizure of thousands of people in the notorious Palmer Raids orchestrated by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. The government then deported as many of them as they legally could. Goldman and Berkman, for example, were among 249 deportees loaded onto a decrepit former troopship and sent off to Russia.

The ferocity of the moment was so extreme that people were prosecuted for things they said in private. Charles Schoberg, for example, was a 66-year-old cobbler in Covington, Kentucky. Although German-born, he had lived in the United States since childhood and had been both a police officer and city council member. In the spring of 1918, a suspicious local vigilante group, the Citizens Patriotic League, hired a private detective to put a microphone in his shoe shop. An eavesdropping detective, listening in from a nearby building, picked up Schoberg and two friends making sour and critical remarks to each other about the US armed forces. A typical comment was “You can’t hold the Germans back”—not an unreasonable observation at a moment when the Kaiser’s rapidly advancing army looked as if it was about to capture Paris. Schoberg was sentenced to 10 years in prison, one of his friends to seven years, and the other to five.

“The Christian Men to Whom God… Has Given the Control of the Property Interests of the Country.”

This patriotic delirium, however, was more than just an upwelling of public opinion. It was carefully stoked. Vigilante groups like the one that snooped on Charles Schoberg or the American Protective League were heavily funded by big business. And not because the country’s industrial and political elite particularly cared about catching German spies or outing pro-German Americans. They were focused on crushing the labor movement.

In the early 20th century, American workers and their unions had few legal rights and business wanted to keep it that way. During a coal miners’ strike in 1902, the president of a railroad declared that wages, hours, and union recognition should be decided “not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country.”

As the century went on, those “Christian men” felt increasingly threatened. The public imagination had been captured by the country’s most radical union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), known to all as the Wobblies. It was led by Big Bill Haywood, a charismatic, one-eyed former miner famous both for using his fists in labor struggles and quoting long passages of Shakespeare by heart.

In 1912, Haywood and other Wobblies organized a strike of 25,000 textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, which was victorious despite the police and militia murders of several strikers. A Wobbly-organized walkout of New York City hotel and restaurant waiters that same year, though less successful, still caused consternation when some 800 strikers blocked Fifth Avenue, a central artery of American capitalism. The police had to fire their revolvers into the air to disperse them. An uprising of Colorado coal miners saw more than 70 people killed before it ended in December 1914—and more strikes followed.

The war changed all that, though. Since almost any industry could now be deemed essential to the war effort, the powers that be had the perfect excuse to come down hard on labor. Previously, such battles, though numerous and violent, had been scattershot: the National Guard suppressing one strike, private detectives another, sheriffs’ deputies a third. Now, business had the pretext for a coordinated nationwide crackdown—and had the backing of the White House.

On September 5, 1917, federal agents raided every IWW office in the country as well as the homes of Wobbly activists. From the group’s Chicago headquarters alone, the raiders took five tons of material, including some of the ashes of the martyred Wobbly songwriter Joe Hill, shot by a Utah firing squad in 1915 after a murder conviction based on much-disputed evidence.

In police vehicles and sealed boxcars, more than 100 Wobblies were brought to trial in Chicago. With more defendants in the dock than at any other trial in American history, all the accused were found guilty on all counts. The judge passed out sentences totaling 807 years of prison time and fines of more than $2.4 million, which, of course, no Wobbly had the money to pay. Along with his comrades, Big Bill Haywood was packed off by special train to the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas. “We never won a hand,” that onetime saloon card dealer wrote to radical journalist John Reed. “The other fellow had the cut, shuffle, and deal all the time.”

The list of violent acts against American labor in these years would prove long indeed, but one of the most egregious was against a veteran Wobbly named Frank Little. He had helped organize a strike in Butte, Montana, after a fire in a local copper mine killed 164 miners. Two months later, on August 1, 1917, six masked men entered the boardinghouse where he was staying and seized the crutches he needed for a broken ankle. They then tied Little, still in his underwear, to the rear bumper of a car and dragged him to a railroad bridge at the edge of town, where they lynched him.

A note pinned to his body read: “Others Take Notice. First and Last Warning.” The police made a conspicuously minimal effort to find the killers. Vice President Thomas Riley Marshall cynically coined a pun on Little’s name. In solving labor problems, he quipped, “A Little hanging goes a long way.”

The Real War of 1917 and Today

The crackdown—including heavy press censorship—continued after the First World War ended in German defeat and the troops came home, for it had never really been about the war.

Instead, the 100-year flood of vituperation, threats, and arrests was part of another, much longer war, a struggle against those trying to rectify America’s staggering maldistribution of its bounty. In 1915, the richest 1 percent of the population owned 35.6 percent of the country’s wealth. The biggest threat to their position was the militant wing of the labor movement, hence the Wobblies were among the greatest victims of repression.

Today, the richest 1 percent owns an even greater slice of the pie: 40 percent of national wealth. Sadly, there’s not much of a labor movement left for them to crush, but the wealthy have other targets. Progressives are advocating many measures that would help rectify the gross inequalities of this America of ours, from health insurance for all to free college tuition to bigger taxes on the highest incomes to taxing wealth itself.

Suppressing such efforts is the central aim of Donald Trump and the people around him. And to do so, he has whipped up a new 100-year flood of venom against invasions of undocumented immigrants supposedly ready to steal American jobs, refugees, the “squad,” and black football players who take a knee, among others. His demagoguery has made skillful use of an old American tradition: employing differences of race to make people forget huge differences of wealth. It’s exactly what Southern plantation owners did when they got non-slave-owning whites to join them in fighting for the Confederacy.

Forty-plus percent of the country identifies with Trump, while the rest of us get outraged. He separates children from their parents at the border and puts people in squalid, overcrowded concentration camps and again the country divides into attacking or defending him. The louder the argument, the happier he is, for it keeps the attention off the real war: his ongoing campaign to put yet more wealth not just in the hands of the top 1 percent, but the top .01 percent. Americans who forget about this truly do become his apprentices.

While the rest of us are furiously disputing whether he’s a racist or a patriot, he and his friends are quietly reaping the rewards of a tax cut that was a massive giveaway to billionaires, and his administration is fast-tracking oil pipelines, opening up federal land to drilling and mining, boosting for-profit diploma mills that exploit the poor, and putting foxes in charge of every henhouse in sight from the Consumer Product Safety Commission to the Environmental Protection Administration. These are the issues that the hundred-year flood distracts us from.



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A Brutal Account of Colonialism in Africa Just Showed Up in the Most Unlikely of Places: Hollywoodhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/a-brutal-account-of-colonialism-in-africa-just-showed-up-in-the-most-unlikely-of-places-hollywood/Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam HochschildJul 19, 2016Bet you didn’t know the latest Tarzan movie was based on this story.]]>

Some time ago I wrote a book about one of the great crimes of the last 150 years: the conquest and exploitation of the Congo by King Leopold II of Belgium. When King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa was published, I thought I had found all the major characters in that brutal patch of history. But a few weeks ago I realized that I had left one out: Tarzan.

Let me explain. Although a documentary film based on my book did appear, I often imagined what Hollywood might do with such a story. It would, of course, have featured the avaricious King Leopold, who imposed a slave labor system on his colony to extract its vast wealth in ivory and wild rubber, with millions dying in the process. And it would surely have included the remarkable array of heroic figures who resisted or exposed his misdeeds. Among them were African rebel leaders like Chief Mulume Niama, who fought to the death trying to preserve the independence of his Sanga people; an Irishman, Roger Casement, whose exposure to the Congo made him realize that his own country was an exploited colony and who was later hanged by the British; two black Americans who courageously managed to get information to the outside world; and the Nigerian-born Hezekiah Andrew Shanu, a small businessman who secretly leaked documents to a British journalist and was hounded to death for doing so. Into the middle of this horror show, traveling up the Congo River as a steamboat officer in training, came a young seaman profoundly shocked by what he saw. When he finally got his impressions onto the page, he would produce the most widely read short novel in English, Heart of Darkness.

How could all of this not make a great film?

I found myself thinking about how to structure it and which actors might play what roles. Perhaps the filmmakers would offer me a bit part. At the very least, they would undoubtedly seek my advice. And so I pictured myself on location with the cast, a voice for good politics and historical accuracy, correcting a detail here, adding another there, making sure the film didn’t stint in evoking the full brutality of that era. The movie, I was certain, would make viewers in multiplexes across the world realize at last that colonialism in Africa deserved to be ranked with Nazism and Soviet communism as one of the great totalitarian systems of modern times.

In case you hadn’t noticed, that film has yet to be made. And so imagine my surprise, when, a few weeks ago, in a theater in a giant mall, I encountered two characters I had written about in King Leopold’s Ghost. And who was onscreen with them? A veteran of nearly a century of movies—silent and talking, in black and white as well as color, animated as well as live action (not to speak of TV shows and video games): Tarzan.

The Legend of Tarzan, an attempt to jumpstart that ancient, creaking franchise for the twenty-first century, has made the most modest of bows to changing times by inserting a little more politics and history than dozens of the ape man’s previous adventures found necessary. It starts by informing us that, at the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, the European powers began dividing up the colonial spoils of Africa, and that King Leopold II now holds the Congo as his privately owned colony.

Tarzan, however, is no longer in the jungle where he was born and where, after his parents’ early deaths, he was raised by apes. Instead, married to Jane, he has taken over his ancestral title, Lord Greystoke, and has occupied his palatial manor in England. (Somewhere along the line he evidently took a crash course that brought him from “Me Tarzan, you Jane” to the manners and speech of a proper earl.)

But you won’t be surprised to learn that Africa needs him badly. There’s a diamond scandal, a slave labor system, and other skullduggery afoot in Leopold’s Congo. A bold, sassy black American, George Washington Williams, persuades him to head back to the continent to investigate, and comes along as his sidekick. The villain of the story, Leopold’s top dog in the Congo, scheming to steal those African diamonds, is Belgian Captain Léon Rom, who promptly kidnaps Tarzan and Jane.  And from there the plot only thickens, even if it never deepens.  Gorillas and crocodiles, cliff-leaping, heroic rescues, battles with man and beast abound, and in the movie’s grand finale, Tarzan uses his friends, the lions, to mobilize thousands of wildebeest to storm out of the jungle and wreak havoc on the colony’s capital, Boma.

With Jane watching admiringly, Tarzan and Williams then sink the steamboat on which the evil Rom is trying to spirit the diamonds away, while thousands of Africans lining the hills wave their spears and cheer their white savior. Tarzan and Jane soon have a baby, and seem destined to live happily ever after—at least until The Legend of Tarzan II comes along.

History Provides the Characters, Tarzan the Vines

Both Williams and Rom were, in fact, perfectly real people and, although I wasn’t the first to notice them, it’s clear enough where Hollywood’s scriptwriters found them. There’s even a photo of Alexander Skarsgård, the muscular Swede who plays Tarzan, with a copy of King Leopold’s Ghost in hand. Samuel L. Jackson, who plays Williams with considerable brio, has told the press that the director, David Yates, sent him the book in preparation for his role.

A version of Batman in Africa was not quite the film I previewed so many times in my fantasies.  Yet I have to admit that, despite the context, it was strangely satisfying to see those two historical figures brought more or less to life onscreen, even if to prop up the vine swinger created by novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs and played most famously by Johnny Weissmuller. Williams, in particular, was a remarkable man. An American Civil War veteran, lawyer, journalist, historian, Baptist minister, and the first black member of the Ohio state legislature, he went to Africa expecting to find, in the benevolent colony that King Leopold II advertised to the world, a place where his fellow black Americans could get the skilled jobs denied them at home. Instead he discovered what he called “the Siberia of the African Continent”—a hellhole of racism, land theft, and a spreading slave labor system enforced by the whip, gun, and chains.

From the Congo, he wrote an extraordinary “open letter” to Leopold, published in European and American newspapers and quoted briefly at the end of the movie. It was the first comprehensive exposé of a colony that would soon become the subject of a worldwide human rights campaign. Sadly, he died of tuberculosis on his way home from Africa before he could write the Congo book for which he had gathered so much material. As New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis observed, “Williams deserves a grand cinematic adventure of his own.”

By contrast, in real life as in the film (where he is played with panache by Christoph Waltz), Léon Rom was a consummate villain. An officer in the private army Leopold used to control the territory, Rom is elevated onscreen to a position vastly more important than any he ever held. Nonetheless, he was an appropriate choice to represent that ruthless regime. A British explorer once observed the severed heads of 21 Africans placed as a border around the garden of Rom’s house. He also kept a gallows permanently erected in front of the nearby headquarters from which he directed the post of Stanley Falls. Rom appears to have crossed paths briefly with Joseph Conrad and to have been one of the models for Mr. Kurtz, the head-collecting central figure of Heart of Darkness.

The Legend of Tarzan is essentially a superhero movie, Spiderman in Africa (even if you know that the footage of African landscapes was blended by computer with actors on a sound stage in England). Skarsgård (or his double or his electronic avatar) swoops through the jungle on hanging vines in classic Tarzan style. Also classic, alas, is the making of yet another movie about Africa whose hero and heroine are white. No Africans speak more than a few lines and, when they do, it’s usually to voice praise or friendship for Tarzan or Jane. From The African Queen to Out of Africa, that’s nothing new for Hollywood.

Nonetheless, there are, at odd moments, a few authentic touches of the real Congo: the railway cars of elephant tusks bound for the coast and shipment to Europe (the first great natural resource to be plundered); Leopold’s private army, the much-hated Force Publique; and African slave laborers in chains—Tarzan frees them, of course.

While some small details are reasonably accurate, from the design of a steamboat to the fact that white Congo officials like Rom indeed did favor white suits, you won’t be shocked to learn that the film takes liberties with history.  Of course, all novels and films do that, but The Legend of Tarzan does so in a curious way: It brings Leopold’s rapacious regime to a spectacular halt in 1890, the year in which it’s set—thank you, Tarzan! That, however, was the moment when the worst of the horror the king had unleashed was just getting underway.

It was in 1890 that workers started constructing a railroad around the long stretch of rapids near the Congo River’s mouth; Joseph Conrad sailed to Africa on the ship that carried the first batch of rails and ties. Eight years later, that vast construction project, now finished, would accelerate the transport of soldiers, arms, disassembled steamboats, and other supplies that would turn much of the inland territory’s population into slave laborers. Leopold was by then hungry for another natural resource: rubber. Millions of Congolese would die to satisfy his lust for wealth.

Tarzan in Vietnam

Here’s the good news: I think I’m finally getting the hang of Hollywood-style filmmaking. Tarzan’s remarkable foresight in vanquishing the Belgian evildoers before the worst of Leopold’s reign of terror opens the door for his future films, which I’ve started to plan—and this time, on the film set, I expect one of those canvas-backed chairs with my name on it. Naturally, our hero wouldn’t stop historical catastrophes before they begin—there’s no drama in that—but always in their early stages.

For example, I just published a book about the Spanish Civil War, another perfect place and time for Tarzan to work his wonders. In the fall of 1936, he could swing his way through the plane and acacia trees of Madrid’s grand boulevards to mobilize the animals in that city’s zoo and deal a stunning defeat to Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s attacking Nationalist troops. Sent fleeing at that early moment, Franco’s soldiers would, of course, lose the war, leaving the Spanish Republic triumphant and the Generalissimo’s long, grim dictatorship excised from history.

In World War II, soon after Hitler and Stalin had divided Eastern Europe between them, Tarzan could have a twofer if he stormed down from the Carpathian mountains in late 1939, leading a vast pack of that region’s legendary wolves. He could deal smashing blows to both armies, and then, just as he freed slaves in the Congo, throw open the gates of concentration camps in both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. And why stop there? If, after all this, the Japanese still had the temerity to attack Pearl Harbor, Tarzan could surely mobilize the dolphins, sharks, and whales of the Pacific Ocean to cripple the Japanese fleet as easily as he sunk Léon Rom’s steamboat in a Congo harbor.

In Vietnam—if Tarzan made it there before the defoliant Agent Orange denuded its jungles—there would be vines aplenty to swing from and water buffalo he could enlist to help rout the foreign armies, first French, then American, before they got a foothold in the country.

Some more recent wartime interventions might, however, be problematic. In whose favor, for example, should he intervene in Iraq in 2003? Saddam Hussein or the invading troops of George W. Bush? Far better to unleash him on targets closer to home: Wall Street bankers, hedge-fund managers, select Supreme Court justices, a certain New York real-estate mogul. And how about global warming? Around the world, coal-fired power plants, fracking rigs, and tar-sands-mining pits await destruction by Tarzan and his thundering herd of elephants.

If The Legend of Tarzan turns out to have the usual set of sequels, take noteDavid Yates: Since you obviously took some characters and events from my book for the first installment, I’m expecting you to come to me for more ideas. All I ask in return is that Tarzan teach me to swing from the nearest vines in any studio of your choice, and let me pick the next battle to win.



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The Untold Story of the Texaco Oil Tycoon Who Loved Fascismhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-untold-story-of-the-texaco-oil-tycoon-who-loved-fascism/Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam HochschildMar 21, 2016

[This piece has been adapted from Adam Hochschild’s new book, Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939.]

“Merchants have no country,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1814. “The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.” The former president was ruing the way New England traders and shipowners, fearing the loss of lucrative transatlantic commerce, failed to rally to their country in the War of 1812.

Today, with the places from which “merchants” draw their gains spread across the planet, corporations are even less likely to feel loyalty to any country in particular. Some of them have found it profitable to reincorporate in tax havens overseas. Giant multinationals, sometimes with annual earnings greater than the combined total gross national products of several dozen of the world’s poorer countries, are often more powerful than national governments, while their CEOs wield the kind of political clout many prime ministers and presidents only dream of.

No corporations have been more aggressive in forging their own foreign policies than the big oil companies. With operations spanning the world, they—and not the governments who weakly try to tax or regulate them—largely decide whom they do business with and how. In its quest for oil in the anarchic Niger Delta, according to journalist Steve Coll, ExxonMobil, for example, gave boats to the Nigerian navy, and recruited and supplied part of the country’s army, while local police sported the company’s red flying horse logo on their uniforms. Jane Mayer’s new book, Dark Money, on how the brothers and oil magnates Charles and David Koch spent hundreds of millions of dollars to buy the Republican Party and America’s democratic politics, offers a vivid account of the way their father, Fred, launched the energy business they would inherit. It was a classic case of not letting “attachments” stand in the way of gain. Fred happily set up oil installations for Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin before the United States recognized the Soviet Union in 1933, and then helped Adolf Hitler build one of Nazi Germany’s largest oil refineries that would later supply fuel to its air force, the Luftwaffe.

His unsavory tale is now part of the historical record, thanks to Mayer. That of another American oil tycoon of the 1930s, who quietly lent a helping hand to a different grim dictator, has, however, gone almost unnoticed. In our world where the big oil outfits have become powerful forces and his company, Texaco, became part of the oil giant Chevron, it’s an instructive tale. He helped determine the course of a war that would shape our world for decades to come.

Flying the Skull and Crossbones Atop an Empire of Oil

From its beginning in 1936 until it ended early in 1939, some 400,000 deaths later, the Spanish Civil War would rivet the world’s attention. For those who no longer remember, here’s a thumbnail sketch of what happened. A group of right-wing army officers calling themselves Nationalists, with a ruthless young general named Francisco Franco emerging as their leader, went into revolt against the elected government of the Spanish Republic. They fought with a brutality that would soon become far more common and global. Newspapers around the world reported on the deadly aid that Franco received from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Squadrons of aircraft on loan from Adolf Hitler infamously bombed the town of Guernica into ruins and leveled whole blocks of Madrid and Barcelona, killing thousands of civilians, something that was shockingly new at the time.

By war’s end, Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini had dispatched 80,000 Italian troops to fight for the Nationalists. Hitler and Mussolini would supply them with weaponry ranging from the latest tanks and artillery to submarines. Totally ignored by the world’s press, however, would be one of Franco’s crucial allies, a man who lived neither in Berlin nor Rome. With a globe on his desk and roll-down maps on the wall of his elegantly wainscoted office, he could be found high in the iconic Chrysler Building in the heart of New York City.

Not one of the hundreds of foreign correspondents who chronicled the bombing of Madrid looked up at the ominous V-shaped formations of Hitler’s bombers and wondered: Whose fuel is powering those aircraft? The oilman who supplied that fuel would, in fact, prove to be the best American friend a Fascist dictator could have. He would provide the Nationalists not only with oil, but with an astonishing hidden subsidy of money, a generous and elastic line of credit, and a stream of strategic intelligence.

Torkild Rieber was a barrel-chested, square-jawed figure whose presence dominated any occasion. At elegant gathering spots, like New York’s 21 Club, where a hamburger-and-egg dish on the menu was named after him, he captivated listeners with tales of his rugged past. Born in Norway, he had gone to sea at 15 as a deckhand on a full-rigged clipper ship that took six months to make its way from Europe around Cape Horn to San Francisco. For the next two years, he signed on with ships carrying indentured laborers from Calcutta, India, to the sugar plantations of the British West Indies. In his deep, gravelly voice, Rieber would tell stories for the rest of his life about climbing to a yardarm to furl sails far above a rolling, pitching deck, and riding out Atlantic hurricanes with a shipload of desperately seasick Indian laborers. On shore years later, however, his dress of choice wasn’t a sailor’s. He liked to wear a tuxedo when he went out to dinner at “21” and elsewhere because, as he said, “that’s the way the Brits ran the colony in Calcutta.”

At the age of 22, having survived a knifing by a drunken crewman, he would be naturalized as an American citizen and become the captain of an oil tanker. Forever after, his friends would call him “Cap.” The tanker he commanded was later bought by the Texas Company, better known by its service station brand name, Texaco. That was when he realized that, in the oil business, the biggest money was to be made on dry land. As the company expanded and the red Texaco star with its green “T” spread to gas stations across the world, he would marry his boss’s secretary and climb the corporate ladder to become, in 1935, CEO.

“He cannot sit at a desk,” wrote an awestruck reporter from Life magazine, who visited him at Texaco’s New York headquarters. “He bounces up and down, fidgets and jumps up to pace the floor as if it were a deck. He is perpetually restless, on a terrestrial scale. He cannot stay long in one office or in one city or on one continent.” Life’s sister magazine, Time, was no less susceptible to his rough-diamond charm, calling him a “hard-headed, steel-willed” corporate chieftain with “horse sense, a command of men, and the driving force of a triple-expansion engine.”

At the time, Texaco had a reputation as the brashest, most aggressive of the big oil companies; its founder, who first hired Rieber, flew a skull-and-crossbones flag atop his office building. “If I were dying at a Texaco filling-station,” a Shell executive once said, “I’d ask to be dragged across the road.”

For the company, Rieber muscled his way into oilfields around the world, making deals with local strongmen. In Colombia, a new city called Petrólea arose in the midst of the Rhode Island-sized expanse of land where Texaco had won the right to drill. To pump the oil to a port where tankers could collect it meant building a 263-mile pipeline across the Andes at Captain Rieber Pass.

Beneath his broad shoulders, iron handshake, sailors’ oaths, and up-from-the-lower-decks persona, however, lay something far darker. Although not particularly anti-Semitic by the standards of the time—“Why,” he would say, “some of my best friends are goddam Jews, like Bernie Gimbel and Solomon Guggenheim”—he was an admirer of Adolf Hitler.

“He always thought it was much better to deal with autocrats than democracies,” a friend recalled. “He said with an autocrat you really only have to bribe him once. With democracies you have to keep doing it over and over.”

Becoming Franco’s Banker

In 1935, the Spanish Republic signed a contract with Rieber’s Texaco, turning the company into its major oil supplier. The next year, after Franco and his allies made their grab for power, however, Rieber suddenly changed course and bet on them. Knowing that military trucks, tanks, and aircraft need not just fuel, but a range of engine oils and other lubricants, the Texaco CEO quickly ordered a supply at the French port of Bordeaux to be loaded into a company tanker and shipped to the hard-pressed Nationalists. It was a gesture that Franco would never forget.
From Nationalist officials came messages explaining that, much as they urgently needed Texaco’s oil for their military, they were painfully short on cash. Rieber instantly replied with a telegram—“Don’t worry about payments”—that became legendary in the dictator’s inner circles. Not surprisingly, soon after that, he was invited to Burgos, headquarters of the Nationalist insurgency, where he promptly agreed to cut off fuel sales to the Republic, while guaranteeing Franco all the oil he needed.

Few were paying the slightest attention to where Franco’s bounteous supply of oil was coming from. Not a single investigation on the subject appeared in any major American newspaper at a time when the civil war in Spain was front-page news almost daily. Yet the question should have been obvious, as more than 60% of the oil going to both sides in the bitter conflict was being consumed by the rival armed forces and Germany and Italy were incapable of offering Franco any oil, since both were petroleum importers.

The US neutrality legislation of the time made it difficult for American corporations to sell even non-military goods to a country at war, and posed two major obstacles for Franco’s Nationalists. The law banned such cargo from being transported in American ships—and the Nationalists had no tankers. In addition, it was illegal to supply a warring country with credit—and the Nationalists had little money. Spain’s gold reserves were in the hands of the Republic.

It didn’t take long for American customs agents to discover that Texaco tankers were breaking the law. They would leave the company’s pipeline terminal at Port Arthur, Texas, with cargo manifests showing their destinations as Antwerp, Rotterdam, or Amsterdam. At sea, their captains would open sealed orders redirecting them to ports in Nationalist Spain. Rieber was also violating the law in yet another way—by extending credit to a government at war. Nominally, the credit was for 90 days (startlingly lenient terms for the oil business of that era). The real terms were far more generous. As one Nationalist oil official later explained, “We paid what we could when we could.” In effect, an American oil company CEO had become Franco’s banker. Unknown to American authorities, Texaco was also acting as a purchasing agent when the Nationalists needed oil products not in the company’s inventory.

FBI agents did indeed question Rieber about those tankers, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt was leery of getting drawn into the Spanish Civil War in any way, even by prosecuting such a conspicuous violation of American law. Instead, Texaco received no more than a slap on the wrist, eventually paying a fine of $22,000 for extending credit to a belligerent government. Years later, when oil companies began issuing credit cards to consumers, a joke began making the rounds among industry insiders: Who did Texaco give its first credit card to? Francisco Franco.

How to Sink a Republic

President Roosevelt continued to maintain a studied neutrality toward the Spanish Civil War that he would later regret. Texaco, on the other hand, went to war.

In recent years, in the archives of the Nationalist oil monopoly, a Spanish scholar, Guillem Martínez Molinos, made a discovery. Not only did Texaco ship its oil illegally to Franco, but that oil was priced as if the Nationalists had transported it, not the company’s fleet of tankers.

Nor was that the end of the gifts Rieber offered. Mussolini had put Italian submarines in the Mediterranean to work attacking ships carrying supplies to Republican Spain. Franco had his own vessels and planes doing this as well. Commanders directing these submarines, bombers, and surface ships were always remarkably well informed on the travels of tankers bound for the Spanish Republic. These were, of course, a prime target for the Nationalists and during the war at least 29 of them were either damaged, sunk, or captured. The risk became so great that, in the summer of 1937, insurance rates for tankers in the Mediterranean abruptly quadrupled. One reason those waters became so dangerous: the Nationalists had access to Texaco’s international maritime intelligence network.

The company had offices and sales agents across the world. Thanks to Rieber, its Paris office began collecting information from port cities about oil tankers headed for the Spanish Republic. His Paris associate William M. Brewster coordinated this flow of intelligence, passing on to the Nationalists data he received from London, Istanbul, Marseille, and elsewhere. Brewster’s messages often listed the quantity and type of fuel a tanker was carrying and how much had been paid for it, intelligence that would help the Nationalists in assessing Republican supplies and finances. Whenever he could, however, he also delighted in relaying information useful to bomber pilots or submarine captains looking for targets.

On July 2, 1937, for example, he sent a telegram to the chief of the Nationalist oil monopoly about the S.S. Campoamor, a Republican tanker a Texaco agent had spotted at Le Verdon, a French port near Bordeaux. It had covered its name, hull, and funnel with new coats of black paint, and was preparing to sail soon under a British flag. It had already twice left its anchorage and returned because of reports of Nationalist ships and submarines lying in wait outside Santander, the Republican-held port where it was supposed to deliver its cargo of 10,000 tons of aviation fuel. The news of that repainting and re-flagging would have been useful to the commanders of Nationalist naval vessels. As it happened, though, an even more valuable piece of information was included in Brewster’s message: much of the crew left the ship “almost every evening.” Four days later, with many of the crew attending a dance on shore, the Campoamor was boarded near midnight by an armed Nationalist raiding party, which quickly sailed it to a port held by Franco.

Rieber traveled to Nationalist Spain twice during the war, at one point getting a VIP tour of the front lines near Madrid. By April 1939, Franco had won the war and Rieber was assured that the gamble he had made would pay off big time. Texaco’s coffers would at last receive the money for the nearly three years’ worth of fuel he had supplied on credit. In total, he sold the Nationalists at least $20 million worth of oil during the war, the equivalent of more than $325 million today. Texaco’s tankers took 225 trips to Spain, and ships the company chartered another 156. Franco later made Rieber a Knight of the Grand Cross of Isabella the Catholic, one of Spain’s highest honors.

After the Spanish war ended, Texaco continued to make its own foreign policy. Even after Germany went to war with Britain and France in September 1939, Rieber made no secret of his enthusiasm for Hitler. He sometimes joked with friends that the Führer’s anti-Semitism might be a touch excessive, but he was just the sort of strong, anti-communist leader with whom one could do business. This Rieber did, with gusto, selling Texaco oil to the Nazis, ordering tankers built in Hamburg shipyards, and traveling to Germany after the Polish Blitzkrieg so that Hermann Göring could take him on a tour by air of key industrial sites. On that trip he spent a weekend at the Luftwaffe commander’s country estate, Carinhall, soon to be extravagantly decorated with art treasures looted from across Europe.

Eventually, Rieber’s love of dictators got him in trouble. In 1940, it was revealed, among other things, that several Germans he had hired were Nazi spies using Texaco’s internal communications to transmit intelligence information to Berlin. Rieber lost his job, but thanks to a grateful Franco the deposed tycoon landed on his feet: the dictator made him chief American buyer for the Spanish government’s oil company. He went on to a succession of other high-paying positions and directorships in the oil industry and shipbuilding and died a wealthy man in 1968, at the age of 86.

Rieber is long forgotten, but we still live in a world he had such a hand in shaping. Texaco oil helped Franco win the Spanish Civil War and so be in a position to aid the Nazis in the far larger war that followed. Untold numbers of American sailors lost their lives thanks to the 21 German U-Boats based on Spain’s Atlantic coast. Forty-five thousand Spaniards volunteered for Hitler’s army and air force, and Spain supplied an essential stream of strategic minerals to Germany’s war industry. In the United States three-quarters of a century later, well-funded climate change deniers and the political network supported by the Koch brothers are testimony to the enduring power of the oil industry.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-untold-story-of-the-texaco-oil-tycoon-who-loved-fascism/
Why No One Remembers the Peacemakershttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/why-no-one-remembers-peacemakers/Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam HochschildDec 9, 2014Memorials across the world pay tribute to “fallen soldiers,” but virtually none exist for those who fought for peace. 

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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

Go to war and every politician will thank you, and they’ll continue to do so—with monuments and statues, war museums and military cemeteries—long after you’re dead. But who thanks those who refused to fight, even in wars that most people later realized were tragic mistakes? Consider the 2003 invasion of Iraq, now widely recognized as igniting an ongoing disaster. America’s politicians still praise Iraq War veterans to the skies, but what senator has a kind word to say about the hundreds of thousands of protesters who marched and demonstrated before the invasion was even launched to try to stop our soldiers from risking their lives in the first place?

What brings all this to mind is an apparently heartening exception to the rule of celebrating war-makers and ignoring peacemakers. A European rather than an American example, it turns out to be not quite as simple as it first appears. Let me explain.

December 25 will be the 100th anniversary of the famous Christmas Truce of the First World War. You probably know the story: after five months of unparalleled industrial-scale slaughter, fighting on the Western Front came to a spontaneous halt. British and German soldiers stopped shooting at each other and emerged into the no-man’s-land between their muddy trenches in France and Belgium to exchange food and gifts.

That story—burnished in recent years by books, songs, music videos, a feature filmd an opera—is largely true. On Christmas Day, troops did indeed trade cigarettes, helmets, canned food, coat buttonsd souvenirs. They sang carols, barbecued a pig, posed for photographs togetherd exchanged German beer for British rum. In several spots, men from the rival armies played soccer together. The ground was pocked with shell craters and proper balls were scarce, so the teams made use of tin cans or sandbags stuffed with straw instead. Officers up to the rank of colonel emerged from the trenches to greet their counterparts on the other side, and they, too, were photographed together. (Refusing to join the party, however, was 25-year-old Adolf Hitler, at the front with his German army unit. He thought the truce shocking and dishonorable.)

Unlike most unexpected outbreaks of peace, the anniversary of this one is being celebrated with extraordinary officially sanctioned fanfare. The British Council, funded in part by the government and invariably headed by a peer or knight, has helped distribute an “education pack” about the Truce to every primary and secondary school in the United Kingdom. It includes photos, eyewitness accounts, lesson plans, test questions, student worksheetsd vocabulary phrases in various languages, including “Meet us halfway,” “What are your trenches like?,” and “Can I take your picture?” The British post office has even issued a set of stamps commemorating the Christmas Truce.

An exhibit of documents, maps, uniformsd other Truce-related memorabilia has been on display at city hall in Armentières, France. A commemorative youth soccer tournament with teams from Britain, Belgium, France, Austriad Germany is taking place in Belgium this month. The local mayor and the British and German ambassadors were recently on hand for a soccer game at a newly dedicated “Flanders Peace Field.”

Volunteers from several countries will spend three days and two nights in freshly dug trenches reenacting the Truce. Professional actors, complete with period uniforms, carol-singingd a soccer match, have already done the same in an elaborate video advertisement for a British supermarket chain. One of the judges for a children’s competition to design a Truce memorial is none other than Prince William, Duke of Cambridge.

What Won’t Be Commemorated

Given the rarity of peace celebrations of any sort, what’s made the Christmas Truce safe for royalty, mayorsd diplomats? Three things, I believe. First, this event—remarkable, spontaneousd genuinely moving as it was—did not represent a challenge to the sovereignty of war. It was sanctioned by officers on the spot; it was short-lived (the full fury of shelling and machine gunning resumed within a day or two, and poison gas and flamethrowers soon added to the horror); and it was never repeated. It’s safe to celebrate because it threatened nothing. That supermarket video, for instance, advertises a commemorative chocolate bar whose sales proceeds go to the national veterans organization, the Royal British Legion.

Second, commemorating anything, even peace instead of war, is good business. Belgium alone expects two million visitors to former battle sites during the war’s four-and-a-half-year centenary period, and has now added one or two peace sites as visitor destinations. The country is putting $41 million in public funds into museums, exhibits, publicityd other tourism infrastructure, beyond private investment in new hotel rooms, restaurantsd the like.

Finally, the Christmas Truce is tailor-made to be celebrated by professional soccer, now a huge industry. Top pro players earn $60 million or more a year. Two Spanish teams are each worth more than $3 billion. The former manager of Britain’s Manchester United team, Sir Alex Ferguson, even teaches at the Harvard Business School. Five of the world’s ten most valuable teams, however, are in Britain, which helps account for that country’s special enthusiasm for these commemorations. The Duke of Cambridge is the official patron of the sport’s British governing body, the Football Association, the equivalent of our NFL. It has joined with the continent-wide Union of European Football Associations in promoting the Christmas Truce soccer tournament and other anniversary hoopla. That packet of material going to more than 30,000 British schools is titled “Football Remembers.”

While such sponsorship represents only a tiny percentage of the public relations budgets of these organizations, they have surely calculated that associating soccer with schoolchildren, Christmas and a good-news historical event can’t hurt business. All industries keep a close eye on their public imaged soccer, especially at the moment, since in many parts of Europe audiences for it are declining as a barrage of other activities competes for people’s leisure time and spending.

For nearly four years, as we reach the centenary mark for one First World War milestone after another, there will be commemorations galore across Europe. But here’s one thing you can bank on: the Duke of Cambridge and other high dignitaries won’t be caught dead endorsing the anniversaries of far more subversive peace-related events to come.

For example, although soldiers from both sides on the Western Front mixed on that first Christmas of the war, the most extensive fraternization happened later in Russia. In early 1917, under the stress of catastrophic war losses, creaky, top-heavy imperial Russia finally collapsed and Tsar Nicholas II and his family were placed under house arrest. More than 300 years of rule by the Romanov dynasty was over.

The impact rippled through the Russian army. An American correspondent at the front watched through binoculars as Russian and German enlisted men met in no-man’s-land. Lack of a common language was no barrier: the Germans thrust their bayonets into the earth; the Russians blew across their open palms to show that the tsar had been swept away. After November of that year, when the Bolsheviks—committed to ending the war—seized power, fraternization only increased. You can find many photographs of Russian and German soldiers posing together or even, in one case, dancing in couples in the snow. Generals on both sides were appalled.

And here are some people who won’t be celebrated in “education packs” sent to schools, although they were crucial in helping bring the war to an end: deserters. An alarmed British military attaché in Russia estimated that at least a million Russian soldiers deserted their ill-fed, badly equipped army, most simply walking home to their villages. This lay behind the agreement that halted fighting on the Eastern Front long before it ended in the West.

In the final weeks of the war in the West, the German army began melting away, too. The desertions came not from the front lines but from the rear, where hundreds of thousands of soldiers either disappeared or evaded orders to go to the front. By early autumn 1918, the Berlin police chief estimated that more than 40,000 deserters were hiding in the German capital. No wonder the high command began peace negotiations.

Don’t hold your breath either waiting for official celebrations of the war’s mutinies. Nothing threatened the French army more than the most stunning of these, which broke out in the spring of 1917 following a massive attack hyped as the decisive blow that would win the war. Over several days, 30,000 French soldiers were killed and 100,000 wounded, all to gain a few meaningless miles of blood-soaked ground.

In the weeks that followed, hundreds of thousands of troops refused to advance further. One group even hijacked a train and tried to drive it to Paris, although most soldiers simply stayed in their camps or trenches and made clear that they would not take part in additional suicidal attacks. This “collective indiscipline,” as the generals euphemistically called it, was hushed up, but it paralyzed the army. French commanders dared launch no more major assaults that year. To this day, the subject remains so touchy that some archival documents on the mutinies remain closed to researchers until the 100th anniversary in 2017.

Parades for Whom?

From Bavaria to New Zealand, town squares across the world are adorned with memorials to local men “fallen” in 1914–18, and statues and plaques honoring the war’s leading generals can be found from Edinburgh Castle to Pershing Square in Los Angeles. But virtually nothing similar celebrates those who served the cause of peace. The Polish-German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, who argued against the suppression of free speech both in the Kaiser’s Germany and in Soviet Russia, spent more than two years in a German prison for her opposition to the war. The eloquent British philosopher Bertrand Russell did six months’ time in a London jail for the same reason. The American labor leader Eugene V. Debs, imprisoned for urging resistance to the draft, was still in a federal penitentiary in Atlanta in 1920, two years after the war ended, when he received nearly a million votes as the Socialist Party candidate for president.

The French socialist Jean Jaurès spoke out passionately against the war he saw coming in 1914 and, due to this, was assassinated by a French militarist just four days before the fighting began. (The assassin was found innocent because his was labeled a “crime of passion.”) Against the opposition of their own governments, the pioneer social worker Jane Addams and other women helped organize a women’s peace conference in Holland in 1915 with delegates from both warring and neutral countries. And in every nation that took part in that terrible war, young men of military age—thousands of them—either went to jail or were shot for refusing to fight.

Jump half a century forward, and you’ll see exactly the same pattern of remembrance. Next year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the arrival of the first official US combat troops in Vietnam, and already a duel is shaping up between the thankers and those who want to honor the antiwar movement that helped end that senseless tragedy.

The Pentagon has already launched a $15 million official commemorative program whose purpose (does this sound familiar?) is “to thank and honor veterans of the Vietnam War…for their service and sacrifice.” Meanwhile, more than 1,000 people, many of us veterans of the US military, the anti-war movement, or both, have signed a petition insisting that “no commemoration of the war in Vietnam can exclude the many thousands of veterans who opposed it, as well as the draft refusals of many thousands of young Americans, some at the cost of imprisonment or exile.”

A recent New York Times article covered the controversy. It mentioned that the Pentagon had been forced to make changes at its commemoration website after Nick Turse, writing at TomDispatch.com, pointed out, among other things, how grossly that site understated civilian deaths in the notorious My Lai massacre.

Perhaps when the next anniversary of the Iraq War comes around, it’s time to break with a tradition that makes ever less sense in our world. Next time, why not have parades to celebrate those who tried to prevent that grim, still ongoing conflict from starting? Of course, there’s an even better way to honor and thank veterans of the struggle for peace: don’t start more wars.

 



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/why-no-one-remembers-peacemakers/
Never Again: The Bloody Origins of Veterans Dayhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/never-again-bloody-origins-veterans-day/Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Joe SaccoNov 11, 2013The first day of the Battle of Somme was one of the deadliest in history.

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The illustrations in this piece come from Joe Sacco’s The Great War: July 1, 1916: The First Day of the Battle of the Somme with the kind permission of its publisher, W.W. Norton, and the slightly adapted text, which also appears in that book, comes originally from Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 and is used with the kind permission of its publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

In a country that uses every possible occasion to celebrate its “warriors,” many have forgotten that today’s holiday originally marked a peace agreement. Veterans Day in the United States originally was called Armistice Day and commemorated the ceasefire which, at 11 a.m. on November 11, 1918, ended the First World War.

Up to that point, it had been the most destructive war in history, with a total civilian and military death toll of roughly 20 million. Millions more had been wounded, many of them missing arms, legs, eyes, genitals; and because of an Allied naval blockade of the Central Powers, millions more were near starvation: the average German civilian lost 20 percent of his or her body weight during the war.

A stunned world had never experienced anything like this. In some countries for years afterward, on November 11th, traffic, assembly lines, even underground mining machinery came to a halt at 11 a.m. for two minutes of silence, a silence often broken, witnesses from the 1920s reported, by the sound of women sobbing.

Like most wars, the war of 1914-1918 was begun with the expectation of quick victory, created more problems than it solved, and was punctuated by moments of tragic folly. As the years have passed, one point that has come to symbolize the illusions, the destructiveness, the hubris, the needless deaths of the entire war—and of other wars since then—has been the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

The preparations for that battle went on for months: generals and their staffs drew up plans in their châteaux headquarters; horses, tractors, and sweating soldiers maneuvered thousands of big 13-ton guns into position; reconnaissance planes swooped above the German lines; endless trains of horse-drawn supply wagons carried artillery shells and machine gun ammunition up to the front; hundreds of thousands of soldiers from across the British Empire, from the Orkney Islands to the Punjab, filled frontline trenches, reserve trenches, and support bases in the rear. All was in preparation for the grand attack that seemed certain to change the course of the war. And then finally on the first day of July 1916, preceded by the most massive bombardment British artillery had ever fired, the battle began.

Joe Sacco
Click to enlarge

You can see the results of the battle’s first day in dozens of military cemeteries spread out across this corner of France, but perhaps the most striking is one of the smallest, on a hillside, screened by a grove of trees. Each gravestone has a name, rank, and serial number; 162 have crosses and one a Star of David. When known, a man’s age is engraved on the stone as well: 19, 22, 23, 26, 21, 20, 34. Ten of the graves simply say, “A Soldier of the Great War, Known unto God.”

Almost all the dead are from Britain’s Devonshire Regiment, the date on their gravestones July 1, 1916. Most were casualties of a single German machine gun several hundred yards from this spot, and were buried here in a section of the frontline trench they had climbed out of that morning. Captain Duncan Martin, 30, a company commander and an artist in civilian life, had made a clay model of the battlefield across which the British planned to attack. He predicted the exact place at which he and his men would come under fire from the machine gun as they emerged onto an exposed hillside. He, too, is here, one of some 21,000 British soldiers killed or fatally wounded on the day of greatest bloodshed in the history of their country’s military, before or since.

Dreams of Swift Victory

In almost every war, it seems, the next planned offensive is seen as the big breakthrough, the smashing, decisive blow that will pave the way to swift victory. Midway through the First World War, troops from both sides had been bogged down for the better part of two years in lines of trenches that ran across northern France and a corner of Belgium. Barbed wire and the machine gun had made impossible the war of dramatic advances and glorious cavalry charges that the generals on both sides had dreamed of.

To end this frustrating stalemate, the British army planned an enormous assault for a point near where the River Somme meandered its slow and weed-filled way through French wheat and sugar-beet fields. A torrent of supplies began pouring into the area to equip the half million British Empire troops involved, of whom 120,000 would attack on the first day alone. This was to be the “Big Push,” a concentration of manpower and artillery so massive and in such a small space that the German defenses would burst open as if hit by floodwaters.

After the overwhelmed Germans had been bayoneted in their trenches, it would be a matter of what General Douglas Haig, the British commander in chief, called “fighting the Enemy in the open,” and so battalions were trained intensively in maneuvering across trenchless meadows. Finally, of course, streaming through the gap in the lines would come the cavalry, three divisions’ worth. After all, hadn’t glorious charges by men on horseback been a decisive element in warfare for millennia?

Troops unrolled 70,000 miles of telephone cable. Thousands more unloaded and piled ammunition in huge dumps; stripped to the waist and sweltering in the summer heat, they dug endlessly to construct special roads to speed supplies to the front. Fifty-five miles of new standard-gauge railway line were built. With as many British soldiers crammed into the launching area as the population of a good-sized city, new wells had to be drilled and dozens of miles of water pipe laid. No detail was forgotten.
By Joe Sacco
Click to enlarge

British troops, the plan went, would move forward across no-man’s-land in successive waves. Everything was precise: each wave would advance in a continuous line 100 yards in front of the next, at a steady pace of 100 yards a minute. How were they to be safe from German machine gun fire? Simple: the pre-attack artillery bombardment would destroy not just the Germans’ barbed wire but the bunkers that sheltered their machine guns. How could this not be when there was one artillery piece for every 17 yards of front line, all of which would rain a total of a million and a half shells down on the German trenches? And if that weren’t enough, once British troops climbed out of their trenches, a final “creeping barrage” of bursting shells would precede them, a moving curtain of fire riddling with shrapnel any surviving Germans who emerged from underground shelters to try to fight.

The plan for the first day’s attack on July 1, 1916, was 31 pages long and its map included the British names with which the German trenches had already been rechristened. Preparations this thorough were hard to conceal, and there were occasional unnerving signs that the German troops knew almost as much about them as the British. When one unit moved into position, it found a sign held up from the German trenches: WELCOME TO THE 29TH DIVISION.

Several weeks before the attack, 168 officers who were graduates of Eton met for an Old Etonian dinner at the Hotel Godbert in Amiens, a French city behind the lines. In Latin, they toasted their alma mater—“Floreat Etona!”—and raised their voices in the school song, “Carmen Etonense.” Enlisted men entertained themselves in other ways. A haunting piece of documentary film footage from these months, taken from a Red Cross barge moving down a canal behind the lines, shows hundreds of Allied soldiers stripped completely bare, wading, bathing, or sunning themselves on the canal bank, smiling and waving at the camera. Without helmets and uniforms, it is impossible to tell their nationality; their naked bodies mark them only as human beings.

Riding a black horse and with his usual escort of lancers, General Haig inspected his divisions as they rehearsed their attacks on practice fields where white tapes on the ground stood for the German trenches. On June 20th, the commander in chief wrote to his wife, “The situation is becoming more favourable to us.” On June 22nd he added, “I feel that every step in my plan has been taken with the Divine help.” On June 30th, as the great artillery barrage had been thundering for five days, Haig wrote in his diary, “The men are in splendid spirits…. The wire has never been so well cut, nor the Artillery preparation so thorough.” For good measure, the British released clouds of deadly chlorine gas toward the German lines.

As it grew close to zero hour, 7:30 a.m. on July 1st, men detonated 10 enormous mines planted by British miners tunneling deep beneath the German trenches. Near the village of La Boisselle, the crater from one remains, a stark, gaping indentation in the surrounding farmland; even partly filled in by a century of erosion, it is still 55 feet deep and 220 feet across.

When the artillery barrage reached its crescendo, 224,221 shells in the last sixty-five minutes, the rumble could be heard as far away as Hampstead Heath in London. More shells were fired by the British this week than they had used in the entire first 12 months of the war; some gunners bled from the ears after seven days of nonstop firing. At a forest near Gommecourt, entire trees were uprooted and tossed in the air by the shelling and the forest itself set on fire.

Soldiers of the First Somerset Light Infantry sat on the parapet of their trench, cheering at the tremendous explosions. Officers issued a strong ration of rum to the men about to head into no-man’s-land. Captain W.P. Nevill of the Eighth East Surrey Battalion gave each of his four platoons a soccer ball and promised a prize to whichever one first managed to kick a ball into the German trench. One platoon painted its ball with the legend:

THE GREAT EUROPEAN CUP
    THE FINAL
EAST SURREYS V. BAVARIANS

Throughout the British Isles, millions of people knew a great attack was to begin. “The hospital received orders to clear out all convalescents and prepare for a great rush of wounded,” remembered the writer Vera Brittain, working as a nurse’s aide in London. “We knew that already a tremendous bombardment had begun, for we could feel the vibration of the guns… Hour after hour, as the convalescents departed, we added to the long rows of waiting beds, so sinister in their white, expectant emptiness.”

“God, God, Where’s the Rest of the Boys?”

Haig waited anxiously in his forward headquarters at the Château de Beauquesne, 10 miles behind the battlefield. Then, after a full week of continual fire, the British guns abruptly fell silent.

When whistles blew at 7:30 a.m., the successive waves of troops began their planned 100-yards-a-minute advance. Each man moved slowly under more than 60 pounds of supplies—200 bullets, grenades, shovel, two days’ food and water, and more. But when those soldiers actually clambered up the trench ladders and over the parapet, they quickly discovered something appalling. The multiple belts of barbed wire in front of the German trenches and the well-fortified machine gun emplacements were still largely intact.

Officers looking through binocular-periscopes had already suspected as much. Plans for any attack, however, have tremendous momentum; rare is the commander willing to recognize that something is awry. To call off an offensive requires bravery, for the general who does so risks being thought a coward. Haig was not such a man. Whistles blew, men cheered, Captain Nevill’s company of East Surreys kicked off its four soccer balls. The soldiers hoped to stay alive—and sometimes for something more: troops of the First Newfoundland Regiment knew that a prominent young society woman back home had promised to marry the first man in the regiment to win the Empire’s highest medal, the Victoria Cross.

The week-long bombardment, it turned out, had been impressive mainly for its noise. More than one out of four British shells were duds that buried themselves in the earth, exploding, if at all, only when struck by some unlucky French farmer’s plow years or decades later. Two-thirds of the shells fired were shrapnel, virtually useless in destroying machine gun emplacements made of steel and reinforced concrete or stone. Nor could shrapnel shells, which scattered light steel balls, destroy the dense belts of German barbed wire, many yards thick, unless they burst at just the right height. But their fuses were wildly unreliable, and usually they exploded only after they had already plummeted into the earth, destroying little and embedding so much metal in the ground that soldiers trying to navigate through darkness or smoke sometimes found their compasses had ceased to work.

The remaining British shells were high-explosive ones, which could indeed destroy a German machine gun bunker, but only if they hit it with pinpoint accuracy. When guns were firing from several miles away, this was almost impossible. German machine gun teams had waited out the bombardment in dugouts as deep as 40 feet below the surface and supplied with electricity, water, and ventilation. In one of the few places where British troops did reach the German front line on July 1, they found the electric light in a dugout still on.

Unaccountably, an underground mine had exploded beneath the German lines 10 minutes before zero hour, a clear signal that the attack was about to begin. Then, like a final warning, the remaining mines went off at 7:28 a.m., followed by a two-minute wait to allow the debris—blown thousands of feet into the air—to fall back to earth before British troops climbed out of their trenches to advance. Those two minutes gave German machine gunners time to run up the ladders and stairways from their dugouts and man their fortified posts, of which there were roughly a thousand in the sector of the line under attack. During the two minutes, the British could hear bugles summoning German riflemen and machine gunners to their positions.

“They came on at a steady easy pace as if expecting to find nothing alive in our front trenches,” recalled a German soldier of the British advance. “…When the leading British line was within 100 yards, the rattle of [German] machine guns and rifle fire broke out from along the whole line… Red rockets sped up into the blue sky as a signal to the artillery, and immediately afterwards a mass of shells from the German batteries in [the] rear tore through the air and burst among the advancing lines.”

The Germans, like the British, had plenty of artillery pieces; these were under camouflage netting and had simply not been used during the preceding weeks, so as not to reveal their positions to British aircraft. Now they fired their deadly shrapnel, whose effects the Germans could see: “All along the line men could be seen throwing their arms into the air and collapsing never to move again. Badly wounded rolled about in their agony… with… cries for help and the last screams of death.”

Plans for the orderly march forward in line abreast were quickly abandoned as men separated into small groups and sought the shelter of hillocks and shell holes. But there was no question of the hard-hit British troops turning back, for each battalion had soldiers designated as “battle police,” herding any stragglers forward. “When we got to the German wire I was absolutely amazed to see it intact, after what we had been told,” remembered one British private. “The colonel and I took cover behind a small bank but after a bit the colonel raised himself on his hands and knees to see better. Immediately he was hit on the forehead by a single bullet.”

Because the artillery bombardment had destroyed so little of the barbed wire, British soldiers had to bunch up to get through the few gaps they could find—making themselves an even more conspicuous target. Many soldiers died when their clothing, especially the loose kilts of the Scotsmen, caught on the wire. “Only three out of our company got past there,” recalled a private of the Fourth Tyneside Scottish Battalion. “There was my lieutenant, a sergeant and myself…. The officer said, ‘God, God, where’s the rest of the boys?’”

The vaunted “creeping barrage” crept forward according to the timetable—and then continued to creep off uselessly into the far distance long after British troops who were supposed to be following behind its protective cover had been pinned down by the tangles of uncut German wire. The cavalry waited behind the British lines, but in vain. Some of those who had survived in no-man’s-land tried, after dark, to crawl back to their own trenches, but even then the continual traversing of German machine gun fire sent up showers of sparks as bullets hit the British barbed wire.

Of the 120,000 British troops who went into battle on July 1, 1916, more than 57,000 were dead or wounded before the day was over—nearly two casualties for every yard of the front; 19,000 were killed, most of them within the first disastrous hour, and some 2,000 more would die in aid stations or hospitals later. There were an estimated 8,000 German casualties. Because they led their troops out of the trenches, the toll was heaviest among the officers who took part in the attack, three-quarters of whom were killed or wounded. These included many who had attended the Old Etonian dinner a few weeks before: more than 30 Eton men lost their lives on July 1st. Captain Nevill of the East Surreys, who had distributed the soccer balls, was fatally shot through the head in the first few minutes.

The First Newfoundland Regiment, awaiting its Victoria Cross winner and the young woman who had promised herself as his reward, was virtually wiped out. There were 752 men who climbed out of their trenches to advance toward the skeletal ruins of an apple orchard covered by German machine gun fire; by the day’s end 684 were dead, wounded, or missing, including every single officer. The German troops the Newfoundlanders attacked did not suffer a single casualty.

Attacking soldiers had been ordered not to tend injured comrades, but to leave them for stretcher bearers who would follow. The dead and wounded, however, included hundreds of stretcher bearers themselves, and there were nowhere near enough men to carry the critically injured to first aid posts in time. Stretchers ran out; some wounded were carried off two to a stretcher or on sheets of corrugated iron whose edges ravaged the bearers’ fingers. Many wounded who lived through the first day never made it off the battlefield. For weeks afterward their fellow soldiers came upon them in shell holes, where they had crawled for shelter, taken out their pocket Bibles, and wrapped themselves in their waterproof groundsheets to die, in pain and alone.

In other ways as well, the terrible day took its toll after the fact. One battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel E.T.F. Sandys, having seen more than 500 of his men killed or wounded during that day, wrote to a fellow officer two months later, “I have never had a moment’s peace since July 1st.” Then, in a London hotel room, he shot himself.

A Quiet Trench

Engraved on a stone plaque in the small cemetery holding the Devonshire Regiment’s casualties from this day are the words survivors carved on a wooden sign when they first buried their dead:

The Devonshires held this trench
The Devonshires hold it still

In the cemetery’s visitors’ book, on a few pages the ink of the names and remarks has been smeared by raindrops—or was it tears? “Paid our respects to 3 of our townsfolk.” “Sleep on, boys.” “Lest we forget.” “Thanks, lads.” “Gt. Uncle thanks, rest in peace.”

Only one visitor strikes a different note: “Never again.”

Read Ann Jones on encounters with American soldiers in the Afghanistan War.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/never-again-bloody-origins-veterans-day/
The Untold Story of World War Onehttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/untold-story-world-war-one/Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Joe Sacco,Adam HochschildFeb 27, 2012Going beyond the tale of a boy and his horse.

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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com. To listen to the author discuss the largely untold stories of those in England who opposed involvement in World War I and the message they offer for our own time, click here, or download it to your iPod here.

Well in advance of the 2014 centennial of the beginning of “the war to end all wars,” the First World War is suddenly everywhere in our lives. Stephen Spielberg’s War Horse opened on 2,376 movie screens and has collected six Oscar nominations, while the hugely successful play it’s based on is still packing in the crowds in New York and a second production is being readied to tour the country.

In addition, the must-watch TV soap opera of the last two months, Downton Abbey, has just concluded its season on an unexpected kiss. In seven episodes, its upstairs-downstairs world of forbidden love and dynastic troubles took American viewers from mid-war, 1916, beyond the Armistice, with the venerable Abbey itself turned into a convalescent hospital for wounded troops. Other dramas about the 1914-1918 war are on the way, among them an HBO-BBC miniseries based on Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End quartet of novels and a TV adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’s novel Birdsong from an NBC-backed production company.

In truth, there’s nothing new in this. Filmmakers and novelists have long been fascinated by the way the optimistic, sunlit, pre-1914 Europe of emperors in plumed helmets and hussars on parade so quickly turned into a mass slaughterhouse on an unprecedented scale. And there are good reasons to look at the First World War carefully and closely.

After all, it was responsible for the deaths of some nine million soldiers and an even larger number of civilians. It helped ignite the Armenian genocide and the Russian Revolution, left large swaths of Europe in smoldering ruins and remade the world for the worse in almost every conceivable way—above all, by laying the groundwork for a second and even more deadly, even more global war.

There are good reasons as well for us to be particularly haunted by what happened in those war years to the country that figures in all four of these film and TV productions: Britain. In 1914, that nation was at the apex of glory, the unquestioned global superpower, ruling over the largest empire the world had ever seen. Four and a half years later its national debt had increased tenfold, more than 720,000 British soldiers were dead and hundreds of thousands more seriously wounded, many of them missing arms, legs, eyes, genitals.

The toll fell particularly heavily on the educated classes that supplied the young lieutenants and captains who led their troops out of the trenches and into murderous machine-gun fire. To give but a single stunning example, of the men who graduated from Oxford in 1913, 31 percent were killed.

“Swept Away in a Red Blast of Hate”

Yet curiously, for all the spectacle of boy and horse, thundering cavalry charges, muddy trenches and wartime love and loss, the makers of War HorseDownton Abbey and—I have no doubt—the similar productions we’ll soon be watching largely skip over the greatest moral drama of those years of conflict, one that continues to echo in our own time of costly and needless wars. They do so by leaving out part of the cast of characters of that moment. The First World War was not just a battle between rival armies, but also a powerful, if one-sided, battle between those who assumed the war was a noble crusade and those who thought it absolute madness.

The war’s opponents went to jail in many countries. There were more than 500 conscientious objectors imprisoned in the United States in those years, for example, plus others jailed for speaking out against joining the conflict. Eugene V. Debs had known prison from his time as a railway union leader, but he spent far longer behind bars—more than two years—for urging American men to resist the draft. Convicted of sedition, he was still in his cell at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta in November 1920 when, long after the war ended, he received nearly a million votes as the Socialist candidate for President.

One American protest against the war turned to tragedy when, in 1917, Oklahoma police arrested nearly 500 draft resisters—white, black and Native American—taking part in what they called the Green Corn Rebellion against “a rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.” Three were killed and many injured.

War resisters were also thrown in jail in Germany and Russia. But the country with the largest and best organized antiwar movement—and here’s where the creators of those film and TV costume dramas so beloved by Anglophile American audiences miss a crucial opportunity—was Britain.

The main reason opposition to the war proved relatively strong there was simple enough: In 1914, the island nation had not been attacked. German invaders marched into France and Belgium, but Germany hoped Britain would stay out of the war. And so did some Britons. When their country joined the fighting on the grounds that Germany had violated Belgian neutrality, a vocal minority continued to insist that jumping into a quarrel among other countries was a disastrous mistake.

Keir Hardie was a prominent early war opponent. A trade union leader and Member of Parliament, he had, by the age of twenty-one, already spent half his life as a coal miner and he never went to school. Nonetheless, he became one of the great orators of the age, mesmerizing crowds with his eloquence, his piercing, heavy-browed eyes and a striking red beard. Crushed with despair that millions of Europe’s working men were slaughtering one another rather than making common cause in fighting for their rights, his beard white, he died in 1915, still in his fifties.

Among those who bravely challenged the war fever, whose rallies were often violently broken up by the police or patriotic mobs, was well-known radical feminist Charlotte Despard. Her younger brother, amazingly, was Field Marshal Sir John French, commander-in-chief of the Western Front for the first year and a half of the war. A similarly riven family was the famous Pankhurst clan of suffragettes: Sylvia Pankhurst became an outspoken opponent of the conflict, while her sister Christabel was from the beginning a fervent drum-beater for the war effort. They not only stopped speaking to each other, but published rival newspapers that regularly attacked the other’s work.

Britain’s leading investigative journalist, Edmund Dene Morel, and its most famous philosopher, Bertrand Russell, were both passionate war critics. “This war is trivial, for all its vastness,” Russell wrote. “No great principle is at stake, no great human purpose is involved on either side.” He was appalled to see his fellow citizens “swept away in a red blast of hate.”

He wrote with remarkable candor about how difficult it was to go against the current of the national war fever “when the whole nation is in a state of violent collective excitement. As much effort was required to avoid sharing this excitement as would have been needed to stand out against the extreme of hunger or sexual passion, and there was the same feeling of going against instinct.”

Both Russell and Morel spent six months in prison for their beliefs. Morel served his term at hard labor, carrying 100-pound slabs of jute to the prison workshop while subsisting on a bare-bones diet during a frigid winter when prison furnaces were last in line for the nation’s scarce supply of coal.

Women like Violet Tillard went to jail as well. She worked for an antiwar newspaper banned in 1918 and was imprisoned for refusing to reveal the location of its clandestine printing press. And among the unsung heroines of that antiwar moment was Emily Hobhouse, who secretly traveled through neutral Switzerland to Berlin, met the German foreign minister, talked over possible peace terms and then returned to England to try to do the same with the British government. Its officials dismissed her as a lone-wolf eccentric, but in a conflict that killed some 20 million people, she was the sole human being who journeyed from one side to the other and back again in search of peace.

Why We Know More About War Than Peace

By the war’s end, more than 20,000 British men had defied the draft and, as a matter of principle, many also refused the alternative service prescribed for conscientious objectors, like ambulance driving at the front or working in a war industry. More than 6,000 of them were put behind bars—up to that moment the largest number of people ever imprisoned for political reasons in a western democracy.

There was nothing easy about any of this. Draft refusers were mocked and jeered (mobs threw rotten eggs at them when given the chance), jailed under harsh conditions and lost the right to vote for five years. But with war’s end, in a devastated country mourning its losses and wondering what could possibly justify that four-year slaughter, many people came to feel differently about the resisters. More than half a dozen were eventually elected to the House of Commons and the journalist Morel became the Labour Party’s chief Parliamentary spokesperson on foreign affairs. Thirty years after the Armistice, a trade unionist named Arthur Creech Jones, who had spent two and a half years in prison as a war resister, was appointed to the British cabinet.

The bravery of such men and women in speaking their minds on one of the great questions of the age cost them dearly: in public scorn, prison terms, divided families, lost friends and jobs. And yet they are largely forgotten today at a moment when resistance to pointless wars should be celebrated. Instead we almost always tend to celebrate those who fight wars—win or lose—rather than those who oppose them.

It’s not just the films and TV shows we watch, but the monuments and museums we build. No wonder, as General Omar Bradley once said, that we “know more about war than we know about peace.” We tend to think of wars as occasions for heroism, and in a narrow, simple sense they can be. But a larger heroism, sorely lacking in Washington this last decade, lies in daring to think through whether a war is worth fighting at all. In looking for lessons in wars past, there’s a much deeper story to be told than that of a boy and his horse.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/untold-story-world-war-one/
The War That Didn’t End War and Its Unending Successorshttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/war-didnt-end-war-and-its-unending-successors/Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Joe Sacco,Adam Hochschild,Adam HochschildMay 3, 2011What if, from the beginning, everyone killed in the Iraq and Afghan wars had been buried in a single large cemetery easily accessible to the American public? Would it bring the fighting to a halt more quickly if we could see hundreds of thousands of tombstones, military and civilian, spreading hill after hill, field after field, across our landscape?

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The article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com.

What if, from the beginning, everyone killed in the Iraq and Afghan wars had been buried in a single large cemetery easily accessible to the American public? Would it bring the fighting to a halt more quickly if we could see hundreds of thousands of tombstones, military and civilian, spreading hill after hill, field after field, across our landscape?

I found myself thinking about this recently while visiting the narrow strip of northern France and Belgium that has the densest concentration of young men’s graves in the world. This is the old Western Front of the First World War. Today, it is the final resting place for several million soldiers. Nearly half their bodies, blown into unrecognizable fragments by some 700 million artillery and mortar shells fired here between 1914 and 1918, lie in unmarked graves; the remainder are in hundreds upon hundreds of military cemeteries, still carefully groomed and weeded, the orderly rows of headstones or crosses covering hillsides and meadows.

Stand on a hilltop in one of the sites of greatest slaughter — Ypres, the Somme, Verdun — and you can see up to half-a-dozen cemeteries, large and small, surrounding you. In just one, Tyn Cot in Belgium, there are nearly 12,000 British, Canadian, South African, Australian, New Zealander, and West Indian graves.

Every year, millions of people visit the Western Front’s cemeteries and memorials, leaving behind flowers and photographs of long-dead relatives. The plaques and monuments are often subdued and remarkably unmartial.  At least two of those memorials celebrate soldiers from both sides who emerged from the trenches and, without the permission of their top commanders, took part in the famous informal Christmas Truce of 1914, marked by soccer games in no-man’s-land.

In a curious way, the death toll of that war almost a century gone, in which more than 100,000 Americans died, has become so much more visible than the deaths in our wars today. Is that why the First World War is almost always seen, unlike our present wars, not just as tragic, but as a murderous folly that swept away part of a generation and in every way remade the world for the worse?

To Paris — or Baghdad

For the last half-dozen years, I’ve been mentally living in that 1914-1918 world, writing a book about the war that killed some 20 million people, military and civilian, and left large parts of Europe in smoldering ruins. I’ve haunted battlefields and graveyards, asked a Belgian farmer if I could step inside a wartime concrete bunker that now houses his goats, and walked through reconstructed trenches and an underground tunnel which protected Canadian troops moving their ammunition to the front line.

In government archives, I’ve looked at laconic reports by officers who survived battles in which most of their troops died; I’ve listened to recordings of veterans and talked to a man whose labor-activist grandfather was court-martialed because he wrote a letter to the Daily Mail complaining that every British officer was assigned a private servant. In a heartbreakingly beautiful tree-shaded cemetery full of British soldiers mowed down with their commanding officer (as he had predicted they would be) by a single German machine gun on the opening day of the Battle of the Somme, I found a comment in the visitors’ book: “Never Again.”

I can’t help but wonder: Where are the public places for mourning the mounting toll of today’s wars?  Where is that feeling of never again?

The eerie thing about studying the First World War is the way you can’t help but be reminded of today’s headlines. Consider, for example, how it started. High officials of the rickety Austro-Hungarian Empire, frightened by ethnic nationalism among Serbs within its borders, wanted to dismember neighboring Serbia, whose very existence as an independent state they regarded as a threat. Austro-Hungarian military commanders had even drawn up invasion plans.

When a 20-year-old ethnic Serb fired two fatal shots at Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife at Sarajevo in the summer of 1914, those commanders had the perfect excuse to put their plans into action — even though the killer was an Austro-Hungarian citizen and there was no evidence Serbia’s cabinet knew of his plot. Although the war quickly drew in many other countries, its first shots were fired by Austro-Hungarian gunboats on the Danube shelling Serbia.

The more I learned about the war’s opening, the more I thought about the U.S. invasion of Iraq. President George W. Bush and his key advisors had long hungered to dislodge Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from power. Like the archduke’s assassination, the attacks of September 11, 2001, gave them the excuse they had been waiting for — even though there was no connection whatsoever between the hijackers, mainly Saudis, and Saddam Hussein’s regime.            

Other parallels between World War I and today’s wars abound. You can see photographs from 1914 of German soldiers climbing into railway cars with “To Paris” jauntily chalked on their sides, and French soldiers boarding similar cars labeled “To Berlin.”

“You will be home,” Kaiser Wilhelm II confidently told his troops that August, “before the leaves have fallen from the trees.” Doesn’t that bring to mind Bush landing on an aircraft carrier in 2003 to declare, in front of a White House-produced banner reading “Mission Accomplished,” that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended"? A trillion dollars and tens of thousands of lives later, whatever mission there may have been remains anything but accomplished. Similarly, in Afghanistan, where Washington expected (and thought it had achieved) the most rapid and decisive of victories, the U.S. military remains mired in one of the longest wars in American history.

The Flowery Words of War

As the First World War made painfully clear, when politicians and generals lead nations into war, they almost invariably assume swift victory, and have a remarkably enduring tendency not to foresee problems that, in hindsight, seem obvious. In 1914, for instance, no country planned for the other side’s machine guns, a weapon which Europe’s colonial powers had used for decades mainly as a tool for suppressing uppity natives.

Both sides sent huge forces of cavalry to the Western Front — the Germans eight divisions with 40,000 horses. But the machine gun and barbed wire were destined to end the days of glorious cavalry charges forever. As for plans like the famous German one to defeat the French in exactly 42 days, they were full of holes. Internal combustion engines were in their infancy, and in the opening weeks of the war, 60% of the invading German army’s trucks broke down. This meant supplies had to be pulled by horse and wagon.  For those horses, not to mention all the useless cavalry chargers, the French countryside simply could not supply enough feed. Eating unripe green corn, they sickened and died by the tens of thousands, slowing the advance yet more.

Similarly, Bush and his top officials were so sure of success and of Iraqis welcoming their “liberation” that they gave remarkably little thought to what they should do once in Baghdad.  They took over a country with an enormous army, which they promptly and thoughtlessly dissolved with disastrous results. In the same way, despite a long, painfully instructive history to guide them, administration officials somehow never managed to consider that, however much most Afghans loathed the Taliban, they might come to despise foreign invaders who didn’t go home even more.

As World War I reminds us, however understandable the motives of those who enter the fight, the definition of war is “unplanned consequences.” It’s hard to fault a young Frenchman who marched off to battle in August 1914. After all, Germany had just sent millions of troops to invade France and Belgium, where they rapidly proved to be quite brutal occupiers. Wasn’t that worth resisting? Yet by the time the Germans were finally forced to surrender and withdraw four and a half years later, half of all French men aged 20 to 32 in 1914 had been killed. There were similarly horrific casualties among the other combatant nations.  The war also left 21 million wounded, many of them missing hands, arms, legs, eyes, genitals.

Was it worth it?  Of course not.  Germany’s near-starvation during the war, its humiliating defeat, and the misbegotten Treaty of Versailles virtually ensured the rise of the Nazis, along with a second, even more destructive world war, and a still more ruthless German occupation of France.

The same question has to be asked about our current war in Afghanistan. Certainly, at the start, there was an understandable motive for the war: after all, the Afghan government, unlike the one in Iraq, had sheltered the planners of the 9/11 attacks. But nearly ten years later, dozens of times more Afghan civilians are dead than were killed in the United States on that day — and more than 2,400 American, British, Canadian, German, and other allied troops as well. As for unplanned consequences, it’s now a commonplace even for figures high in our country’s establishment to point out that the Afghan and Iraq wars have created a new generation of jihadists.

If you need a final resemblance between the First World War and ours of the present moment, consider the soaring rhetoric. The cataclysm of 1914-1918 is sometimes called the first modern war which, among other things, meant that gone forever was the era when “manifest destiny” or “the white man’s burden” would be satisfactory justifications for going into battle. In an age of conscription and increasing democracy, war could only be waged — officially — for higher, less self-interested motives.

As a result, once the conflict broke out, lofty ideals filled the air: a “holy war of civilization against barbarity,” as one leading French newspaper put it; a war to stop Russia from crushing “the culture of all of Western Europe,” claimed a German paper; a war to resist “the Germanic yoke,” insisted a manifesto by Russian writers, including leftists. Kaiser Wilhelm II avowed that he was fighting for “Right, Freedom, Honor, Morality” (and in those days, they were capitalized) and against a British victory which would enthrone “the worship of gold.” For English Prime Minster Herbert Asquith, Britain was fighting not for “the advancement of its own interests, but for principles whose maintenance is vital to the civilized world.” And so it went.

So it still goes.  Today’s high-flown war rhetoric naturally cites only the most noble of goals: stopping terrorists for humanity’s sake, finding weapons of mass destruction (remember them?), spreading a “democracy agenda,” protecting women from the Taliban. But beneath the flowery words, national self-interest is as powerful as it was almost a hundred years ago.

From 1914 to 1918, nowhere was this more naked than in competition for protectorates and colonies. In Africa, for instance, Germany dreamed of establishing Mittelafrika, a grand, unbroken belt of territory stretching across the continent. And the British cabinet set up the Territorial Desiderata Committee, charged with choosing the most lucrative of the other side’s possessions to acquire in the postwar division of spoils. Near the top of the list of desiderata: the oil-rich provinces of Ottoman Turkey that, after the war, would be fatefully cobbled together into the British protectorate of Iraq.

When it comes to that territory, does anyone think that Washington would have gotten quite so righteously worked up in 2003 if, instead of massive amounts of oil, its principal export was turnips?

Someday, I have no doubt, the dead from today’s wars will be seen with a similar sense of sorrow at needless loss and folly as those millions of men who lie in the cemeteries of France and Belgium — and tens of millions of Americans will feel a similar revulsion for the politicians and generals who were so spendthrift with others’ lives.  But here’s the question that haunts me: What will it take to bring us to that point?



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/war-didnt-end-war-and-its-unending-successors/
Help for Congohttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/help-congo/Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Joe Sacco,Adam Hochschild,Adam Hochschild,Adam HochschildJun 19, 2003 News from the Ituri region of the misnamed Democratic Republic of Congo in recent weeks has been so grim as to make one want to turn the page or flip the TV channel in despair: tens of thousand]]>

News from the Ituri region of the misnamed Democratic Republic of Congo in recent weeks has been so grim as to make one want to turn the page or flip the TV channel in despair: tens of thousands of refugees in flight, ethnically based mass murder, killers jubilantly draping themselves in the entrails of their victims, animals eating dead bodies in the streets, 10- and 11-year-old child soldiers bearing AK-47s and hand grenades. Such horrors are but the latest in a civil war whose death toll, in less than five years, is estimated by the International Rescue Committee to be at least 3.3 million. This is the greatest such bloodshed anywhere on earth since the end of World War II. There is no end in sight.

The conflict’s origins are many. A hundred years ago, under King Leopold II of Belgium, Congo was the scene of one of the most brutal chapters in the European colonization of Africa. The king’s private colony–and to a lesser extent the early Belgian Congo that succeeded it–was based on a draconian system of forced labor that over a forty-year period slashed the territory’s population roughly in half, an estimated drop of about 10 million people. But colonialism can’t be blamed for everything. The formation of a modern nation-state is a slow, complicated business, which in most of Western Europe was accompanied by much war and violence and took several centuries. To survive in the modern world, Africa doesn’t have those centuries to spend.

One trigger for Congo’s current war came in 1994, when the world did nothing to stop the Rwanda genocide. When the Hutu regime that carried out those killings was overthrown, its leaders and roughly a million other Hutu fled next door to Congo. Angry at continuing attacks mounted from there, the army of the new government in Rwanda occupied part of northeastern Congo.

Seeing the huge, mineral-rich country’s sclerotic, corrupt, US-backed Mobutu regime collapse in 1997, nearby African nations quickly joined in dividing the spoils. At various points the armies of seven of them have had troops on Congo’s soil. They have formed an ever-changing web of alliances with local warlords and militias, and with the many foreign corporations–American, South African, European–eager to buy Congo’s diamonds, gold, timber, copper, cobalt and columbium-tantalum, or coltan. Coltan, which at times has rivaled gold in price per ounce, is used in chips in cell phones and computers; eastern Congo has more than half the world’s supply.

This vast wealth in the ground and the lack of a functioning central government have been a catastrophic combination. When there is no money in the public treasury, armies become self-financing networks of miners and smugglers. When there are few schools, they can easily recruit children. When there are few jobs, control of precious minerals becomes the source of all money.

So, what is to be done? Peace won’t come easily to Congo, but three things would help:

(1) The current expansion of the minuscule and hamstrung United Nations peacekeeping force now in the country is a step in the right direction, although tragically belated and inadequate. There is an opportunity here for the UN to at last prove that it can be a power for peace in Africa, after shamefully caving in–under US and British pressure–and allowing the Rwanda genocide to happen. Enough troops to provide security for all of Congo, which is as big as the United States east of the Mississippi but has no working road or rail network, is too much to hope for. But a UN force at least several times the size of the 10,800-soldier contingent that UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has proposed could begin to halt the terrible bloodshed in the northeastern corner of the country, where the most carnage has taken place. Its length of service should be seen as a matter of years, and its mission should be drastically toughened to include, for instance, disarming the rival militias–for which there is no mandate now.

The European Union and Canada and various other countries are contributing small numbers of troops. The United States is not, although it voted in the Security Council for the expansion of the UN presence. Besides its small size, however, two things threaten to sap the effectiveness of that force. One is that it is led by France, and Bush is still enraged over French opposition to his conquest of Iraq. The other problem is that Congo’s immense bloodletting does not threaten to spill over into the United States and Europe, nor does it threaten to cut off the export of strategic minerals. In such circumstances, will the leaders of countries contributing troops be willing to tolerate having their soldiers killed and wounded? The real test of the UN as a peacekeeping power is in a situation like this, where there is not yet a peace to keep.

(2) Anarchic civil wars like those in Congo are fueled by lucrative minerals. Recognizing how diamonds have helped drive the conflicts in Angola, Liberia and Sierra Leone, more than fifty nations recently agreed to cease trading in “conflict diamonds.” Remarkably, given its scorn for most international agreements, the United States is a signer. It remains to be seen how much the agreement will be followed. But a recent World Bank study suggests that if conflict diamonds can be outlawed, why not conflict gold and conflict coltan? If stringently enforced, such pacts could begin to slash the funding for the warlords who have ravaged so much of Congo.

(3) Finally, we must stop arming Africa. The United States and France, the two leading neocolonial powers on the continent, have been the worst offenders here. During the 1990s alone, the United States gave more than $200 million worth of equipment and military training to African armies, including six of the seven that have had troops involved in Congo’s civil war. This is the modern version of what happened hundreds of years ago, when American and European ship captains used muskets and ammunition as one of the currencies for purchasing slaves from African dealers. This senseless, destructive flow of arms into the continent fueled a brutal commerce in human beings then, and it fuels a brutal commerce in conflict minerals today. It’s time to call a halt.



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