II.
Pietism and Prohibition
One
of the few important omissions in Professor Higgs's book is the crucial role of
postmillennial pietist Protestantism in the drive toward statism in the United
States. Dominant in the "Yankee" areas of the North from the 1830s
on, the aggressive "evangelical" form of pietism conquered Southern
Protestantism by the 1890s and played a crucial role in progressivism after the
turn of the century and through World War I. Evangelical pietism held that
requisite to any man's salvation is that he do his best to see to it that
everyone else is saved, and doing one's best inevitably meant that the State
must become a crucial instrument in maximizing people's chances for salvation.
In particular, the State plays a pivotal role in stamping out sin, and in
"making America holy."
To the pietists, sin was very broadly defined as any force that might cloud men's minds so that they could not exercise their theological free will to achieve salvation. Of particular importance were slavery (until the Civil War), Demon Rum, and the Roman Catholic Church, headed by the Antichrist in Rome. For decades after the Civil War, "rebellion" took the place of slavery in the pietist charges against their great political enemy, the Democratic party.[7] Then in 1896, with the evangelical conversion of Southern Protestantism and the admission to the Union of the sparsely populated and pietist Mountain states, William Jennings Bryan was able to put together a coalition that transformed the Democrats into a pietist party and ended forever that party's once proud role as the champion of "liturgical" (Catholic and High German Lutheran) Christianity and of personal liberty and laissez faire.[8][9]
The
pietists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were all
postmillennialist: They believed that the Second Advent of Christ will occur
only after the millennium – a thousand years of the establishment of the
Kingdom of God on earth – has been brought about by human effort.
Postmillennialists have therefore tended to be statists, with the State
becoming an important instrument of stamping out sin and Christianizing the
social order so as to speed Jesus' return.[10]
Professor
Timberlake neatly sums up this politico-religious conflict:
Unlike those extremist
and apocalyptic sects that rejected and withdrew from the world as hopelessly
corrupt, and unlike the more conservative churches, such as the Roman Catholic,
Protestant Episcopal, and Lutheran, that tended to assume a more relaxed
attitude toward the influence of religion in culture, evangelical Protestantism
sought to overcome the corruption of the world in a dynamic manner, not only by
converting men to belief in Christ but also by Christianizing the social order
through the power and force of law. According to this view, the Christian's
duty was to use the secular power of the state to transform culture so that the
community of the faithful might be kept pure and the work of saving the
unregenerate might be made easier. Thus the function of law was not simply to
restrain evil but to educate and uplift.[11]
Both prohibition and progressive reform were pietistic, and as both movements expanded after 1900 they became increasingly intertwined. The Prohibition Party, once confined – at least in its platform – to a single issue, became increasingly and frankly progressive after 1904. The Anti-Saloon League, the major vehicle for prohibitionist agitation after 1900, was also markedly devoted to progressive reform. Thus at the League's annual convention in 1905, Rev. Howard H. Russell rejoiced in the growing movement for progressive reform and particularly hailed Theodore Roosevelt, as that "leader of heroic mould, of absolute honesty of character and purity of life, that foremost man of this world…."[12] At the Anti-Saloon League's convention of 1909, Rev. Purley A. Baker lauded the labor union movement as a holy crusade for justice and a square deal. The League's 1915 convention, which attracted 10,000 people, was noted for the same blend of statism, social service, and combative Christianity that had marked the national convention of the Progressive Party in 1912.[13] And at the League's June 1916 convention, Bishop Luther B. Wilson stated, without contradiction, that everyone present would undoubtedly hail the progressive reforms then being proposed.
During
the Progressive years, the Social Gospel became part of the mainstream of
pietist Protestantism. Most of the evangelical churches created commissions on
social service to promulgate the Social Gospel, and virtually all of the
denominations adopted the Social Creed drawn up in 1912 by the Commission of
the Church and Social Service of the Federal Council of Churches. The creed
called for the abolition of child labor, the regulation of female labor, the
right of labor to organize (i.e., compulsory collective bargaining), the
elimination of poverty, and an "equitable" division of the national
product. And right up there as a matter of social concern was the liquor
problem. The creed maintained that liquor was a grave hindrance toward the
establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth, and it advocated the
"protection of the individual and society from the social, economic, and
moral waste of the liquor traffic.[14]
The
Social Gospel leaders were fervent advocates of statism and of prohibition.
These included Rev. Walter Rauschenbusch and Rev. Charles Stelzle, whose tract Why
Prohibition! (1918) was distributed, after the United States' entry into
World War I, by the Commission on Temperance of the Federal Council of Churches
to labor leaders, members of Congress, and important government officials. A
particularly important Social Gospel leader was Rev. Josiah Strong, whose
monthly journal, The Gospel of the Kingdom, was published by Strong's
American Institute of Social Service. In an article supporting prohibition in
the July 1914 issue, The Gospel of the Kingdom hailed the progressive spirit
that was at last putting an end to "personal liberty":
"Personal Liberty"
is at last an uncrowned, dethroned king, with no one to do him reverence. The
social consciousness is so far developed. and is becoming so autocratic, that
institutions and governments must give heed to its mandate and share their life
accordingly. We are no longer frightened by that ancient bogy –
"paternalism in government." We affirm boldly, it is the business of
government to be just that – Paternal. Nothing human can be foreign to a
true government.[15]
As true crusaders, the pietists were not content to stop with the stamping out of sin in the United States alone. If American pietism was convinced that Americans were God's chosen people, destined to establish a Kingdom of God within the United States, surely the pietists' religious and moral duty could not stop there. In a sense, the world was America's oyster. As Professor Timberlake put it, once the Kingdom of God was in the course of being established in the United States, "it was therefore America's mission to spread these ideals and institutions abroad so that the Kingdom could be established throughout the world. American Protestants were accordingly not content merely to work for the kingdom of God in America, but felt compelled to assist in the reformation of the rest of the world also."[16]
American
entry into World War I provided the fulfillment of prohibitionist dreams. In
the first place, all food production was placed under the control of Herbert
Hoover, Food Administration czar. But if the US government was to control and
allocate food resources, shall it permit the precious scarce supply of grain to
be siphoned off into the "waste," if not the sin, of the manufacture
of liquor? Even though less than two percent of American cereal production went
into the manufacture of alcohol, think of the starving children of the world
who might otherwise be fed. As the progressive weekly The Independent
demagogically phrased it. "Shall the many have food, or the few have
drink?" For the ostensible purpose of "conserving" grain,
Congress wrote an amendment into the Lever Food and Fuel Control Act of August
10, 1917, that absolutely prohibited the use of foodstuffs, hence grain, in the
production of alcohol. Congress would have added a prohibition on the
manufacture of wine or beer, but President Wilson persuaded the Anti-Saloon
League that he could accomplish the same goal more slowly and thereby avoid a
delaying filibuster by the wets in Congress. However, Herbert Hoover, a
progressive and a prohibitionist, persuaded Wilson to issue an order, on
December 8, both greatly reducing the alcoholic content of beer and limiting
the amount of foodstuffs that could be used in its manufacture.[17]
The
prohibitionists were able to use the Lever Act and war patriotism to good
effect. Thus, Mrs. W. E. Lindsey, wife of the governor of New Mexico, delivered
a speech in November 1917 that noted the Lever Act, and declared:
Aside from the long
list of awful tragedies following in the wake of the liquor traffic, the
economic waste is too great to be tolerated at this time. With so many people
of the allied nations near to the door of starvation, it would be criminal
ingratitude for us to continue the manufacture of whiskey.[18]
Another rationale for prohibition during the war was the alleged necessity to protect American soldiers from the dangers of alcohol to their health, their morals, and their immortal souls. As a result, in the Selective Service Act of May 18, 1917, Congress provided that dry zones must be established around every army base, and it was made illegal to sell or even to give liquor to any member of the military establishment within those zones, even in one's private home. Any inebriated servicemen were subject to courts-martial.
But
the most severe thrust toward national prohibition was the Anti-Saloon League's
proposed eighteenth constitutional amendment, outlawing the manufacture, sale,
transportation, import or export of all intoxicating liquors. It was passed by
Congress and submitted to the states at the end of December 1917. Wet arguments
that prohibition would prove unenforceable were met with the usual dry appeal
to high principle: Should laws against murder and robbery be repealed simply
because they cannot be completely enforced? And arguments that private property
would be unjustly confiscated were also brushed aside with the contention that
property injurious to the health, morals, and safety of the people had always
been subject to confiscation without compensation.
When
the Lever Act made a distinction between hard liquor (forbidden) and beer and
wine (limited), the brewing industry tried to save their skins by cutting
themselves loose from the taint of distilled spirits. "The true
relationship with beer," insisted the United States Brewers Association,
"is with light wines and soft drinks-not with hard liquors." The
brewers affirmed their desire to "sever, once for all, the shackles that
bound our wholesome productions to ardent spirits." But this craven
attitude would do the brewers no good. After all, one of the major objectives
of the drys was to smash the brewers, once and for all, they whose product was
the very embodiment of the drinking habits of the hated German-American masses,
both Catholic and Lutheran, liturgicals and beer drinkers all. German-Americans
were now fair game. Were they not all agents of the satanic Kaiser, bent on
conquering the world? Were they not conscious agents of the dreaded Hun Kultur,
out to destroy American civilization? And were not most brewers German?
And
so the Anti-Saloon League thundered that "German brewers in this country
have rendered thousands of men inefficient and are thus crippling the Republic
in its war on Prussian militarism." Apparently, the Anti-Saloon League took
no heed of the work of German brewers in Germany, who were presumably
performing the estimable service of rendering "Prussian militarism"
helpless. The brewers were accused of being pro-German, and of subsidizing the
press (apparently it was all right to be pro-English or to subsidize the press
if one were not a brewer). The acme of the accusations came from one
prohibitionist: "We have German enemies," he warned, "in this
country too. And the worst of all our German enemies, the most treacherous, the
most menacing are Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz, and Miller."[19]
In
this sort of atmosphere, the brewers didn't have a chance, and the Eighteenth
Amendment went to the states, outlawing all forms of liquor. Since twenty-seven
states had already outlawed liquor, this meant that only nine more were needed
to ratify this remarkable amendment, which directly involved the federal
constitution in what had always been, at most, a matter of police power of the
states. The thirty-sixth state ratified the Eighteenth Amendment on January 16,
1919, and by the end of February all but three states (New Jersey, Rhode
Island, and Connecticut) had made liquor unconstitutional as well as illegal.
Technically, the amendment went into force the following January, but Congress
speeded matters up by passing the War Prohibition Act of November 11, 1918,
which banned the manufacture of beer and wine after the following May and
outlawed the sale of all intoxicating beverages after June 30, 1919, a ban to
continue in effect until the end of demobilization. Thus total national
prohibition really began on July 1, 1919, with the Eighteenth Amendment taking
over six months later. The constitutional amendment needed a congressional
enforcing act, which Congress supplied with the Volstead (or National
Prohibition) Act, passed over Wilson's veto at the end of October 1919.
With
the battle against Demon Rum won at home, the restless advocates of pietist
prohibitionism looked for new lands to conquer. Today America, tomorrow the
world. In June 1919 the triumphant Anti-Saloon League called an international
prohibition conference in Washington and created a World League Against
Alcoholism. World prohibition, after all, was needed to finish the job of
making the world safe for democracy. The prohibitionists' goals were fervently
expressed by Rev. A.C. Bane at the Anti-Saloon League's 1917 convention, when
victory in America was already in sight. To a wildly cheering throng, Bane
thundered:
America will "go
over the top" in humanity's greatest battle [against liquor] and plant the
victorious white standard of Prohibition upon the nation's loftiest eminence.
Then catching sight of the beckoning hand of our sister nations across the sea,
struggling with the same age-long foe, we will go forth with the spirit of the
missionary and the crusader to help drive the demon of drink from all
civilization. With America leading the way, with faith in Omnipotent God, and
bearing with patriotic hands our stainless flag, the emblem of civic purity, we
will soon bestow upon mankind the priceless gift of World Prohibition.[20]
Fortunately,
the prohibitionists found the reluctant world a tougher nut to crack.
III. Women at War and at the Polls
Another
direct outgrowth of World War I, coming in tandem with prohibition but lasting
more permanently, was the Nineteenth Amendment, submitted by Congress in 1919
and ratified by the following year, which allowed women to vote. Women's
suffrage had long been a movement directly allied with prohibition. Desperate
to combat a demographic trend that seemed to be going against them, the
evangelical pietists called for women's suffrage (and enacted it in many
Western states). They did so because they knew that while pietist women were
socially and politically active, ethnic or liturgical women tended to be
culturally bound to hearth and home and therefore far less likely to vote.
Hence,
women's suffrage would greatly increase pietist voting power. In 1869 the Prohibitionist
Party became the first party to endorse women's suffrage, which it continued to
do. The Progressive Party was equally enthusiastic about female suffrage; it
was the first major national party to permit women delegates at its
conventions. A leading women's suffrage organization was the Women's Christian
Temperance Union, which reached an enormous membership of 300,000 by 1900. And
three successive presidents of the major women's suffrage group, the National
American Woman Suffrage Association – Susan B. Anthony, Mrs. Carrie Chapman
Catt, and Dr. Anna Howard Shaw – all began their activist careers as
prohibitionists. Susan B. Anthony put the issue clearly:
There is an enemy of
the homes of this nation and that enemy is drunkenness. Everyone connected with
the gambling house, the brothel and the saloon works and votes solidly against
the enfranchisement of women, and, I say, if you believe in chastity, if you
believe in honesty and integrity, then take the necessary steps to put the
ballot in the hands of women.[21]
For its part, the German-American Alliance of Nebraska sent out an appeal during the unsuccessful referendum in November 1914 on women suffrage. Written in German, the appeal declared, "Our German women do not want the right to vote, and since our opponents desire the right of suffrage mainly for the purpose of saddling the yoke of prohibition on our necks, we should oppose it with all our might…."[22]
America's
entry into World War I provided the impetus for overcoming the substantial
opposition to woman suffrage, as a corollary to the success of prohibition and
as a reward for the vigorous activity by organized women in behalf of the war
effort. To close the loop, much of that activity consisted in stamping out vice
and alcohol as well as instilling "patriotic" education into the
minds of often suspect immigrant groups.
Shortly
after the US declaration of war, the Council of National Defense created an
Advisory Committee on Women's Defense Work, known as the Woman's Committee. The
purpose of the committee, writes a celebratory contemporary account, was
"to coordinate the activities and the resources of the organized and
unorganized women of the country, that their power may be immediately utilized
in time of need, and to supply a new and direct channel of cooperation between
women and governmental department."[23] Chairman
of the Woman's Committee, working energetically and full time, was the former
president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Dr. Anna Howard
Shaw, and another leading member was the suffrage group's current chairman and
an equally prominent suffragette, Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt.
The
Woman's Committee promptly set up organizations in cities and states across the
country, and on June 19, 1917 convened a conference of over fifty national
women's organizations to coordinate their efforts. It was at this conference
that "the first definite task was imposed upon American women" by the
indefatigable Food Czar, Herbert Hoover.[24] Hoover enlisted the cooperation of the
nation's women in his ambitious campaign for controlling, restricting, and
cartelizing the food industry in the name of "conservation" and elimination
of "waste." Celebrating this coming together of women was one of the
Woman's Committee members, the Progressive writer and muckraker Mrs. Ida M.
Tarbell. Mrs. Tarbell lauded the "growing consciousness everywhere that
this great enterprise for democracy which we are launching [the US entry into
the war] is a national affair, and if an individual or a society is going to do
its bit it must act with and under the government at Washington."
"Nothing else," Mrs. Tarbell gushed, "can explain the action of
the women of the country in coming together as they are doing today under one
centralized direction."[25]
Mrs.
Tarbell's enthusiasm might have been heightened by the fact that she was one of
the directing rather than the directed. Herbert Hoover came to the women's
conference with the proposal that each of the women sign and distribute a
"food pledge card" on behalf of food conservation. While support for
the food pledge among the public was narrower than anticipated, educational
efforts to promote the pledge became the basis of the remainder of the women's
conservation campaign. The Woman's Committee appointed Mrs. Tarbell as chairman
of its committee on Food Administration, and she not only tirelessly organized
the campaign but also wrote many letters and newspaper and magazine articles on
its behalf.
In
addition to food control, another important and immediate function of the
Woman's Committee was to attempt to register every woman in the country for
possible volunteer or paid work in support of the war effort. Every woman aged
sixteen or over was asked to sign and submit a registration card with all
pertinent information, including training, experience, and the sort of work
desired. In that way the government would know the whereabouts and training of
every woman, and government and women could then serve each other best. In many
states, especially Ohio and Illinois, state governments set up schools to train
the registrars. And even though the Woman's Committee kept insisting that the
registration was completely voluntary, the state of Louisiana, as Ida Clarke
puts it, developed a "novel and clever" idea to facilitate the
program: women's registration was made compulsory.
Louisiana's
Governor Ruftin G. Pleasant decreed October 17, 1917 compulsory registration
day, and a host of state officials collaborated in its operation. The State
Food Commission made sure that food pledges were also signed by all, and the
State School Board granted a holiday on October 17 so that teachers could
assist in the compulsory registration, especially in the rural districts. Six
thousand women were officially commissioned by the state of Louisiana to
conduct the registration, and they worked in tandem with state Food
Conservation officials and parish Demonstration Agents. In the French areas of
the state, the Catholic priests rendered valuable aid in personally appealing
to all their female parishioners to perform their registration duties.
Handbills were circulated in French, house-to-house canvasses were made, and
speeches urging registration were made by women activists in movie theaters,
schools, churches, and courthouses. We are informed that all responses were
eager and cordial; there is no mention of any resistance. We are also advised
that "even the negroes were quite alive to the situation, meeting
sometimes with the white people and sometimes at the call of their own pastors."[26]
Also
helping out in women's registration and food control was another, smaller, but
slightly more sinister women's organization that had been launched by Congress
as a sort of prewar wartime group at a large Congress for Constructive
Patriotism, held in Washington, D.C. in late January 1917. This was the
National League for Woman's Service (NLWS), which established a nationwide
organization later overshadowed and overlapped by the larger Woman's Committee.
The difference was that the NLWS was set up on quite frankly military lines.
Each local working unit was called a "detachment" under a
"detachment commander," district-wide and state-wide detachments met
in annual "encampments," and every woman member was to wear a uniform
with an organization badge and insignia. In particular, "the basis of
training for all detachments is standardized, physical drill."[27]
A
vital part of the Woman's Committee work was engaging in "patriotic
education." The government and the Woman's Committee recognized that immigrant
ethnic women were most in need of such vital instruction, and so it set up a
committee on education, headed by the energetic Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt. Mrs.
Catt stated the problem well to the Woman's Committee: Millions of people in
the United States were unclear on why we were at war, and why, as Ida Clarke
paraphrases Mrs. Can, there is "the imperative necessity of winning the
war if future generations were to be protected from the menace of an
unscrupulous militarism."[28] Presumably US militarism, being
"scrupulous," posed no problem.
A
vital part of the Woman's Committee work was engaging in "patriotic
education." The government and the Woman's Committee recognized that
immigrant ethnic women were most in need of such vital instruction, and so it
set up a committee on education, headed by the energetic Mrs. Carrie Chapman
Catt. Mrs. Catt stated the problem well to the Woman's Committee: Millions of
people in the United States were unclear on why we were at war, and why, as Ida
Clarke paraphrases Mrs. Can, there is "the imperative necessity of winning
the war if future generations were to be protected from the menace of an
unscrupulous militarism."[28] Presumably US militarism, being
"scrupulous," posed no problem.
Apathy
and ignorance abounded, Mrs. Catt went on, and she proposed to mobilize twenty
million American women, the "greatest sentiment makers of any
community," to begin a "vast educational movement" to get the
women "fervently enlisted to push the war to victory as rapidly as
possible." As Mrs. Catt continued, however, the clarity of war aims she
called for really amounted to pointing out that we were in the war
"whether the nation likes it or does not like it," and that therefore
the "sacrifices" needed to win the war "willingly or unwillingly
must be made." These statements are reminiscent of arguments supporting
recent military actions by Ronald Reagan ("He had to do what he had to
do"). In the end, Mrs. Catt could come up with only one reasoned argument
for the war, apart from this alleged necessity, that it must be won to make it
"the war to end war."[29]
The
"patriotic education" campaign of the organized women was largely to
"Americanize" immigrant women by energetically persuading them (a) to
become naturalized American citizens and (b) to learn "Mother
English." In the campaign, dubbed "America First," national
unity was promoted through getting immigrants to learn English and trying to
get female immigrants into afternoon or evening English classes. The organized
patriot women were also worried about preserving the family structure of the
immigrants. If the children learn English and their parents remain ignorant,
children will scorn their elders, "parental discipline and control are
dissipated, and the whole family fabric becomes weakened. Thus one of the great
conservative forces in the community becomes inoperative." To preserve
"maternal control of the young," then, "Americanization of the
foreign women through language becomes imperative." In Erie, Pennsylvania,
women's clubs appointed "Block Matrons," whose job it was to get to
know the foreign families of the neighborhood and to back up school authorities
in urging the immigrants to learn English, and who, in the rather naïve words
of Ida Clarke, "become neighbors, friends, and veritable mother confessors
to the foreign women of the block." One would like to have heard some
comments from recipients of the attentions of the Block Matrons.
All
in all, as a result of the Americanization campaign, Ida Clarke concludes,
"the organized women of this country can play an important part in making
ours a country with a common language, a common purpose, a common set of ideals
– a unified America."[30]
Neither
did the government and its organized women neglect progressive economic
reforms. At the organizing June 1917 conference of the Woman's Committee, Mrs.
Carrie Catt emphasized that the greatest problem of the war was to assure that
women receive "equal pay for equal work." The conference suggested
that vigilance committees be established to guard against the violation of
"ethical laws" governing labor and also that all laws restricting
("protecting") the labor of women and children be rigorously
enforced. Apparently, there were some values to which maximizing production for
the war effort had to take second place.
Mrs.
Margaret Dreier Robins, president of the National Women's Trade Union's League,
hailed the fact that the Woman's Committee was organizing committees in every
state to protect minimum standards for women and children's labor in industry and
demanded minimum wages and shorter hours for women. Mrs. Robins particularly
warned that "not only are unorganized women workers in vast numbers used
as underbidders in the labor market for lowering industrial standards, but they
are related to those groups in industrial centers of our country that are least
Americanized and most alien to our institutions and ideals." And so
"Americanization" and cartelization of female labor went hand in
hand.[31][32]
IV. Saving Our Boys from Alcohol and Vice
One
of organized womanhood's major contributions to the war effort was to
collaborate in an attempt to save American soldiers from vice and Demon Rum. In
addition to establishing rigorous dry zones around every military camp in the
United States, the Selective Service Act of May 1917 also outlawed prostitution
in wide zones around the military camps. To enforce these provisions, the War
Department had ready at hand a Commission on Training Camp Activities, an
agency soon imitated by the Department of the Navy. Both commissions were
headed by a man tailor-made for the job, the progressive New York
settlement-house worker, municipal political reformer, and former student and
disciple of Woodrow Wilson, Raymond Blaine Fosdick.
Fosdick's
background, life, and career were paradigmatic for progressive intellectuals
and activists of that era. Fosdick's ancestors were Yankees from Massachusetts
and Connecticut, and his great-grandfather pioneered westward in a covered
wagon to become a frontier farmer in the heart of the Burned-Over District of
transplanted Yankees, Buffalo, New York. Fosdick's grandfather, a pietist lay
preacher born again in a Baptist revival, was a prohibitionist who married a
preacher's daughter and became a lifelong public school teacher in Buffalo.
Grandfather Fosdick rose to become Superintendent of Education in Buffalo and a
battler for an expanded and strengthened public school system. Fosdick's
immediate ancestry continued in the same vein. His father was a public school
teacher in Buffalo who rose to become principal of a high school. His mother
was deeply pietist and a staunch advocate of prohibition and women's suffrage.
Fosdick's father was a devout pietist Protestant and a "fanatical"
Republican who gave his son Raymond the middle name of his hero, the veteran
Maine Republican James G. Blaine. The three Fosdick children, elder brother
Harry Emerson, Raymond, and Raymond's twin sister, Edith, on emerging from this
atmosphere, all forged lifetime careers of pietism and social service.
While
active in New York reform administration, Fosdick made a fateful friendship. In
1910, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., like his father a pietist Baptist, was chairman
of a special grand jury to investigate and to try to stamp out prostitution in
New York City. For Rockefeller, the elimination of prostitution was to become
an ardent and lifelong crusade. He believed that sin, such as prostitution,
must be criminated, quarantined, and driven underground through rigorous
suppression.
In
1911, Rockefeller began his crusade by setting up the Bureau of Social Hygiene,
into which he poured $5 million in the next quarter century. Two years later he
enlisted Fosdick, already a speaker at the annual dinner of Rockefeller's
Baptist Bible class, to study police systems in Europe in conjunction with
activities to end the great "social vice." Surveying American police
after his stint in Europe at Rockefeller's behest, Fosdick was appalled that
police work in the United States was not considered a "science" and
that it was subject to "sordid" political influences.[33]
At
that point, the new Secretary of War, the progressive former mayor of Cleveland
Newton D. Baker, became disturbed at reports that areas near the army camps in
Texas on the Mexican border, where troops were mobilized to combat the Mexican
revolutionary Pancho Villa, were honeycombed with saloons and prostitution.
Sent by Baker on a fact-finding tour in the summer of 1916, scoffed at by tough
army officers as the "Reverend," Fosdick was horrified to find
saloons and brothels seemingly everywhere in the vicinity of the military
camps. He reported his consternation to Baker, and, at Fosdick's suggestion,
Baker cracked down on the army commanders and their lax attitude toward alcohol
and vice. But Fosdick was beginning to get the glimmer of another idea.
Couldn't the suppression of the bad be accompanied by a positive encouragement
of the good, of wholesome recreational alternatives to sin and liquor that our
boys could enjoy? When war was declared, Baker quickly appointed Fosdick to be
chairman of the Commission on Training Camp Activities.
Armed
with the coercive resources of the federal government and rapidly building his
bureaucratic empire from merely one secretary to a staff of thousands, Raymond
Fosdick set out with determination on his twofold task: stamping out alcohol
and sin in and around every military camp, and filling the void for American
soldiers and sailors by providing them with wholesome recreation. As head of
the Law Enforcement Division of the Training Camp Commission, Fosdick Bascom
Johnson, attorney for the American Social Hygiene Association.[34] Johnson
was commissioned a major, and his staff of forty aggressive attorneys became
second lieutenants.
Employing
the argument of health and military necessity, Fosdick set up a Social Hygiene
Division of his commission, which promulgated the slogan "Fit to
Fight." Using a mixture of force and threats to remove federal troops from
the bases if recalcitrant cities did not comply, Fosdick managed to bludgeon
his way into suppressing, if not prostitution in general, then at least every
major red light district in the country. In doing so, Fosdick and Baker,
employing local police and the federal Military Police, far exceeded their
legal authority. The law authorized the president to shut down every red light
district in a five-mile zone around each military camp or base. Of the 110 red
light districts shut down by military force, however, only 35 were included in
the prohibited zone. Suppression of the other 75 was an illegal extension of
the law. Nevertheless, Fosdick was triumphant: "Through the efforts of
this Commission [on Training Camp Activities] the red light district has
practically ceased to be a feature of American city life."[35] The
result of this permanent destruction of the red light district, of course, was
to drive prostitution onto the streets, where consumers would be deprived of
the protection of either an open market or of regulation.
In
some cases, the federal anti-vice crusade met considerable resistance.
Secretary of Navy Josephus Daniels, a progressive from North Carolina, had to call
out the marines to patrol the streets of resistant Philadelphia, and naval
troops, over the strenuous objections of the mayor, were used to crush the
fabled red light district of Storyville, in New Orleans, in November 1917.[36]
In
its hubris, the US Army decided to extend its anti-vice crusade to foreign
shores. General John J. Pershing issued an official bulletin to members of the
American Expeditionary Force in France urging that "sexual continence is
the plain duty of members of the A.E.F., both for the vigorous conduct of the
war, and for the clean health of the American people after the war."
Pershing and the American military tried to close all the French brothels in
areas where American troops were located, but the move was unsuccessful because
the French objected bitterly. Premier Georges Clemenceau pointed out that the
result of the "total prohibition of regulated prostitution in the vicinity
of American troops" was only to increase "venereal diseases among the
civilian population of the neighborhood." Finally, the United States had
to rest content with declaring French civilian areas off limits to the troops.[37]
The
more positive part of Raymond Fosdick's task during the war was supplying the soldiers
and sailors with a constructive substitute for sin and alcohol, "healthful
amusements and wholesome company." As might be expected, the Woman's
Committee and organized womanhood collaborated enthusiastically. They followed
the injunction of Secretary of War Baker that the government "cannot allow
these young men to be surrounded by a vicious and demoralizing environment, nor
can we leave anything undone which will protect them from unhealthy influences
and crude forms of temptation." The Woman's Committee found, however, that
in the great undertaking of safeguarding the health and morals of our boys,
their most challenging problem proved to be guarding the morals of their
mobilized young girls. For unfortunately, "where soldiers are stationed
the problem of preventing girls from being misled by the glamour and romance of
war and beguiling uniforms looms large.'' Fortunately, perhaps, the Maryland
Committee proposed the establishment of a "Patriotic League of Honor which
will inspire girls to adopt the highest standards of womanliness and loyalty to
their country."[38]
No
group was more delighted with the achievements of Fosdick and his Military
Training Camp Commission than the burgeoning profession of social work.
Surrounded by handpicked aides from the Playground and Recreation Association
and the Russell Sage Foundation, Fosdick and the others "in effect tried
to create a massive settlement house around each camp. No army had ever seen
anything like it before, but it was an outgrowth of the recreation and
community organization movement, and a victory for those who had been arguing
for the creative use of leisure time."[39] The social work profession pronounced the
program an enormous success. The influential Survey magazine summed up
the result as "the most stupendous piece of social work in modern
times."[40]
Social
workers were also exultant about prohibition. In 1917, the National Conference
of Charities and Corrections (which changed its name around the same time to
the National Conference of Social Work) was emboldened to drop whatever
value-free pose it might have had and come out squarely for prohibition. On
returning from Russia in 1917, Edward T. Devine of the Charity Organization
Society of New York exclaimed that "the social revolution which followed
the prohibition of vodka was more profoundly important than the political
revolution which abolished autocracy." And Robert A. Woods of Boston, the
Grand Old Man of the settlement house movement and a veteran advocate of
prohibition, predicted in 1919 that the Eighteenth Amendment, "one of the
greatest and best events in history," would reduce poverty, wipe out
prostitution and crime, and liberate "vast suppressed human
potentialities."[41]
Woods,
president of the National Conference of Social Work during 1917–18, had long
denounced alcohol as "an abominable evil." A postmillennial pietist,
he believed in "Christian statesmanship" that would, in a
"propaganda of the deed," Christianize the social order in a corporate,
communal route to the glorification of God. Like many pietists, Woods cared not
for creeds or dogmas but only for advancing Christianity in a communal way;
though an active Episcopalian, his "parish" was the community at
large. In his settlement work, Woods had long favored the isolation or
segregation of the "unfit," in particular "the tramp, the
drunkard, the pauper, the imbecile," with the settlement house as the
nucleus of this reform. Woods was particularly eager to isolate and punish the
drunkard and the tramp. "Inveterate drunkards" were to receive
increasing levels of "punishment," with ever-lengthier jail terms.
The "tramp evil" was to be gotten rid of by rounding up and jailing
vagrants, who would be placed in tramp workhouses and put to forced labor.
For
Woods the world war was a momentous event. It had advanced the process of
"Americanization," a "great humanizing process through which all
loyalties, all beliefs must be wrought together in a better order."[42] The war had wonderfully released the
energies of the American people. Now, however, it was important to carry the
wartime momentum into the postwar world. Lauding the war collectivist society
during the spring of 1918, Robert Woods asked the crucial question, "Why
should it not always be so? Why not continue in the years of peace this close,
vast, wholesome organism of service, of fellowship, of constructive creative
power?"[43]
V. The New Republic Collectivists
The
New Republic magazine, founded in 1914 as the leading intellectual organ
of progressivism, was a living embodiment of the burgeoning alliance between
big-business interests, in particular the House of Morgan, and the growing
legion of collectivist intellectuals. Founder and publisher of the New
Republic was Willard W. Straight, partner of J.P. Morgan & Co., and its
financier was Straight's wife, the heiress Dorothy Whitney. Major editor of the
influential new weekly was the veteran collectivist and theoretician of Teddy
Roosevelt's New Nationalism, Herbert David Croly. Croly's two coeditors were
Walter Edward Weyl, another theoretician of the New Nationalism, and the young,
ambitious former official of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, the future
pundit Walter Lippmann. As Woodrow Wilson began to take America into World War I,
the New Republic, though originally Rooseveltian, became an enthusiastic
supporter of the war, and a virtual spokesman for the Wilson war effort, the
wartime collectivist economy, and the new society molded by the war.
On
the higher levels of ratiocination, unquestionably the leading progressive
intellectual, before, during, and after World War I, was the champion of
pragmatism, Professor John Dewey of Columbia University. Dewey wrote frequently
for the New Republic in this period and was clearly its leading
theoretician. A Yankee born in 1859, Dewey was, as Mencken put it, "of
indestructible Vermont stock and a man of the highest bearable sobriety."
John Dewey was the son of a small town Vermont grocer.[44] Although he was a pragmatist and a
secular humanist most of his life, it is not as well known that Dewey, in the
years before 1900, was a postmillennial pietist, seeking the gradual
development of a Christianized social order and Kingdom of God on earth via the
expansion of science, community, and the State. During the 1890s, Dewey, as
professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, expounded his vision of
postmillennial pietism in a series of lectures before the Students' Christian
Association. Dewey argued that the growth of modem science now makes it
possible for man to establish the biblical idea of the Kingdom of God on earth.
Once humans had broken free of the restraints of orthodox Christianity, a truly
religious Kingdom of God could be realized in "the common incarnate Life,
the purpose animating all men and binding them together into one harmonious
whole of sympathy."[45]
Religion
would thus work in tandem with science and democracy, all of which would break
down the barriers between men and establish the Kingdom. After 1900 it was easy
for John Dewey, along with most other postmillennial intellectuals of the
period, to shift gradually but decisively from postmillennial progressive
Christian statism to progressive secular statism. The path, the expansion of
statism and "social control" and planning, remained the same. And
even though the Christian creed dropped out of the picture, the intellectuals
and activists continued to possess the same evangelical zeal for the salvation
of the world that their parents and they themselves had once possessed. The
world would and must still be saved through progress and statism.[46]
A
pacifist while in the midst of peace, John Dewey prepared himself to lead the
parade for war as America drew nearer to armed intervention in the European
struggle. First, in January 1916 in the New Republic, Dewey attacked the
"professional pacifist's" outright condemnation of war as a
"sentimental phantasy," a confusion of means and ends.
Force,
he declared, was simply "a means of getting results," and therefore
would neither be lauded or condemned per se. Next, in April Dewey signed a
pro-Allied manifesto, not only cheering for an Allied victory but also
proclaiming that the Allies were "struggling to preserve the liberties of
the world and the highest ideals of civilization." And though Dewey
supported US entry into the war so that Germany could be defeated, "a hard
job, but one which had to be done," he was far more interested in the
wonderful changes that the war would surely bring about in the domestic
American polity. In particular, war offered a golden opportunity to bring about
collectivist social control in the interest of social justice. As one historian
put it,
because war demanded
paramount commitment to the national interest and necessitated an unprecedented
degree of government planning and economic regulation in that interest, Dewey
saw the prospect of permanent socialization, permanent replacement of private
and possessive interest by public and social interest, both within and among
nations.[47]
In
an interview with the New York World a few months after US entry into
the war, Dewey exulted that "this war may easily be the beginning of the
end of business." For out of the needs of the war, "we are beginning
to produce for use, not for sale, and the capitalist is not a capitalist [in
the face of] the war." Capitalist conditions of production and sale are
now under government control, and "there is no reason to believe that the
old principle will ever be resumed…. Private property had already lost its
sanctity …industrial democracy is on the way."[48]
In
short, intelligence is at last being used to tackle social problems, and this
practice is destroying the old order and creating a new social order of
"democratic integrated control." Labor is acquiring more power,
science is at last being socially mobilized, and massive government controls
are socializing industry. These developments, Dewey proclaimed, were precisely
what we are fighting for.[49]
Furthermore,
John Dewey saw great possibilities opened by the war for the advent of
worldwide collectivism. To Dewey, America's entrance into the war created a
"plastic juncture" in the world, a world marked by a "world
organization and the beginnings of a public control which crosses nationalistic
boundaries and interests," and which would also "outlaw war."[50]
The
editors of the New Republic took a position similar to Dewey's, except
that they arrived at it even earlier. In his editorial in the magazine's first
issue in November 1914, Herbert Croly cheerily prophesied that the war would
stimulate America's spirit of nationalism and therefore bring it closer to
democracy. At first hesitant about the collectivist war economies in Europe,
the New Republic soon began to cheer and urged the United States to
follow the lead of the warring European nations and socialize its economy and
expand the powers of the State.
As
America prepared to enter the war, the New Republic, examining war
collectivism in Europe, rejoiced that "on its administrative side
socialism [had] won a victory that [was] superb and compelling." True,
European war collectivism was a bit grim and autocratic, but never fear,
America could use the selfsame means for "democratic" goals.
The
New Republic intellectuals also delighted in the "war spirit"
in America, for that spirit meant "the substitution of national and social
and organic forces for the more or less mechanical private forces operative in
peace." The purposes of war and social reform might be a bit different,
but, after all, "they are both purposes, and luckily for mankind a social
organization which is efficient is as useful for the one as for the
other."[51] Lucky indeed.
As
America prepared to enter the war, the New Republic eagerly looked
forward to imminent collectivization, sure that it would bring "immense
gains in national efficiency and happiness." After war was declared, the
magazine urged that the war be used as "an aggressive tool of
democracy."
"Why
should not the war serve," the magazine asked, "as a pretext to be
used to foist innovations upon the country?" In that way, progressive
intellectuals could lead the way in abolishing "the typical evils of the
sprawling half-educated competitive capitalism."
Convinced
that the United States would attain socialism through war, Walter Lippmann, in
a public address shortly after American entry, trumpeted his apocalyptic vision
of the future:
We who have gone to
war to insure democracy in the world will have raised an aspiration here that
will not end with the overthrow of the Prussian autocracy. We shall turn with
fresh interests to our own tyrannies – to our Colorado mines, our autocratic
steel industries, sweatshops, and our slums. A force is loose in America. Our
own reactionaries will not assuage it. We shall know how to deal with them.[52]
Walter Lippmann, indeed, had been the foremost hawk among the New Republic intellectuals. He had pushed Croly into backing Wilson and into supporting intervention, and then had collaborated with Colonel House in pushing Wilson into entering the war. Soon Lippmann, an enthusiast for conscription, had to confront the fact that he himself, only twenty-seven years old and in fine health, was eminently eligible for the draft. Somehow, however, Lippmann failed to unite theory and praxis.
Young
Felix Frankfurter, progressive Harvard Law Professor and a close associate of
the New Republic editorial staff, had just been as a special assistant
to Secretary of War Baker. Lippmann somehow felt that his own inestimable
services could be better used planning the postwar world than battling in the
trenches. And so he wrote to Frankfurter asking for a job in Baker's office.
"What I want to do," he pleaded, "is to devote all my time to
studying and speculating on the approaches to peace and the reaction from the
peace. Do you think you can get me an exemption on such highfalutin
grounds?" He then rushed to reassure Frankfurter that there was nothing
"personal" in this request. After all, he explained, "the things
that need to be thought out, are so big that there must be no personal element
mixed up with this." Frankfurter having paved the way, Lippmann wrote to
Secretary Baker. He assured Baker that he was only applying for a job and draft
exemption on the pleading of others and in stern submission to the national
interest. As Lippmann put it in a remarkable demonstration of cant:
I have consulted all
the people whose advice I value and they urge me to apply for exemption. You
can well understand that this is not a pleasant thing to do, and yet, after
searching my soul as candidly as I know how, I am convinced that I can serve my
bit much more effectively than as a private in the new armies.