Liberalism: Power, Economic Crisis, Reform, War 93efforts by politicians and celebrities who go to Iraq or Afghanistan], and it
produced anti-German events and even movies like “The Kaiser, the Beast of
Berlin,” and “The Prussian Cur.” The government’s anti-German ideas filtered
down through society and mobs even attacked American citizens who had
come from Germany or spoke with an accent. In East St. Louis, Illinois in
1918 a group of people attacked Robert Prager, a German-born U.S. citizen,
and lynched him. The courts did not find anyone guilty of causing his death.
More commonly—similar to the creation of “Freedom Fries” to criticize the
French for not helping the US fight Iraq in 2003—people made symbolic
gestures, re-naming Bratwurst “liberty sausage” and calling sauerkraut “liberty
cabbage.” Many schools quit teaching German classes, and symphonies
stopped playing German composers like Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven [which
made it much harder to put together a concert]. Wilson delighted in such
behavior, and got Congress to pass the Espionage Act of 1917, to arrest and try
Americans who were accused of aiding the enemy, and the Sedition Act a year
later, which punished people for speaking or writing negatively about the war.
It is crucial to understand that these laws penalized Americans for their words
or thoughts, not their actions.
Political “radicals”—Wobblies, pacifists, anarchists and others—were fre-
quently harassed, arrested, or jailed under these laws, none more famously
than Eugene Debs. In June 1918 Debs, who had twice run as a Socialist can-
didate for president, gave a speech in Canton, Ohio in which he began by
admitting that he was at risk for his views and should be careful with his
words. But he continued on and attacked the war as a fight for ruling class
wealth. “The master class has always declared the wars,” he told the crowd,
and “the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had
all to gain and nothing to lose while the subject class has had nothing to gain
and all to lose—especially their lives.” Debs was charged with 10 counts of
sedition, convicted and sentenced to 10 years in jail, and had his right to vote
taken from him. Still, in 1920, while in prison, Debs received almost one mil-
lion votes for president. In December 1921 new President Warren G. Harding
commuted Debs’s sentence because of his age and failing health. He had
spent about two-and-a-half years in prison for practicing freedom of speech.
Even though the American government and people were harsh on Germans
and radicals, no group embodied the contradictions, or hypocrisies, of the