752 ★ CHAPTER 19 Safe for Democracy: The United States and WWI
campaign to ban intoxicating liquor. Employers hoped it would create a more
disciplined labor force. Urban reformers believed that it would promote a more
orderly city environment and undermine urban political machines that used
saloons as places to organize. Women reformers hoped Prohibition would
protect wives and children from husbands who engaged in domestic violence
when drunk or who squandered their wages at saloons. Many native- born Prot-
estants saw Prohibition as a way of imposing “American” values on immigrants.
Like the suffrage movement, Prohibitionists first concentrated on state
campaigns. By 1915, they had won victories in eighteen southern and midwest-
ern states where the immigrant population was small and Protestant denom-
inations like Baptists and Methodists strongly opposed drinking. But like the
suffrage movement, Prohibitionists came to see national legislation as their
best strategy. The war gave them added ammunition. Many prominent brew-
eries were owned by German- Americans, making beer seem unpatriotic. The
Food Administration insisted that grain must be used to produce food, not dis-
tilled into beer and liquor. In December 1917, Congress passed the Eighteenth
Amendment, prohibiting the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquor. It
was ratified by the states in 1919 and went into effect at the beginning of 1920.
Liberty in Wartime
World War I raised questions already glimpsed during the Civil War that would
trouble the nation again during the McCarthy era and in the aftermath of the
terrorist attacks of 2001: What is the balance between security and freedom?
Does the Constitution protect citizens’ rights during wartime? Should dissent
be equated with lack of patriotism? The conflict demonstrated that during a
war, traditional civil liberties are likely to come under severe pressure.
In 1917, Randolph Bourne ridiculed Progressives who believed they could
mold the war according to their own “liberal purposes.” The conflict, he pre-
dicted, would empower not reformers but the “least democratic forces in
American life.” The accuracy of Bourne’s prediction soon become apparent.
Despite the administration’s idealistic language of democracy and freedom, the
war inaugurated the most intense repression of civil liberties the nation has
ever known. Perhaps the very nobility of wartime rhetoric contributed to the
massive suppression of dissent. For in the eyes of Wilson and many of his sup-
porters, America’s goals were so virtuous that disagreement could only reflect
treason to the country’s values.
The Espionage and Sedition Acts
For the first time since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the federal govern-
ment enacted laws to restrict freedom of speech. The Espionage Act of 1917