To oppose America’s participation in World War I, or even to be pessimistic
about it, was dangerous. The Creel Committee asked all Americans to “report
the man who... cries for peace, or belittles our efforts to win the war.” Send
their names to the Justice Department in Washington, it exhorted. After World
War I, the Wilson administration’s attacks on civil liberties increased, now
with anticommunism as the excuse. Neither before nor since these campaigns
has the United States come closer to being a police state.
Because heroification prevents textbooks from showing Wilson’s