Wilson’s presidential campaign pledged to keep the country out of the meat-grinding war across the Atlantic, and he kept that promise for nearly three years until Congress declared war on Germany in April 1917. But American Midnight isn’t about the First World War. It’s about what happened at home during and after it. The declaration of war in the House of Representatives passed by 373 votes to 50, and while most Americans approved of the decision, there were noisy pockets of dissent, as there are whenever democracies fight wars. Wilson feared that even the mildest bleats of complaint would undermine the morale necessary to sustaining the war effort. The upshot was the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, which had almost nothing to do with actual espionage. Instead, it declared any kind of anti-war activity to be criminal, and defined “opposition” in ways that few modern critics of pacifists and isolationists would even recognize.
Anyone who “shall willfully make or convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation of the military or naval forces of the United States” was subject to arrest. It would be a mistake to assume that the Wilson administration was only going after the purveyors of what we now call “fake news,” or to get hung up on the words “with intent to interfere.” Ordinary people were rounded up and prosecuted who had no intention of interfering with anyone or anything, and those convicted faced up to 20 years in prison—twice as long as the sentence Vladimir Putin metes out to his Russian subjects for similar offenses today.
A Texas man was jailed for saying, “I wish Wilson was in hell.” Andreas Latzko’s novel Men in War was banned for describing the war as a “wholesale cripple-and-corpse factory.” Police officers arrested playwright Eugene O’Neill at gunpoint on Cape Cod because somebody saw sunlight reflecting off his typewriter and thought he was sending signals to German ships. Filmmaker Robert Goldstein was arrested for co-writing and producing a silent film called The Spirit of ’76about the American Revolution. Regardless of what happened in 1776, the presiding judge said, “we are engaged in a war in which Great Britain is an ally of the United States,” and this was not the time for “sowing dissension among our people” or “creating animosity … between us and our allies.” Goldstein was handed 10 years in prison.