A Precedent of Silencing Dissent: Just as left-wing "watchdog" groups today are working to silence dissent from opponents, their predecessors did the same during America's involvement in World Wars I and II. (On the Home Front).

How bad can it get? This question is on the minds of many Americans worried that the open-ended "War on Terrorism" could eventually extinguish our civil liberties. Unfortunately, there are ample precedents for the wartime use of private "watchdog" organizations to spy upon and harass patriotic Americans who offer principled criticism of federal policies.

Contemporary self-appointed leftist "watchdog" organizations could be looked upon as lineal descendants of a World War I-era American vigilante organization: The "American Protective League" (APL), which was based in Chicago. Historian Don Whitehead recalls that the APL grew out of a suggestion from Chicago advertising executive A.M. Briggs that the Justice Department create "a volunteer organization of loyal Americans who would give their time and service ... to help the Bureau of Investigation in work involving national defense."

Bruce Bielaski, chief of the Bureau of Investigation (which is now the FBI) supported the idea, and soon the APL attracted hundreds of thousands of recruits. The League was structured as a quasi-secret society. Its local affiliates were organized like cells, with each member knowing only two or three others.

Like modern "watchdog" groups, the APL was privately funded and unaccountable to the public. Its members "formed an elaborate nationwide spy network," notes historian Diane M.T. North. Its cadres "relied on reckless, undocumented accusations" of disloyalty and subversion, and through its efforts "countless loyal citizens were placed under suspicion, denied jobs or detained by authorities."

It also acted as a shake-down squad by intimidating residents -- many of whom were just scraping by -- into buying war bonds. According to one contemporary press account, a Minnesota branch of the APL warned that those who failed to buy war bonds would be regarded as "German sympathizers." The gravity of that accusation was made clear by the death of a Finnish resident of Duluth who was lynched by APL thugs for failing to register for the draft. The hapless victim was a non-citizen and thus not subject to conscription.

The APL played a prominent role in the notorious "Slacker Raids" of 1918, a crackdown in New York and New Jersey during which tens of thousands of American citizens and resident aliens were arrested on suspicion of desertion or failure to register for the draft.

"The roundup began at 7:00 a.m., Tuesday, September 3," writes Whitehead. "At the close of the three-day raid, some 50,000 men had been hustled from theaters, restaurants, street cars, railway stations, pool halls and street corners, sometimes to the jeers of street crowds. Soldiers, with bayonets fixed on their rifles, halted men on the streets and demanded proof of registration. APL operatives 'arrested' suspects. Out-of-town visitors who had forgotten their cards were hauled off to the roped arenas which became known as 'bull pens.' Worried wives came searching for lost husbands. Workers were seized when they left their jobs. Men were forced to stand for hours, without food, unable to telephone for help in establishing their innocence."

The raids were denounced by Senator Hiram Johnson of California, who declared that "to humiliate 40,000 citizens, to shove them along with bayonets, to subject them to prison and summary military force, merely because they are 'suspects,' is a spectacle never before presented in the Republic."

Threats and Intimidation

Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute points out that in 1918 Congress passed the Sedition Act, which imposed prison terms of up to 20 years and fines of up to $10,000 on "all forms of expression in any way critical of the government, its symbols, or its mobilization of resources for the war." The Justice Department subcontracted enforcement of that dictatorial act to the citizen "watchdogs" of the APL.

Thanks to the efforts of the Minnesota APL, recalls one historical account, "The Department of Justice today has a complete record of every person living in the Duluth district who uttered words against the Government from April 1, 1917, until the division was disbanded on February 1, 1919."

The Henry County, Missouri, "Council of Defense," a local APL affiliate, "devised its own means of dealing with anybody considered ... to be 'speaking or acting in a disloyal way,'" recalls Whitehead. The suspect would first receive a white card with the following warning: "You have been reported to the Committee on Patriots and Patriotism as in your attitude and utterances dangerous and disloyal. We recommend caution and a complete change of attitude."

If the subject failed to reform to the Council's satisfaction, a blue card was sent: "The White Card meant 'caution'; the Blue, 'warning.' Every flag in our Country waves to protect you -- your life and property. Your duty is to defend your Country's flag with your life." Those deemed to be incorrigible would receive a final red card: "If unjustly reported, or if you desire to avoid Summary Action, report at once your change of front to the Postmaster. No harm will come to you if you continue loyal to your country in its hour of need."

It must be understood that the "patriotism" invoked by such vigilantes had nothing at all to do with the defense of the U.S. Constitution, fidelity to our system of individual liberty under the rule of law, or the protection of our homeland from foreign attack. Instead, it was a form of abject, unquestioning submission to the dictates of President Woodrow Wilson and the Power Elite behind him - power-hungry men who entangled our nation in its first overseas war for the purpose of building a socialist regime at home and world government abroad.

Bernard Baruch, chairman of Wilson's War Industries Board, was typical of that Power Elite. A statement made by Baruch on August 7, 1918, leaves little doubt about the totalitarian nature of the wartime state created with the help of the APL "watchdogs":

Every man's life is at the call of the nation and so must be every man's property. We are living today in a highly organized state of socialism.

The state is all; the individual is of importance only as he contributes to the welfare of the state. His property is his only as the state does not need it. He must hold his life and his possessions at the call of the state.

FDR's Sedition Trial

Most of the Wilson administration's "war socialism" measures were repealed at the end of the conflict. They were revived by FDR's regime following America's entry into World War II. And once again the Justice Department tried to find some way to marginalize, demonize, and -- if possible -- criminalize critics of the government.

"Friends of Democracy," a leftist group that was created in the 1930s to agitate for early U.S. entry in the European war, hired an Armenian immigrant named Avedis Derounian to act as a spy and agent provocateur within the America First movement.

Using the pseudonym, "John Roy Carlson," Derounian published two "watchdog" style exposes of the "isolationist" right: Under Cover and The Plotters. Notes historian Justin Raimondo, in both volumes, the smear artist "used the old trick of focusing on the activities of marginal bigots who are then quoted as expressing agreement with the anti-war arguments" of the America First Committee. Derounian's best-selling books equated "all criticism of the New Deal and FDR with treason and support for Hitler." This was a view shared by FDR himself.

Following Pearl Harbor, FDR began to importune Attorney General Francis Biddle to prosecute journalists and political activists who criticized the administration. "Biddle started receiving notes from FDR, attached to scurrilous attacks on the president's leadership, asking: 'What are you doing to stop this?"' writes Thomas Fleming in his recent book, The New Dealers' War. FDR "was not much interested in the theory of sedition or in the constitutional right to criticize the government during wartime," Biddle later admitted. "He wanted this anti-war talk stopped."

One of the FDR administration's first efforts to suppress criticism came at a March 1942 meeting sponsored by the Overseas Writers Association (OWA). The meeting, which was attended by numerous administration officials, was a hate session targeting newspaper publishers Robert McCormick (Chicago Tribune) and Joe Patterson (the New York Daily News). Both publishers, who had utter contempt for the Axis powers, were unabashed critics of FDR and proponents of an "America First" foreign policy. During the OWA event they were denounced as traitors.

"Roosevelt advisors ... applauded lustily such declarations as: The important thing is to put an end (to criticism of the Roosevelt administration] by whatever means may be necessary -- be as ruthless as the enemy," recorded one account of the meeting. "Get him on his income tax or the Mann Act. Hang him, shoot him or lock him up in a concentration camp."

Shortly after that hate session, "the journalistic lynch mob -- [George] Seldes, William L. Shirer, and Edmond Taylor -- went to Attorney General Biddle and requested that he find grounds, any grounds, for indicting McCormick and Patterson," recalls Raimondo. "Archibald MacLeish, the 'poet laureate of the New Deal' and Librarian of Congress, gave the lynch party his blessings when he told the ANPA [American Newspaper Publishers Association] that certain of their members were guilty of treason."

McCormick and Patterson managed to avoid prosecution. However, after enduring weeks of demands from FDR to "indict the seditionists," Biddie finally relented and appointed William Power Maloney, described by Fleming as "an aggressive publicity-loving Justice Department attorney," to begin compiling evidence for a treason trial. In July 1942, after tantalizing the press with leaks suggesting that "isolationist" congressmen might be arraigned, Maloney announced the indictment of 28 writers and activists accused of Axis sympathies. Biddle eventually removed Maloney for incompetence and replaced him with a Harvard Law School graduate named O. John Rogge -- who used a book produced by "watchdog" Derounian as the foundation of his criminal case.

"Following [Derounian's] book, [Rogge] maintained that the defendants were guilty of sedition because passages in their writings and speeches were very close to Nazi statements on Roosevelt, the Jews, and similar topics," recalls Fleming. "Civil libertarians grew more and more aghast at the spectacle." Critics of FDR's sedition trial began referring to the prosecutor as "Vishinsky," a reference to the prosecutor in Stalin's Moscow show trials of the 1930s. Eventually a mistrial was declared when the judge died of a heart attack -- and Biddle chose to wind down the case.