[The following is in regards to vigilante action following the passing of the Sedition Act of 1918. Context of the law, courtesy of Wikipedia: “The Sedition Act of 1918 (Pub.L. 65–150, 40 Stat. 553, enacted May 16, 1918) was an Act of the United States Congress that extended the Espionage Act of 1917 to cover a broader range of offenses, notably speech and the expression of opinion that cast the government or the war effort in a negative light or interfered with the sale of government bonds.”]
What the government didn’t do, vigilantes did. There were the twelve hundred IWW [International Workers of the World] members locked in boxcars in Arizona and left on a siding in the desert. There was IWW member Frank Little, tied to a car and dragged through streets in Butte, Montana, until his kneecaps were scraped off, then hung by the neck from a railroad trestle. There was Robert Prager, born in Germany but who had tried to enlist in the navy, attacked by a crowd outside St. Louis, beaten, stripped, bound in an American flag, and lynched because he uttered a positive word about his country of origin. And, after that mob’s leaders were acquitted, there was the juror’s shout, “I guess nobody can say we aren’t loyal now!” Meanwhile, a Washington Post editorial commented, “In spite of excesses such as lynching, it is a healthful and wholesome awakening in the interior of the country.”
Socialist Eugene Debs, who in the 1912 presidential election had received nearly one million votes, was sentenced to ten years in prison for opposing the war, and in an unrelated trial Wisconsin congressman Victor Berger was sentenced to twenty years for doing the same. The House of Representatives thereupon expelled him and when his constituents reelected him anyway the House refused to seat him.
All this was to protect the American way of life.
Source:
Barry, John M. “Explosion.” The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. Penguin Books, 2009. 206-7. Print.
Further Reading:
Frank H. (Franklin Henry) Little: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Little_(unionist)
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