The Only Badge Needed Is Your Patriotic Ferver

The Only Badge Needed Is Your
Patriodc Fervor: Vigilance, Coercion,

and die Law in World War I America
Christopher Capozzok
On July 26, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson condemned mob rule. Almost four
months had passed since Robert Prager, a German American coal miner, had been
lynched. Wilson was angered that the enemy German press had used the killing of
Prager in its wartime propaganda, and he felt increasing pressure from civil libertari-
ans at home. In a widely reprinted proclamation, Wilson insisted on the rule of law.
He daimed that "no man who loves America, no man who really cares for her fame
and honor and character, . . . can jusdfy mob action while the courts of justice are
open and the governments of the States and the Nation are ready and able to do their
duty." The mob spirit, Wilson averred, was irreconcilable with American democracy.
I say plainly that every American who takes pan in the action of a mob or gives it
any son: of countenance is no true son of this great Democracy, but its betrayer, and
does more to discredit her by that single disloyalty to her standards of law and of
right than the words of her statesmen or the sacrifices of her heroic boys in the
trenches can do to make suffering peoples believe her to be their savior.^
In the early twendeth century, there was far less consensus about the nation's "stan-
dards of law and of right" than Wilson suêsted. During and afrer World War I,
Americans debated the place of extralegal violence in American political life.
Through words and actions, they nôtiated the boundaries of legitimate political
Christopher Capozzola is a visiting instructor in the Department of American Lirerature and Civilization at Mid-
dlebury College. This essay received the Louis Pelzer Memorial Award for 2001.
This essay was first presented at the Workshop in Twentieth-Century American Politics and History at
Columbia University. For comments, I would like to thank Alan Brinkley, Elizaberfi Blackmar, and Ira Katinel-
son; Joanne Meyerowitz, Susan Anneny, Kevin Mareh, the Pelzer Prize committee, and the stalFof, and an anony-
mous reader for, the Joumal of American History; and my graduate student colleagues in the Coliunbia University
Depanment of History, withour whose support this essay would not have been written. Funding has been pro-
vided by the Ctûmbia University Institute for Sodal and Economic Research and Policy, the Social Sdence
Research Council Prt^ram on Philanrfiropy and the Nonprofit Sector, and the Sophia Smith Cdlection and
Smith Colley Ardiives.
may œnua Caprazola at <cjc32@coiumbia.edu>.
' Woodrow Wilson, "A Statement to the American People," July 2ß, 1918, in The Papers of Woodrow Wilstn.
ed. Arrfiur S. Link et al. (69 vols., Princeton, 1966-1994), XLIX, 97, 98. On the killing of Robert Prager, see
Donald R. Hickey, "The Prager Affiùr: A Study in Wartime Hysteria," Joumdafihe lUinsis State Historieal Seciet^
62 (Sumnwr 1969), 117-34; Frederick C. Luebke, Bone ofUyaky: German-Americans and WorU War I (DeKdb,
1974). 3-26; and Cari Weinba^ "The Tug of Wan Labt», Loyalty, and Rebellion in die Southvrestem 0inois
Coaifields, 19Ï4^19W (Hi.D. diss., Yale University, 1995), 452-521.
M ^ 2002
Vigilance, Coercion, and the Law in World War I America 1355
coercion. These ongoing debates shed light on the relationship between voluntarism
and state authority in twentieth-century American political culture.
Woodrow Wilson's proclamations notwithstanding, violence has been a persistent
feature of American political life, especially in the tumult of World War I. Political vio-
lence daims a central place in many narratives of the American past. To read them is to
learn that violence is as American as apple pie, a point that would not have been lost
on the crowd that strung Robert Prager up on the branch of a lone huckleberry tree on
the outskirts of Collinsville, Illinois, and then dropped his body three times, in the
words of one participant, "one for the red, one for the white, and one for the blue."^
But if violence is integral to American history, why were Wilson's words so compel-
ling to many readers in 1918? Why did the "lawless passion" that Wilson decried
strike George Creel, the nations leading war propagandist, as so un-American that he
could e}q)iain it only as the work of German spies? Why—or, more important, how—
did incidents of violence in 1918 lead so readily to a ritual of denunciation? The years
surrounding World War I mark a high point of one kind of political violence in Amer-
ican history as the aaions of repressive state institutions, private organizations, and
spontaneous crowds left dozens of Americans dead and led to temporary detainment
of thousands on war-related charges. Yet those years also witnessed the invigoration of
political arguments that questioned ail extralegal authority and laid the groundwork
for the legal and political dismanding of vigilantism in the twentieth century.^
One key to understanding this debate turns on the distinction between vigilance
and vigilantism made during this period. On the World War I American home front,
citizens proudly called themselves vigilant and believed that they were doing work
needed—and explicitly requested—by the national government. In that assumption,
they were not wrong. Leading public figures, drawing on long-standing traditions
equating citizenship with obligation, did call on Americans to stand vigilant during
the war. Appealing to habits of voluntary association, they supported the organiza-
tion of vigilance movements nationwide: committees of safety, women's vigilance
leagues, home guards. State actors depended on the voluntary work of such groups
for the success of the nations war mobilization efFort.
Yet some of those figures also spoke out against vigilantism, few more eloquendy
than Wilson in his July 1918 statement. When they did so, they did not have the vig-
^ Weinberg, "Tug of War," 484. See also Richard Hofetadtcr and Michael Wallace, eds., American Violence: A
Documentary History (New York, 1970). On the hisrory of ddzenship, see Gary Gersde, "Liberty, Coercion, and
the Mziánôf hracrka.m," Joumal of American Hismry, 84 (Sept. 1997), 524-58; and Rt^rs M. Smith. Qviclde-
als: Conf^cting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, 1997). On World War I-era r^ression, see
Stephen M. Kohn. American Political Prisoners: Prosecutions under the Espionage and Sedition Acts (Westpon.
1994); H. C. Pfeterson and Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War, 1917-1918 (Scaníe, 1968); and William Preston Jr.,
Aliens and Dissenters: Fedeml Suppression offUidicah, 1903-1933 (Urbana, 1994). For a heated cxchai^ on the
place of violence in African American histoiy. sec "What We See and Can't See in the Past: A Round Table," Jour-
nal of American History. 83 (March 1997), 1217-72.
' Resptmses from Wilsons readers include Robert Russa Moton to Woodrow Wiiron, July 27, 1918, in Pifers
ofWoodnw Wilson, ed. Link ei al.. XLDC, 113-14; and George Foster Peabody to Wilson, July 29. 1918, ibid.,
125. Ge(Mge Cree!, "Unite and Win," Independent, April 6. 1918, pp. 5-6. For historians' defeate on the sîfi-
cance of "»Olson's statement in relation to die issue of lynchings of African Americans, see Henry Biumenthal.
"Woodiöw W^dffln and die Race Question," >ttr>w/ff/Ai^Tw i/«jwr}î 48 (Jan. 1963), 4,10-12; Scqáien R. Fox.
Tbe Gutadian ^fBman: William Monroe Ttvtter (New Yorfc, 1971). 221; and Robert L. Alfcn mih Vaméa P.
Alien. Rel$faam airmen: Racism and Social Heßrm Movement in the Uni^ States (Washii^ton, 1974), 98.
1356 The Journal of American History March 2002
ilance societies in mind. What Wilson and those who shared his oudook meant was
K>mething more spedfic and rarer: the mob, conceived as a violent, spontan«>us, and
extralegal public group. As national leaders denounced the mob in ever more ñe-
quent cails for "law and order," they attempted to separate viâncc and \4^lantisin.
Tliey cast die former as a valuable work of service and voluntarism that embodied
American democracy and delegitimated the latter as incompatible with what Wilson
had called the nation's "standards of law and of right."
The distinction took on great significance. Americans who engaged in extralegal
actions to support the war effort insisted that they were exemplars of vigilant citizen-
ship. Their victims denounced them as lawless vigilantes unworthy of the nation's
honor. The sudden preoccupation with the distinaion between legitimate and ille-
^timate political coercion marked a partial revision of the place of law in the system
of political obligation. The attack on the mob and vigilantism gave new energies to
civil libertarians; the wartime events that made political violence possible and visible
also undermined its legitimacy.
The line between vigilance and vigilantism was contested throughout the war and
postwar years. Government ofïicials who denounced lawless vigilantism also praised
vigilance oiânizations' policing. They insisted that only uncontrolled physical vio-
lence was politically illegitimate—^precisely because it subverted the spirit of a nation
of laws. The wartime and postwar concern with mob violence led many to ignore
legal and nonviolent forms of state and private coercion that arose alongside, and
outlasted, crowd actions. The distinction obscured the way political violence was
woven into American political culture during this period.
The Obligation of Vigilance in Peace and War
The concqjt of vigilance as a form of collective self-defense has long accompanied

d ^ m s to self-rule; in the early American republic it was intimately tied to concepts of
popular sovereignty. But vigilance as an obligation of citizenship has been not just a
rhetorical flourish, but a political practice in which collective policing by private citi-
zens contributed to community defense. By the time of the United States' entry into
World War I in April 1917, Americans were accustomed to the idea that dtizens had
a positive obligation to police one another. Such policing could involve coercion,
many believed. "Mob \dolence," that is, tmcontrolled physical coercion, was largdy
(althou^ never entirely) denounced. But drawing the line of Intimacy between
controlled and uncontrolled physical coercion created political difficulty.''
Vigilantism too has played a recurrent role in American history. Vigilantism is
ofren equated with mob violence and thought to consist of political terror and vio-
lent coerdon. Use of the term conjures up images of night riders and frontier justice.
Tbe historian Richard Maxwell Brown has documented more than 5,400 deaths by
d and unoiânized g r o » ^ between 1767 and 1951. But vvMe v ^ a n t i s m
* Gordon S. Wood, The Oration oftheAimrkan Republic, 1776^1787 (New York, 1967), 319-28; Ridiaid
é& BKwra, *The Hisojiy t ^ \ ^ ^ d » n in AuKrica," in Vigtíanu Politics, cd. H. jan
C, Sedeifeerg i^âMÛ^ Î976), 103-4.
could and often did become ckadly, neither killing nor physical ôlence is necessary
for vîlantism. Relier, vigikntism is fundamentally about law. Political aiguments
about vigilantism articulate relationships between the politicd behavior of citizens
and the system of law in which they operate. Vigilante actions are undertaken by cit-
izens who are not public officials, even if they sometimes cooperate with officials or
claim to act in the name of the state. Vigilantes operate outside the strictures of law
as articulated by the lîtimate regime, but they t}îcaUy aim to establish social order,
whether defense ofthe state, control of crime, or maintenance of racial, class, or gen-
der hierarchies, "What is paradoxical about the vigilante position is, of course, that it
seeks to perpetuate the existing order, but without law and without accepting die
actions of the society's political institutions," according to the political sciöitist
Edward Stettner.^
American traditions of citizen vigibmce and vigikntism in 1917 fall into four
main categories, each of which long predated the war but was transformed by it: citi-
zen policing, antilabor vigilance, moral vigilance, and racial vigilance. The traditions
of Anglo-American common law had long demanded that citizens—particularly
male citizens—participate in defending the community. Self-defense could be se«n in
forms of community policing: Individuals could initiate a citizen*s arrest or be depu-
tized by local authorities; those who heard the "hue and cry" of distressed persons
were obliged to come to their aid; militias gathered most able-bodied adult men for
service; the common-law rule of posse comitatus gave sheriff the power to summon
the same men to preserve the public peace. In the years immediately preceding World
War I, those practices appeared to be on the decline. The tasks of policing had been
partly professionalized, particularly in urban areas, and the newly reorganized
National Guard had largely replaced state and local militias. But while the institu-
tions of law enforcement had displaced the posse and the hue and cry in most ofthe
United States by 1917, the process was hardly complete and universal, as extral^d
actions in the Jim Crow South demonstrated. Nor were myths and memories of colo-
nial days and the western frontier far from the minds of either the national elite or
the general public.^
In 1917 labor relations were dominated by private and community methods for the
maintenance of order. Corporations rûlarly employed private policing forc^ sudi as
' Here 1 am hoirowing and modifying definitional categories suêsted by H. Jon Rosenbaum and Peter C.
Sederberg,g "V^lantism:
^ An Analysis
y of Êiabiishment Violence," in Vigilame g Politics, ed. Itesenbaum and S f c
b ^ 3-^29. Richaid
h d Maxwell ll feomi, the
h lleading
d hhistorian off v^jiiuitism
i in the U
h d S
United fll ^^fined
States, never fully
the Krm, u$ing as a working definition "cakii^ llic law into one's own hands." See Brown, "History of VigUantism
in America," 79; and Riclard Maxwell Brown, Strain ^Vwlence. Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigi-
lantism (New York, 1975), 95-96. For a d^nidon from political andiropoli^, see Ray Abrahams, V^knt Oti-
zens: V^kntísm md ^ State (Cand>ri(%c, Eng., 1998), 4-Í0. The Chfoid E/^lish Dictionary define a vigUancc
committee as "a sclf-i^potnted commitœe for the maintenance of iustice and order in an impCT^dy organized
comjntmky," h^úi^ñng voluntarism, the organized nature of the undertakii^ and its retationdhip to insätu-
ticms of law. OxßrdEnîsh Dictionarjt 2â. ed., s.v. "VigüaiK« ajmminee." Hie term "\iguante" was noi widdy
u s ^ in AiiKrican discourse until dw Virginia City movement in the Montana Temttwy in 1865-1865, accordii^
to BiowQ, "Htetoiy ^ Vi^lanc^m in Ammca," 85. For the %ur«s, see ihid., 80-81. Edward Stetttio; "Vi^lan-
tlan and PoUtíc^ Theory," in Vigiiante PöUties, ed. Rosenbaum and Sctkriserg, 70.
*EricH. MonlAonen, ThePoUcein Urian America. /«60-iil2Ö (New Yoik, 1981); Sidney L. Hairii^ P»lking
a 0m Soe^ The Eêrimee afAmeman Cities. 1865-1915 (New Brunswidc 1983). For Tiieodoie Roose^îts
màk i ^ mmanoc <^ dje CM yffex, see Gail Bed^nym, Mai^ness and Cioilizatien: A OtitunU History ef
During and after World War I, African Americans faced organized violence dedicated to
maintaining the racial status quo. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, on May 31-June 1, 1921, white riot-
ers destroyed nearly a thousand buildings, including several churches. The Mount Zion Bap-
tist Church, shown here, had heen dedicated just seven weeks earlier. Courtesy Tulsa Race Riot
Collection, McFarUn Library, Univenity of Tulsa,
the Pinkertons to break up strikes and infiltrate unions. To supplement such merce-
nary forces, business leaders seeking to maintain surveillance over labor activities
recruited volunteer citizen groups. State and federal officials, who saw little active role
fot the state in economic life, generally supported antilabor vigilance groups. From
time to time, state actors disputed the methods of vigilance groups, and labor organiza-
tions consistently challenged their extralegality. But in the pre-World War I era, when
the courts were no more sympathetk to Idsor than were other arms of the American
government, woricers ofren saw little to gain by appealing to the rule of law.^
The obligation of vigilance also made Americans the guardians of the moral wel-
fere of their fellow citizens, as in the national prohibition campaigns that gathered
force before World War I. Similarly, ^ o r t s to curtail prostitution coalesced in the
Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 {C\ù<ô, 1995), 170-215. In 1915 Roosevdt daimed tbar tbe
workirf'wgilantesin tbeninetecndi-century WiKtwas"in tbemainDdioiesome." Brown, "History of V^ílantism in
America," 105- Tbe pbilostÂcr josiab R<^ce explored tbe impact of vigilantism on community in bis writings on
tbe American West; see Robert V. Hine, Josiah Râ)/ce: from Grass Valley to Harvard (ôimaa, 1992), 151,169.
' On jwi^^re policir^ œe Rbodri Já&eys-}ones, Violence arid ^form in American History {êv/"Hoik, 1978), 6.
Even die U.S. Depiutment of Jusdce rdied on Fmlccrrons as its investigators pdor to 1893; see Joan M. Joisen, The
Price efVigilmee (Cbicago, 1968), 12. On dtiza» volïmtarism in tbe maintenance of industdd order, see Meiv^m
T>é>(^, We Shaü Be AIL A History (fthe Industrial Workmifthe WorU{UÁim3^\9%t^^^
"Tlie literature trf Báot Duty: Managing Class Coi^ïict in die Streets, 1877-1927," Radical History Review (no. 56,
Sprteg 1993), 25-!K); afid Stevoi C. Le«, Committee ofViplance: The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce Law and
Onder Qmmiaee, 1916-1919: A Case StMfy in Oßaal Hysteria QdSktstm, 1983). On tbe coopcradcmirf'die fédérai
govemment in tbe suppression of stdkcs, see Jerry M. Cooper, The Army and CivU Disorder Pederal Military Inter-
veraien in Labor Dù^fitm, 1877-^1900 (êstpon, 1980). On tbe reUrionî^ between labor and dîe legal qiístem, sec
WÜÜam £. I^ïath, Law and ê Sh^ng ^the American Labor Movement (Cambmlge, Mass., 199^1)> 59-127.
M»ty advocates It»-iTOiic^spbRxddiàr^tb in dielegsJ systnn despite repeared 6iiluits. Mott^r JOIKS wrote diu
1910s into a movement to abolish it. Supporters of the prohibition and purity move-
ments did not restrict their efforts to lîsladve campaigns but established vigilance
societies. Anthony Comstock's New York Society for the Suppression of Vice sought
to purify the city's night life for over thirty years. Beginning in 1910, the Progressive
reformer Maude Miner recruited working-class young women into the New York
Girls' Protecdve League, a volunteer police force meant to discipline young women.
Across the country massive networks of volunteers surveyed and apprehended sus-
pected prosdtutes. Anti-vice activists had an ambivalent relationship to the law.
Ofren, frustrated by what they saw as a corrupt policing and legal system, they chose
to work outside it. At other times they cooperated with the police and the courts,
either using the law to crack down on prostitutes, madams, and pimps or seeking to
aid the women they patrolled through special courtroom procedures and the reform
of women's prisons. Their actions, both inside and outside the legal system, were
rarely challenged, except by accused prostitutes themselves.^
A similar tradition of collective policing, active predominately in the South, was dedi-
cated to suppressing African American militancy and controlling African American
labor. White vigilance groups enforced white racial supremacy. They enjoyed the support
of formal state institutions at every level of American government, w4iich consistendy
declined to intervene in what they deemed local or wholly private matters. The number
of lynchings had peaked in the 1890s, but the war years saw an increase in racial violence
and the formation of new white supremacist dtizen groups, including the Ku Klux Klan,
reorganized in 1915. Although leading black reformers strongly challeiêd the methods
and even the existence of such groups, they had made litde headway by 1917.^
In many areas of everyday life, therefore, Americans were accustomed to partici-
pating in or enduring citizen vigilance, and they were already debating how to rein in
extralegal coercion. As part of the war mobilization effort, citizen vigilance move-
ments expanded. The relationship of those movements to the state changed as private
the courts "are the bulwark of our institutions and their inte^ty must he preserved." Mother Jones to Sara J. Dorr,
Dec. 16, 1918, in The Correspondence of Mother Jones, ed. Edwaid M. Steel (Pittsbmgh, 1985), 185.
* Anti-vice activity reached its peak in the 1910s, according to Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in
America, 1900-1918 (Baltimore, 1982), 12-15. See also John D'Emilio and fetelle B. Freedman, Intimate Mat-
ters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York, 1988), 208-15. On Anthony Comstock, see Timothy J. Gü-
ft)yle, City efEros: New York dty. Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 (New York, 1992),
185-96; on Maude Miner, see Barbara Meil Hobson, Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and Âmerican
Reßrm Tradition (Chicit^, 1990), 173. On antiprostitution campaigns, see Mark Thomas Conneiiy, TheResponse
to Prostitution in the Processive Era (Chapel Hill, 1980); and E>avid J. Langum, Crossing over the Line: Legislating
MomUty and the Mann Art (Chicago, 1994). On the experience of working-class women who ended up in die
wartime net, stx Joanne J. Meyerowia, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (Chicago,
1988); and Kaihy ïîss. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Tum-of-the-Century New York (PWla-
delphia, 1986). On Prt^sssives' involvement in moral vigilance and sodal reform, see Estelle B. Frœdman, Their
Sisters'iêpers: Women's Prison Reßrm in America, 1830-1930 (Ann Aibot, 1981).
' W. Fitáiugh Bnmdagc, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 (Urbana, 1993); W.
FitiJii^ BrumÊ^, ed.. Under SetOence ofDeath: Lynching in íAf Sotoh (Chapel Hill, 1997); Crystal Nicole Fdm-
ster, "'Ladies and Lynching': The Gendered Discourse of Mob Violence in the New South, 1880-1930" {Ph.D.
diss., ft-inccton Univeraty, 2000); Robert P. In^ls, Urban Violâmes in ée New South: Tampa. 1882-1936
(KïioKvUie, 1988>. Leon F. XJtwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Cnw (New York, 1998).
i^ úa rise ^ the mioaáJfUi Kim KliR, SIX Dav^Chsdmers, Hooded Ameriamisnt: The Himry ^tbr lût fSux
Kkn <Chicô, 1968); Kathleen M. Bice. Wmmt of the KUm Racism and Gender in OK Î9WS (Berief, 1991);
^î f ^ Behindtíi«M^ fof Oriwdry: y Tbe Making g af
f the Secotid îùi JÚux iÚan ÇNew^hA, 1994); and
Ú Th lO K l
Leonaid J.Moore, Citizen JÚanmen: The Ku lOwc Klan in Insana,I s i 5i5Í2/~/a2S
Í 2 / / a 2 S ( (Chapel
C h l HUI
HUI.1 1991).
991)
1360 Thejoumal of American History March 2002
policing efforts were enfolded in state agendas: vigÜance oiânizations gained force
and authority as they spoke in the name of die wartime state, but their new position
also gave new weapons to dio^ who denied their legitimacy. The wartime debate
about political violence, while not entirely new, was conducted on an altered tarrain.
Mobilization for war against Gennany changed die siîficance of dtizen valance.
Government officials and other leading public figures called on American citizens,
male and female, to stand vigilant for the duration. A poster from New York's Con-
ference Committee on National Prepar^lness mêd d ^ n s e gainst spies and trai-
tors: "Men of America, be of dear vision! . . . Prompdy deliver up these advance
agents to public scorn and to the law, so diat when you go to your home at night you
can look into the innocent ês of your children and be unafraid." A similar fK>ster
printed by the New Hampshire Committee on Public Safety urged "promptness in
recognizing and reporting suspidous or disloyal actions to your local authorities or to
us" and "helping your local Committee on Public Safety in every way." In his 1917
Flag Day speech. President Wilson warned that "vicious spies and conspirators" had
"sprfâid sedition amongst us" and "sot^t by violence to destroy our industries and
arrest our commerce," and throughout the war he consistently encouraged private
citizen ^^gilance. "Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our
way," Wilson ominously concluded.'"
Americans who wanted to do their part found explicit instruction in a not unusual
editorial in New York State s Albany Joumal:
If you ever, on the street or in a trolley car, should hear some soft-shell pacifist or
hard-boiled but pooriy camouflaged pro-German, make seditious or unpatriotic
remarks about your Uncle Sam you have the ri^t and privUege of taking that per-
son by the collar, hand him over to the nearest policeman or else take him yourself
before the m^strate.
You do not require any official authority to do this and the only badge needed is
your patriotic fervor. The same thing applies to women. Every American, under
provisions of the code of civil procedure, has the authority to arrest any person
makii^ a remade or utwrance which "outrages public Cheney.""
Hundreds of thousands of men and women responded to calls for national defense
on the home front by forming voluntary vigilance associations. They varied widely in
dieir aims, structures, and membership, from elite sodeties such as the National
^^ Qoi&mxe, Commit«» on Natkmal PreyarednKs. The Advance Agents cfée Hun, broadside, [1917]. portftdk)
315, no. 2, Broadside Collection (Riffe Book IHvsiion, L^nuy ctfCor^ress, W^ngton. D.C); N i w l t o n f ^ K Com-
àfMSSay,Pa^te^NewHa$npshm. Wake Up! We Are at War!, broadside, [1917], i»rtîo98, no. 3. ibid.
"A 1 % Day Addnss," lune 14.1917. in/ií^m flîôi^ïw Ï Ç ^ ^
áyMasíT^úayúVcrsoia,''AäfonyJournal. Apú\ 17, ]918,£%pingeiidosedmdi IhulkyPiuJ
to Anwícan Ihúcm gainst Mûiiïaism. ,^^>ril 17, 1918, Amerkan Gvtí IM/ertíes ünim Archives: Tite
Rùger &ddmn YÈart, 1917-1950 (micit^lm, 293 teek, Sdiolaáy Resources, 1996), red 5. «d. 55. ílie Afeany
etËa»n«&tJS áúm m cvctme^ï&eàz only a Îéatxf jtnîîed a cíázens íxtnst. ^VSBM^ Act tûôkms woe fi^cnùs;
f « ï ; ^ i k c a i c y weregem^âlly misdetiieuïors. Few vi|âm Mseñoats b
and even chñl Vkiôimm sudt as Rog«' Bjdáwin cKd atxtvpîtméy
, diraa umâ very late in ^ - « a r .
Vigilance, Coercion, ami the Law in World War I America 1361
Security League and Amaican Defense Society to more menacing organizations such
as the Sedition Slammers and the Terrible Threateners to the Boy Spies of America.
Over 250,000 men, and some women, enrolled in the largest such organization, the
American Protective L e ^ ^ . ^ ^
Not a single German spy was uncovered during World War I thanks to the worfc
of these vigilant dtizens, and much of what they did was ineffectual or even absurd.
Volunteers in New Haven, Connecticut, kept a round-the-clock watch at an antiair-
crafr device they had installed to protect the city against an (unlikely) aerial invasion
fix>m Germany. The earnest patriots of a vigilance group in Portland, Maine, seized a
suitcase abandoned in downtown Longfellow Square. They "gii^rly" brought the
bag to police headquarters, where it was "carefully examined and was found to con-
tain a quantity of men's soiled underwear."'^
Other stories, however, offer little comic relief During the war, vigilance societies
tainted padfists, suffragists, ethnic minorities, religious fundamentalists, trade
unionists, and socialists. Incidents of violent, spontaneous prowar crowd action
abound, but organized groups working with the institutions of government and dvil
society already in place in local communities conducted most political coercion.
Those organizations repeatedly glossed over or ignored issues of legal process and
wasted little energy on establishing with precision their authority to make arrests—
on what grounds and consistent with, or despite, what specific structures of law.
They were not thoughtless mobs who believed the Constitution a meaningless scrap
of paper, even as they appeared to treat it as such, but organized men and women
deeply concerned about the survi'ral of American democracy as t h ^ underetood it.
The wartime context mattered. Calls for citizen vigilance raised the demand for
volunteer policing, and wartime dhetoric and fear of subversion heightened its signif-
icance. The war also altered the relationship between private political coercion and
the state. Americans were accustomed to private citizens' policing their neighbors'
ideas and behaviors, their labor and leisure, before World War I. Yet it was only dur-
ing the war—âs i<âs, behaviors, labor, and leisure had to be mobilized, regulated,
and governed in order to defeat the enemy—that the practices of citizen policir^
came to be state projects, even when they were not conducted under state auspices.
As the needs of modern war blurred the line between state and society, between
mobilization and social control, the war tied private coerdons to state interest.
This essay takes up four episodes that demonstrate the virality of the four tradi-
tions of vigilance outlined above. In each case, wartime vigilance societies drew from,
and altered, existing patterns of coercion, and each demonstrates the interpénétration
of vigilance and \dgilantism. Wartime groups both used and ignored legal institu-
tions, as they engaged in practices ranging from persuasion to coercive persecution.
Finally, the essay examines how the postwar debate about m<^ violence and law and
" Pctewon and Fiœ, O^nmts ofV^, 18. On die American Protarave League, see Harold M. Hyman, To Try
Mere &mk: Laytd^ Tern in American Himry (Wtstport, 1981), 2JS7-V\ aiKl Jensen, Price ef Valance.
'* R t ^ n G. Offlcrweis, Ilhrte Cenutries of Neu) Hauen. 1^38-1938 (New Haven, 1953), 404; Pitrdand Tek~
^öiKcdißC^^T. Ijwinjr., "ÍTo«BaQÍdedAgconioaWorÍd^íKu',''in Gretatr Portimd Celebraban 350.
=., 1984), Î24.
order responded to events on the wartime home front and how it attempted to rec-
oncile the coxiflicts between vi^lance, obligation, and the law in national citizenship.
Delèiidisig die Connecticut Home Firont
The war obliged American citizens to serve in the nation's defense. Those who did
not go to the trenches of Franœ would fight the war at home. Against the innagined
dangers of German attack and domestic subversion, vigilance against invasion, dis-
loyalty, and sabotage became basic tasks. Members ofthe Citizens' Protective League
in Covington, Kentucky, stockpiled arms while other townspeople volunteered as
public speakers. Their patriotic counterparts in New Jersey formed espionage com-
mittees and a women's gun club as they knitted socks and scarves. Whether federal or
state governments had lâlly authorized the groups was not always on their minds.
Good citizenship for the wartime civilian required voluntary service for the war effort
and vigilance in all matters. Events in the industrial state of Connecticut demonstrate
the role of voluntar policing in war mobilization.'^
On March 9, 1917, nearly a month before the United States declared war on Ger-
many, the Connecticut legislature authorized the formation of the Connecticut
Home Guard, "a body of armed troops for constabulary duty within the state." By
the time of the armistice, 19,336 citiîns had worn its makeshift secondhand uni-
forms. All were men, mostly above draft age or otherwise exempt. The guard s leaders
were bankers, lawyers, and doctors, but its rank and file included small businessmen,
farmers, traveling salesmen, and clerks. Most were experienced members of fraternal
organizations; only a few were military veterans. Nearly all were native-born white
Protestants in a state deeply divided by ethnic and religious tensions.^^
The Connecticut Home Guard was dedicated to the defense of the state and its
industries, especially miinitions. Charles Burpee, a local historian and himself a colo-
nel in the Home Guard, later wrote, "Though the mass ofthe so-called 'foreign' pop-
ulation was devoted to Connecticut principles, Germans included, a very contrary
socialistic element. . . had organized, and the Deutschland genius for working mis-
chief behind the lines had been evidenced, as was to be expected." The Home
Guard's authorizing legislation limited its power: it had no legal authority for much
of its work, and its members were specifically forbidden to make arrests. The guards-
men, however, regularly disregarded lâl formalities.^^
'* Edward E Alexander to Roger N. Baldwin, Sept. 16, 1918, American Civil Uhertifs Union Archives,reel12,
vol. 72; A History of the New Jersey State federation ofmmen's Clubs. 1894-1958 (CaldweU, 1958), 54; Kimberiy
S. }ensen, "Minerva Km eve Reid of Mars: AiBerican Women, Citizendiip, and Military Servtee in tlœ Firat World
War" (Ph.D. diss.. University of Iowa, 1992), chap. I.
1' "An Act Conc^ning the HOOK Guímd," in Conneaicut Home Guard, Regulations ßtr the Connecticut Home
Guard (Hartford, 1917), 1; Coiaiecticut Mtíitary Emeiçency Board, Report to ÜK Gotxmor: November 1, 1918
(Hartfoid, 1918), 1. On d « makaip of tíie Home Guard, sec Bruce Fras«, "Yankees at War: Social N^rfíitízatron
cm the Connecticut Homefrom, 1917-1918" (ñi.D. dira., Columbia University, 1976), 97-99, 35î-AÏ;Connect-
kat H<Hne Guaid, i^îter ^Ctgkers (IHartfiard], 1917). Hartfemi and New Haven had some reserve units in
vûch all the c^ôcds lad Itd¿in mmames. Africasi Amiîcans, ^^lo nun^jeisd Ëswer áxm 20t(K)0 in t ^ state's pop-
ulados in 1917> iue mentíoned lUMviwrein dK piUîcadoosof the Home Qjard or isáies RX»RÍS ofthe home front
km% i»gsnáiaiom, ifîkh leads lae to 1 ^ tentative a»iidiei<^
" Oiarics W. Buipee, Burpees theStoryofConnecti^t (New \brk, 1939), 958; "Aa Act Conceming the Mäi-
The Home Guard quicMy got to work, in dose collaboration with other voluntary
associations, industrial corporations, and the federal govemment. The firsc task was to
coordinate the state's military census of May 1917, which aimed to record vital data on
every adult man in the state in preparation for military conscription. The guard later
stood watch during the rîstration calls of the Selective Service System and showed its
strength in Home Guard parades in towns across the state just before the registration
day. As the guard noted in its official report, the parades "gave to certain inhabitants of
the State a salutary objea lesson and warning which they needed" at a time when
many of Connecrticuts young men were surely considering drafr e^^lsion. The HtMne
Guards also vigilantly protected the state's railroad bridges and power insmllations
from enemies foreign and domestic. In January 1918, acting on a spurious tip that the
radical unionists of the Industrial Workers of the World (iww) were planning to set fire
to industrial facilities and to bomb the bridges of the New York, New Haven and Hart-
ford Railroad, four thousand guardsmen st€K>d watch through the cold winter night.'^
In April 1917, afrer the federal government ruled that enemy aliens could not live
near munitions manufticturers, the Home Guard forcibly evacuated New Haven resi-
dents from homes near the Winchester Repeating Arms factory. The gârd also col-
laborated with other wartime oiganizations, particularly the American Protective
League. Together, the two groups invaded the weekly meeting of a Hartford socialist
group in April 1918 afrer the U.S. attorney's office had refused to indict the radicals
for sedition. Seizing the stage, Charles Burpee demanded that the socialists pledge
allegiance to the flag and warned them of the dangers of their disloyalty:
This city must be purified. The law will act according to the law's own course. In
this city we have plenty of citizens ready to back up the law and show the law its
course. . . . All law depends on public opinion. Public opinion makes law. No law
can be supported without public opinion. When the people enter a great war like
this, they are the
Here was the vigilant citizens attitude: not bald-faced disrespect for the law (although
it must have seemed that way to the assembled socialists), but a theory of citizenship
tia," in Connecticut Home Guard, Regulatiom, 3. Home Guards were active in dozens of states during tbe war.
Many were initiated after thefederalizationof the Nadonal Guard made tbose utxits unavailable to state governors.
In Pordand, Maine, tbe Sons of Veterans collaborated with the Cumberland County Power and Ligbt Commis-
sion to guard against German s^wtage. Clark T Irwin Jr., "WWî Galvanizes Region's Acdvides," in Greater In-
land Celebmtion. comp. and ed. Barnes, 136. On similar work in M a r j ^ d and Texas, see Maryland War Records
Commission, Maryland in the World War. 1917-1919: Military and Naval Service Records (Baltimore, 1933), 99-
101; Mrs. Ralph E. Randel, ed., A Time to Purpose: A Chronicle of Carson County (4 vois., Hereford, Tea., 1966-
1972), I, 280, IV, 293; and Roy Eddins, ed.. History of Falls County, Texas ({Maríin, Tex.], 1947). 212-13. The
Texas Raiders sjwnt most of World War I along die Mexican bonier. Charles M. Robinson III, The Men Who
Wear the Star: The Story of the Texas Rangers (New York, 2000), 269-79.
" "Connecdcuts Military Census," Review ofReviews, 55 (May 1917), 534; Marcus H. Holcomb, "Connecd-
cut in tbe Van," ibid., 57 (May 1918), 520; Connecticut Military Emergency Board, Report to ^ Governor, 3-4.
Tbc ixôrt not« that tbe tip was provided by tbe U.S. Secret Service, but it probably came from die volunteer
operatic» ctf the American Proteaive League.
'* OsHTvreis, Thrw Centuries ofNew Haven, 4Ö3-A. Some 6,300 ali«is nationwide were arrested in enfotcraamt of
cnenty aücn i^jslation; see Li^fce, Bonds of Loyalty, 255-56; and Harry N. Scheiba, The Wtimn Admimstration ami
OvilUberties, 1917-1921 (Idiaca, I960), 14. Charles Burpee, "Canna:dcut in die Wars," in Hismry of Connecticut in
MemgmphicForm. ed. Nortis Galpiß Osbotn (5 vols.. New York, 1925), V. 127; "Socialist Meedng Packed by Patriots,"
M Y^ Tribune, ,^ml 8, 1918, dippii^ in j4»«m«i Gvil liberties Union Archives, reel 8, vol. 70; "Home Guards
Sociaiât RaBy," New Yore Cali April 8,1918, ibid For Bmp^'s staicmcnt, see Fraser, ""SknlMs at War," 307.
1364 The Joumal of American History Mardi 2002
that located sovere^nty in the people and would not separate the power of the state
from that of the citizens who consdtuted it and had been authorized to a a in its
name.
The men of the Connecticut Home Guard described diemselves as the descen-
dants of the minutemen who had ddFend^l the New England countryside more than
a century before, and the work they did was unexcepdonal in Connecticut's long his-
rory of industrial strife and ethnic tension, in which the technicalities of law luul fre-
quendy been ignored in the interests of order. The men of the Home Guard, fearing
revolution or subversion and preoccupied with the n^ds of die nation during \rar,
viewed the law as a tool to manipulate, radier than a set of institutional constraints to
obey. Nor, it spears, did they deem violent coercion ill^timate, as their summary
evictions and their Ktid on die Hartford socialists demonstrate. As Burpee later
noted, the guardsmen "were comfort and satisfaction especially to the munitions
plants and the manners of the railroads." Not only corporate boss«, but the thank-
ful crowds who filled Hartford's streets on Armistice Day cheered them, and Gov.
Marcus Holcomb decorat«! them in front of the state capitol. Their coercions were
not unknown in prewar industrial centere such as urban Connecticut, but t h ^ were
shaped by the war effort and folded into the national war project in ways that high-
l i ^ t o l their ambiguous lâl status. In Connecticut there was litde public opposi-
don to that ambiguity. Elsewhere die actions of vigilance organizations led some
critics to try to disentangle the interwoven threack of public and private that these
groups represented.^^
Keeping Vigil over Labor in the Arizona Copper Mines
Connecticut was not the only state in which quasi-military organizations formed and
dedicated themselves to citizen policing and the suppression of labor militancy. In
Bisbee, Arizona, a small copper-mining dty on the Mexican border, the summer of
1917 witnessoi a crisis of coercion, authority, and political legidmacy that demon-
strates the contested barrier between vigilance and vigilantism in the wartime era.
The rule of law did not have a firm hold in Arizona in 1917. Mining companies
wielded enormous power at dieir own niines, and they employed both privare police
forces and groups formed by citizen volunteers. State and local government offidals
regularly sided vnui the corporations against the workers. But in the summer of
1917, the state was in polidcal crisis, as the sitting Democratic governor G. W. P.
Hunt had refused to tuni over the reins of power to RûbUcan Thomas E. Camp-
bcál after a heated and almost certainly corrupt election. The crisis in the statehouse
lefr the day-to-day ^svemance of much of die state almost endrely in the hands of
die mining bosses.^
War mobilizadon ciianged both the copper industry ami the siîfkance of and-
kbor vigilance. Every bullet used at diefrcMitrequired almost a quarter ounce of pure
"Yankees at War," 107; Buip«, "Connccticat in Ae mis," 127.

á T d ^
On July 12, 1917, over two ibousand members of two ^dgilance groups, the Citizens' Protec-
tive League and the Workmen's Loyalty League, used organized force to expel nearly twelve
hundred residents (most of them striking members of the Industria! Workers of the World)
from the copper-mining town of Blsbee, Arizona. Courtesy Arizona Historical Society/Tucson,
AHS2768.
copper, sending the price of the mineral (and corporate profits) skyrocketing, while a
wartime inflationary spiral left workers feeling pinched. Labor shortages caused in
part by drafr call-ups made the workers at the Phelps-Dodge mines in Bisbee more
confident about unionizing. Some chose the more moderate International Union of
Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, a branch of the American Federation of Labor, but
most workers in Bisbee chose the radical unionism of the Metal Mine Workers
Industrial Union no. 800, affiliated with the rww.^'
On June 27, 1917, more than half of the forty-seven hundred workers at the Cop-
per Queen mine in Bisbee walked off the job. A bitter strike draped on for weeks,
and production of copper for the war efFort reached a near standstill. Mineowners,
town leaders, and the national press interpreted the strikers' actions as disloyal and
outrageous. Bisbee residents formed two organizations to oppose the stril«:: the Citi-
zens' Protective League gathered business leaders and middle-dass locals, while the
Workmen's Loyalty Lesê organized nonstriking mine workers.
Early in the morning on July 12, 1917, over two thousand members of the two
leagues, as well as hundreds of privately hired detectives and the president of the
^' Carios A. Sdtwant«, Toil and Trouble: Rhydims of Woik Life," infiöÄsf:Urban Ou^mst on the frontier,
cd. Carlos A. Sdwanres (Taoon, 1992), 121. For the suggestion that bodi unions were ^mpadieticTOdie Indus-
trial Worfeerstrf die Worid by Ae summer of 1917, see Dubolsky, 'H^SfeflÄfflf^ 370. The Biièce workforcewas
a mix c^tunrdian, KKtdl^ti, and e a a ^ Etinjpeui immigrant woricers, as wdl as African Americvis, Mexicans,
and some OûBoœ, vvho were oiditded frtmi the town of Bisbee Í Í A E See Quries S. Saluent, "Copper Star of the
AiiHHM U i ^ Rramiicnt," in ^s^. ed. Stiiwances, 35-36. On âa dc»ninadon trfthe towm l ^ "noitíicm Euro-
peans and Amaáaai-hom w 4 û ^ ' -SK Tom Vai^glun. "Everyday Liic in a Copper Camp," ibid., 59-61.
1366 The Joumal of American History March 2002
Rjsidents of Bisbee, Arizona, volunteered to aid Sheriff Harry E. Wheeler in the deportation. One
of their white armbands, symbols of voluntarism and of an assumed \eg^ authority, can be seen on
the right arm of the man in the middle distance. Courtesy Arizona Historical Sodety/Tucson, AffS
43171.
Phelps-Dodge Corporation (who "happened to be in Bisbee on the day of the depor-

tation"), were deputized by Sheriff Harry E. Wheeler of Cochise County, a former
Rough Rider. Wheeler told the men that the federal government had authorized
them to deport the strikers (although they h ^ not been so authorized), gave his new
deputies white armbands, and set them to work rounding up "on the charges of
Vibrancy, treason, and of being disturbers of the peace of Cochise County ail those
strange men who have congregated here." The deportation itself was a political circus
that indiscriminately detained men, women, and children, regardless of thdr opin-
ions on the war or their actions during the strike. By midday, approximately twelve
hundred townspeople were held under armed guard in a baseball park in a neighbor-
i i ^ town. By late afrernoon, they were marched at gunpoint onto trains provided by
the El Paso and Southw^tem Railroad and deported to New Mexico, where they
were unceremoniously dumped in the desert town of Hermanas .^^
" Walter D o i ^ ^ , presidentofPhelps-Dodgc, quoted in Tucson Citizen, May 29, 1918, in John H. Lindquist
and James Fraser, "A Socáolí^cal Interpretation of the Bisbee Deportation," Pacific Historical Review. 37 (Nov.
1968), 417. On SherifFHarry E. Wheekr's proclamation (printed in the Bisbee Daily Review, July 12, 1917, p. 1),
see ibid., 408. The Qtizens' Proteoive League had hop«! to deliver the dqwrtees to the U.S. Army camp in
Colunûs, New Mexico, but ai^ry civilians in die town refused the shipment. The most exttnaw source on the
Ztatee deportations is James W Byrkit, For^r^ the Copper Collar: Arizonds Labor-Mam^ment War of 1901-1921
(Tucson, 1982). See also Dubofiácy, We ShaU Be Aä, 385-91; Vemon H. Jensen, Heritage <f Conflict: Labor Rela-
tions in tie Non^rrous Metals Industry up to 1930 (Ithaca, 1950), 381-410; lindquist aid Fraser, "Sociological
i i á the Bi^>ec D^xmation," 401-22; í%üip J. Malinger, Race and Labor in Wes»m Copper: The
Uf 189^191$ (TUCSOT, 1995), 174-203; and Sdwantcs, cd^Äifisw. On tbe prirotely hired detec-
tives, see R i ^ r t W. &uere, "O^per Camp ftitfiotism,'' Nation, Fd>. 21,1918, p. 20Z
For the next four months, the Citizens* Protective League and the more patrician
Chamber of Commerce in nearby Dougjas effectively ruled Bisbee from a building
owned by the copper companies. The leûe issued "passports" to town residents
after oral examinations that mingled questions about the wax with questions about
the strike. No one could enter or leave Bisbee without a pass; no one found work—or
got a draft exemption—^without one either. Men and women who foiled the league s
loyalty tests were excluded from the city, deported, or imprisoned and sent to work at
the copper mines in convict labor gangs. The rule ofthe Citizens' Protective League
continued until late November 1917, despite the pleas of President Wilson and
orders from Arizona's attorney general. The competition between the state's two
competing governors left a power vacuum in which the corporations and the vigi-
lance organizations held control.^^
The Citizens' Protective Leûe claimed that its work was vital to the war. Its
spokesmen argued that they had taken the law into their own hands to defend law, not
to violate it. In a telegram to the president, Governor-êlect Campbell noted that "citi-
zens in the many mining communities affected, feeling that peace ofFiœrs cannot
afford adequate protection, are acting,. . . meantime praying for federal intervention."
Campbell, Wheeler, and the corporations insisted that it was the iww strike« who were
lawless. As Wheeler told the state attorney general, "If we are guilty of taking the law
into our own hands, I can only cite to you the Univereal Law that necessity makfâ....
I would repeat the operation any time I fmd my own people endangered by a mob
composed of eighty per cent aliens and enemies of my Government." The leaders of
the raids sought to claim the mantle of lawful vigilance and to distance themselves
from lawless vigilantism. Across the country, many Americans cheered their work. The
Los Angeles Times congratulât«! the posse, noting that "the citizens of Cochise County,
Arizona, have written a lesson that the whole of America would do well to copy."
Former president Theodore Roosevelt insisted that "no human being in his senses
doubts that the men deported from Bisbee were bent on destruaion and murder."^'*
Critics ofthe Bisbee deportations placed the leagues on the other side ofthe divide
between vigilance and vigilantism. They distinguished between legitimate and iUît-
imate political coercion and insisted on the need for legal process. From Florence,
Arizona, J. Sheik claimed that the copper companies "had taken, as it were, the gov-
ernment from out of [the governor's] hands and were running it to suit their needs."
Samuel Gompers, the president of the American Federation of Labor, also blamed
the leagues:
I assume it is not necessary for me to give any assurance of how utterly out of
acconl I am with the LW.W. and any such propaganda; but some of the men
^ Bruerc, "Cof^xï Camp Patriodsm," 203; Rofeert Bruere, "Copper Camp Patriotism: An Interpretation,"
Nation, Feb. 28, 1916, p. 235; Lindquist and Fraser, "Sodolí^cal Interpretation ofthe Bisbee Dqsorcadons,"
405-7. P^Ks asiàd also Iw issued by die chief" of police and the chambers of commerce in Ei Pa^ and Tucstm.
For an earlier example of die use of privately issued passes, see D. G. Thiesscn and Carlos A. Stiwantes, "Indus-
trial Violence In the Cœur d'Algie Mining District," Pacißc Northwest Quanerfy. 78 (July 1987), 83-90.
^ "Thomas E. C^npbdl to •'ÎTilson, teleâm, July 12, 1917, in Piepers of Woodrow Whon, ed. link ct al.,
XUII, 157. for Hsurry "Wheder's scwement, s « Duboifsky, TP^ SÊaff Be M, 386. FM die statements from the Los
Angeles TUnes «oÂ F^êvdt, see l^terson and Fite, Opponents of War. 55-56.
The Journal (Âmerican History March 2002
deported are said to be law-abiding aien eiâ^d in an earnest effort at improve-

ment of their condition There is no law of w^ch I am aware that gives author-
ity to private citizens w unc^rtake to deport from the state any man. If there be
lawlessness, it is surdiy such conducî.^^
Bruere, an investigati^re kbor journalist, observed events in Bisbee after the
deportation. In the midst of World War I, even Bruere could not countenance subver-
sion of the war effort h^ striking workere» and he echoed the copper corporations in
his critidsms of iww radicalism. But Bruere questioned the entire system of vigilance
when he insisted that the wartime need i<x order did not outweigh the value of legal
process. The dtizens' lesees, he suêsted, were the dangerous and lawless elements
in southern Arizona. "When . . . we look more dosely at the things which die copper
companies did, we are starded to find their policy inspired by the same distrust of the
State, of the constituted authorities of Arizona and the Federal Govemment, for
which they themselves condemned the I.W.W. as an 'outlaw' organization."^
The Bisbee raids prompted a conflicted response from officials in Washington.
Immediatdy afisr the workers walked out. Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson was
pleas^ that the secretary of war had decided not to dispense "troops or secret service
men" to deal with the situation in Bisbee. But the federal govemment encourêd
dtizen vigilance through its support for Arizona Home Guards. Writing from Camp
Sevier in Greenville, South Carolina, the Arizona native Clifford C. Faires noted that:
The Loyalty League of Globe [another Arizona mining town] was organized fbr the
purposes of preserving law and order and of fostering patriotism in a community
wêre it was sadly lacking. The outgrowth of this organization has been the forma-
tion of a Home Guard, which has been drilling since August, to preserve order after
the troops are withdrawn. Very recently notice was received from Washington that
this effort at safeguarding the peace is to be rewarded by Federal recognition and
supervision.^^
Faires perceptively identified the complicated and contradictory response of a gov-
ernment that depended on dtizen vigilance yet actively tried to rein in vigilantism.
As the details of the Bisbee deportation reached the White House, key figures in
the administration came to regret their slow response to the raids. Hours after the
raid. President Wilson assured Governor-elect Campbell that federal trcwps were on
their way to quiet the town but added, "Meantime may I not respectfully urge the
great d a n ^ r of dtizens taking the law in their own hands as you report their having
done. I look upon such action with grave apprehension. A very serious resporîbility
is assumed when such precedents are
» J. Sheik, "Autocracy in Arizona," Public. Feb. 16,1918, pp. 216-17; Samuel Gompera to Wilson, J u ^ 20,
1917, in Papers ofWoot^vui Wibon, ed. link et al.. XLIII, 231. For two otber vteim from Idwt, Me,ânnette
RaïUàn to WUstm, Axi^. 1,1917, ibid., 339-40; and J. L. Donnelly Mid Iliomas A. Frmcb to Wil«m, tdegnrai,
Aug.6.1917,íéw¿,373.
^ Btueie, "Cc^jper Camp PatrâMisia,* 202; Bruere, "CqpperCatiq) I>im&»:ism: An jbce^nrniuion," 235.
^ WilUam B. Wilson to NewKM D. Baker, June 22,1917, m Pa^ efWoodrow WUmh ed. lidk et ú., ÎOJI,
563; Oiffiacd C ÎÎMics, n.W.W. Pairiotistn in <aaïe." ASatóM, Matái ^
^ WHson t» Camf^dtt, tdeâm. >iiy 12^917. iß % « w (i^H^««itt^
Wilson assigned the Presidents Mecliation Commission (PMC), a board of lawyers

and labor bureaucrats generally liberal and sympathetic to labor, to investigate events
in Bisbee. The PMC, under the direction of Felix Frankfurter, worked in southem Ari-
zona throughout jfall 1917 and issued a report highly critical of the deportations. The
report also condemned the postdeportation reign of law and order by the Citizens'
Protective L e a ^ e and the Chamber of Commerce; as a cure for industrial strife, it
urged greater cooperation between labor and management, to be facilitât«! by the
federal govemment. But the PMc's greatest concern was that die leagues had under-
mined the effectiveness of other wartime loyalty oiânizations: "Such iêncies of the
public' as the so-called ioyalty leagues' only serve to intensify bitterness, and, more
unfortunately, to the minds of workers in the West serve to associate all loyalty move-
ments with partisan and anti-union aims."-^^
The wartime mobilization of American industry had changed the context of die
tense relations between labor and maniement. Accustomed to maintaining order
through citizens' groups and private police forces, the copper companies and the
town leadere w4io supported them turned to long-standing traditions of antilabor
vigilance in Bisbee in summer 1917. In part, the war was a pretext to continue pre-
war labor batdes on new terms. But it was more. League members tied their work—
and the actions of the strikers^to the fortunes of the war effort, claiming to speak
with the authority of the state in their ongoing contests over power. Sheriff WTieeler
justiHed the July 12 raid by saying of the strike, "This is no labor trouble. We are sure
ofthat; but it is a direct attempt to embarrass the government of the United States."
The wartime need for industrial mobilization made the government dependent on
such organizations even as some of its officials questioned their legitimacy. Most of
the leagues' actions were supported, even in the United States Supreme Court, which
heard a challenge to the deportations on the grounds that it infringed freedom of
movement. The Court dismissed the claim as a state issue in which the federal gov-
ernment had no interest.^*'
By making a labor dispute into a high-stakes matter of war mobilization, the
leagues also opened the door for workers to use that formulation as a weapon and to
call on state' institutions in their own defense. The leagues' more violent forms of
coerdon were debated in the press and condemned within the Wilson administra-
tion. The fundamental idea that ddzens had a duty of vigilance—^which had
prompted the formation of such oiânizations as the Cidzens' Protective L e a g u e -
was never fiiUy discredited. But the court challenges and federal investigations laid
the groundwork for new approaches that would come to the fore in later decades.
® Bruere claims to quffle diis direcdy from the President's Mediation Commission (PMC) rqwrt; sec Bruere,
"Copf^r Camp ÏWiotism," 202. But it does not af^>ear in V.S. Department of Labor, R^rt on the Bisbee Impor-
tations Made by ^ l^^tíidenti Mei&ation Commission to ^ Présidera if tbe United âm (îéúa^n, 1918). On
the fMc, see Jensen, Heritt^ of Gm^wt 411-29; and josrah A. McCardn, ¿ A Í W Í Gma War: The Strug^ßtr
Industrial Da^cmey and the Órigimef Modem American Ubor Relations. 1912-1921 (CkapdHitt, 1997). 77-80.
* Bisf^ Daäy Betñew, Jidy Í2,1917, p. 1, qimnxl in Lindquist and Frwer, "Sodoicîàl Interpretation of die
Bisbee D^wrtadon," 408; UnitedStates v. Wêler, 254 U.S. 28Î (1920).
Moral Vîlance around MiUtary Camps
The importance of moral vigilance was also heightened during die war, particularly
in communities adjacent to the nation's miUtary camps. There, the l a r ^ congr^;a-
tions of soldiers gathered in hastily constructed military installations had a sudden
impact on local communities. Many residents welc»med their presence and orga-
nizjcd recreational and social service opportunities; others worried that the popularity
of the camps with young women from town betokened imminent moral collapse.
Some of the young women were commercial prostitutes, but most were guilty only of
offending middle-dass understandings of proper female behavior. Military police
operating widi the authority of law undertook much of the anti-vice work of the
World War I era; the Sdective Service Act had made it a federal offense to sell alcohol
or operate a house of ill repute within five miles of a camp. But the enforcement of
that legislation folded into—ând dramatically transformed—patterns of moral vigi-
lance and dtizen policing of personal behavior and female sexuality. The war raised
the stakes for those vtho saw women's personal freedom as a subversive assault on the
effectiveness of U.S. troops. As D. J. Poynter of Albion, Nebraska, wrote to Secretary
of War Newton D. Baker: "Shoot the lewd women as you would the worst Cerman
spy; they do more damage than all the spys." The work of moral vigilance societies
reveals the outer limits that coercion could reach when legal authorities cooperated
dosely with private policing and few organized to oppose ic^'
Soon after the passage of the Selective Service Act, the War Department estab-
lished, in conjunction with its Commission on Training Camp Activities, a Commit-
tee on Protective Work for Girls (CPWG) to patrol the areas around military
establishments in order to protect soldiers from the dangers of prostitution. The sup-
pression of vice was a federal policy, and women and men in official positions domi-
nated the bureaucracy that oversaw it, but volunteers conducted the nighdy work of
surveillance, investigation, and internment in communities nadonwide. In every city
that had a military training camp, the CPWG established a Protective Bureau. Con-
ceived as official police forces, the bureaus were in practice staffed largely by volun-
teers, due mostly to the CPWG'S insistence that the enforcers be female, for, in tke
words of one War Department ofBcial, "it is a woman's job to work with women,"^^
The state endeavors of the CFWG intersected with die private initiatives of middle-
dass women's dubs in military communities. The conveiênce of governmental and
private polidng brought the structures of coercion down hard on allegedly loose
women. As Henrietta S. Additon, the prc^ram's assistant director, noted, "all the
" D. J. Pcynter to Baker, Au^;. 6. 1917, quoted in Nancy K. Bristow, Making Men Moml: Social Engineering
during the Great War O'iewYoik, 1996). 135.
'^ Henrietta S. îditon, "Worit among Delinquent Women and Girls," Annals of tbe American Acaden^ of
Po&tit^ and Social Science, 79 (&^t. 1918), 1 5 2 - ^ ; Manba P. Fôoner, "llie Sc^prâùon of Ddinquent Women
and Giris as a War Pr(á)iem^" ibid., 165. On the g(»%nmient's wartime attadc on prostitution, s « Btùxow.Jîc^n^
Men Mena, \\4\íy^xMawa^TeeÁxaxR, Intimau Matters, 2\\-l2\03ïu\'c^,^spon«
gmssimEm. 1 ^ H - 5 0 ; Mid Ehwid J. Pivar.'^Qcaming dw Nation: The War on Prostitution, 1917-1921,"/Wt^we,
12 (Spiûig 1980). 2 9 ^ 1 . O n the similar w ( ^ <rf-wtAmtera- pdkewDiom in Britain, see Lucy Kand, "In die
hiame lá Proteç^m: The Ptrficing of Women in úx Fita Worid Niûr," in V^mm-in-rLaw: Beplomtiom m Law,
Bonify andSexua^ eà. jfoUa B r o [ ^ and Carca Smart ( L ^ )
È2 K"
tu <&
P -cS
3 ^
cr t;
SJ M
C -o
^c c
«
SE
=•1
5 g
•c o
u o
l
si
o o
U 1.-
c u
« i
li
resources of occupation, education, health, recreation and religion in the community

are brought into play." During the war ÎVlaude Miner transferred her eneiês from
volunteer protective work to government service. In a lecture to the War Work Coun-
cil ofthe Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) National Board, Miner urged
the women of the Y to practice vigilance, and she tolerwed no slackers: "Every one
who has been around can help. At times you are too busy at work and too tired to do
anything. Combine a litde trolley car ride with some scouting work. You will find you
auinot help but f(ôw some of these youngsters home and help them." When asked
after the lecture how women could get authority for the patrols, she told her listeners,
"Just by asking for i t . . . . M of us have a certain arïiount of power. We can stop a little
girl iuid find out about her and learn ofthe danger and start the worii, and then go to
the Chief of Police and to the different officials of the city." Miner gave voice to her
understanding of women's oblations, but she also exerted agency and thereby
claim«! a space for vigilant women in die coercive work ofthe war efifort.^^
Antiprostitution squads already existed in some communities; In others, the war
led to their formation. Women's patriotic leagues could be found on the streets of cit-
ies across the country. In Massachusetts, the social worker Helen Pigeon and her col-
leagues hid in the bushes of Boston Common at n ^ t to spy on and detain women
who were consorting with soldiers. In Chillicothe, Ohio, just outside Camp Sher-
man, an army captain found the patrols efF«xive: "The worst kind of women do not
parade the streets as the Girls' Protective League operates under the 'arrest on suspi-
cion' rule, and strangers are not in town long before being picked up."^^
Women suspected of prostitution were detainol, interned, and frequently forced
to submit to medical examination, often without any lâl charges being pressed
iâinst them. At best, women were quickly released; others, particularly those
infected with venereal disease, languished indefinitely in the nations hospitals, pris-
ons, or makeshift detention centers—some behind barbed wire—^where they per-
formed manual labor under the watchfiil eye of armed guards. The vigilance
societies' definition of prostitution was frequendy \îgue: Juanita Wright, a young
woman originally ftom Spartanburg, South Carolina, was committed indefinitely to
the Sherbom Reformatory for Women in Massachusetts aitci word reached the Pro-
tective Bureau there that she was living with a soldier without benefit of marrlage.^^
33 Additon, "Work among Delinquoit Women and Giás," 155-56; Maude Mina, "Probation Work," [1917], "Lec-
tures under ihe Aa^îices of die W^ Work Council of the YVCA," typwcr^, fç. 52, 65-64, box 28a, Young Women's
Christian Association of dw U.SA National BOMKI Recoids {ScÂia SmiA Colkcticn, Smith CoH^, Norrfiampton,
Ma^.). Tbe General Federarion of Women's Oubs and the Nañonid Asswiadon of O ^ r e d Women were active nation-
wide in anti-vice activities. See Califbnáa Fédération of Wcmioi's Ctubs, tHanumd JubUee History HiÛ^Hs (n.p.,
1975), 16; Saliie Soothall Cowen, Hiôry ef^ Naré Carolina Feáemian ^ Women's Cbths, 1901-1925 (Raieigb,
1925). nO\ Mary }emHouát,7%eauinimuin: A Story if the lUinoitJrderatim of Women's^ Î97O),92;
Martha Lavinia Hunwr, A Quarter rfa Century History éfée Douas Womatà Foruttt, 1906-1931 (Dallas, 1932), 67;
Maude T. Jaikins, "The History ^ Ae SHatk WonKm's Oub Movea3«it in Amelia" (íliJD. diss., Teachers CoUige,
CoUimlria Univeraty, 19H), 81, 97; Mei^Kis trfAe Past ^màâam fíxuxmxm of die DaBas JBedâdon of WcHmn's
Oubs, eds.. History efée Ùaiîas Bederatíon4Wmmt'$ Ches, /«SÄ-ZÄifftDâs; 19^), 81; Maude G. PaJmer, conqï.,
Tie History of the imms Federation if Women's Ckk, 1894~19^^p., Í928%9hVlsma. Lost Sisterhood, 52,116; an
CmiesmxsmáKoitéi.Rmimanceíifée^frh^^Wefmtsatar, im4~1924{íi.p., [Ï924]), 137.
** Hobson, Uneasy Virtue. 177; Oqn. M Pi^wnoe to M;^r Joy, Mi, 20. 1919. quoted in Bmtow, Making
Men Maml 130.
^ in mnlme rwds IMI fôstimtion, wtHi^n w«e the only ra^ts; {hiring war nuîtizôn, the calls
Moral vigilance and state power interseaed with the emerging discipline of psy-
chology, as suspected prostitutes were subjected to psychological examinations.
Women fotmd to be "feebleminded" were regularly turned over to institutions with-
out their consent and with no public hearing. Further complicating matters, between
1910 and 1917, siseen states had passed lavre authorizing the sterilization of the
feebleminded, and some of the presumptive prostitutes were sterilized. It is unclear
how many women faced the strong arms of the law, of medicine, and of the nations
moral vigilance groups during the war. Official documents from the period report as
few as 15,000 women arrested as prostitutes, but the historian Allan M. Brandt sug-
gests that 30,000 were held in federal facilities alone, excluding an even greater num-
ber who encountered local laws and organizations but were not formally arrested.^
That the policing of women's sexuality was considered a specifically female obli^-
tion demonstrates the distinctly gendered aspects of citizenship in the Worid War I
United States. Men's service in the military posited a direct equation between man-
hood and full citizenship, one that the state home guards mimicked through their
exclusionary membership patterns. But patriotic women on the home front could
choose from options that ranged well beyond womens moral vigilance sociedes.
Women formed gun dubs for armed self-defense. Within days of the dedaration of
war, the American Defense Rifle dub, under the leadership of June Haughton, "an
expert rifle shot," established a rifie range on the roof of the Hotel Majestic in New
York City. The women of the Albany Colony of the National Society of New
England Women learned how to use rifles in self-defense under the direction of a
staff member from the nearby armory. In Bayonne, New Jersey, nineteen women
formed the Women's Revolver League and, using borrowed weapons and an instruc-
tor borrowed ftom the local police station, trained at the police practice ranges at the
Bayswater Yacht Club. Through their actions, these women reworked the gendered
structure of obli^tion and embedded themselves in the institutions and rhetoric of
self-defense and citizen vigilance.^''
reforméis to cradt down on males who solicited prostitution were generally ignored. Hobran, Uneasy Virtue. 176;
Freedman, Their Sisters' Keepers. l47; Bristow, Making Men Moral, 118-19; Mary Macey Diealer, Detention
Houses and Refhrmatories as Protective Social Agencies in ^ Campaign ofthe United States Govemment against Vene
real Diseases (Washington, \ 922), 64. Martha P. Falconer suêsted a national internment camp system for women
who were "a menace to tbe men in training." Sec Falconer, "Segre^tion of Delinquent Women and Giris," 160.
For a summary of actions gainst alleged prostitutes, sec Bristow, Making Men Moral, 124.
^ Rosen, Lost Sisterhood, 22-23; Allan M. Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the
United Smes since I88Ú (I^fcw Yoiit, 1987), 234nl IS. No more than onc-tbird of interned women wwe commer-
cial prostitute according to Hobson, Uneayy Virtue. 176-77. Ps)xbological testing procedures were borrowed
from tbe U.S. Army, acconiing to F^coner, "Sîâtion of Delinquent Women and Girls," I6l. On the prob-
lematic nature of die osts, sec Daniel ). Ke^4es, "Testing dïc Army's Intdligence: Psychologists and the Military in
World Wat I," Joumal ojÂmerican History, 55 (Dec. 1968), 565-81. In one study a whopping 42 of die 88
women examined were found to be feebleminded, according to îditon, "Work among Delinquent Women and
Giris," 156. On ibe stoilization irfd» fèdaieminded, see D'Emüio and Freednum, Intimate Matters, 215; Hxh-
son, Unea^ Virtue, I9l~92^ indDmiéJ.Kevks, In tbe f'-kmeífBigenics:(^netícsand tix C/ses of Humm Hered-
ity (Berkeley, 1985), 96-112. On ciutwromen's advocacy of sterilÊadon bws, see Vemetta Mucdiison H<^sett,
The Geiden Yean: A HuaryofÎdaho Federmhn of Wimen's Clubs, iiiO5-/S55 (CaldwcU, 1955), 82.
"Afett/îî»ï*7Wï, April 8,1917. sec 1, p. 5; National &)diety of NEewEnând Women, TuUt^ fimn Far and
Afcar (Oiic^fO» 1918), 14, paii^Wt^ foider 3, box 23, NMional Sodety of New & ^ a n d Womai Records (S<^bia
Snü& GoUcaiMi); Ikw J^ Tma, ^ n i l 15, 1917, sec. 1. p. 16. For a iasdaiatii^ atói mianced biôry of the
gendered poiitk» of wotaen's «^rttme me of g^ms, see Jeoaai, "Minerva im tbe Field of Mars."
Women formed patriotic lesees, surveillance sodetles, and women's auxiliaries to

all-male militias and guards. Connecticut women, for example, could not enroll in the
Home Guaixl, but the Minute Women of New Haven and Bridgeport formed a quasi-
military uniformed alternative that drilled and paraded just as men did. Some women
even joined men's vigilance organizations. A few women were members of the American
Protective League, and women were among the perpetrators of the Bisb«: deportations,
even as Bisbee's morning paper on July 12, 1917, urged, "All Women and Children
Keep off Streets Today." The obligations of citizenship were gendered, but the barriers
between the gendered variants of dtizenship were permeable. Women's wartime Wgi-
lance also demonstrates the divisions among women along lines of race and class. In
Utica, New York, the elire members of the National Society of New England Women
helped guard the Udca Gas and Electric Company, the Savage Arms Corporation, and
nearby bridges against sabotee by German spies and striking worker. But the radical
sodalist Ella Reeve Bloor also spent much of the war in Utica, organizing women work-
e r at Sava^ Arms, who struck in an effort to obtain e q i ^ pay for equal work.^^
The work of the moral vigilance sociedes on the World War I home front represents
another aspect of >^^rtime cidzen policing. Nothing that occurred, from the formation
of vice squads to forœd sterilization, was entirely new. But moral vigilance took new
forms during the war, as ongoing campaigns for citizen vigilance were incorporated into
war mobilizadon efforts. Moral vigilance work also had new meanings for the citizens
who undertook it, as women folded pri^^te policing efforts into state institutions. Ques-
tions about coercion were answered differently in this instance than in others. Radicals
in Connecticut and elsewhere had vigorously protested the Home Guard's breakup of
the socialist meetings in Hartford. In the wake of the Bisbee deportations, national
labor unions and liberal intellectuals called for defending labor £âinst the lesees. But
few organizations or individuals spolœ out on behalf of the working-class women who
were interned as feebleminded prostitutes, and a for wider range of state and voluntary
activities were deemed legitimate forms of coercion. With govemments, laws, voluntary
associations, psychologists, and reformers arrayed against them, and the relative political
powerlessness of their gender and class and sometimes race as well, these Americans bore
a heavy burden of polidcal coercion on the Wodd War I home
Keeping Vig^ over the Racial Order
Worid N)C^ I had a profound impact on African American life. Many black veterans,
concurring in W. E. B. Du Bois's strident claim V e return from fighting, we return
fighting," b ^ a n to agitate for political rigjits both in the South and in die urban
^ Ostawcis, T^Tte Centuries of New Haven, 405; Caroline RUUK-RCK, "The Mcîlization of American
Women," Yak Reviewi 7 (July 1918), 810; Fred T Frazer to American Protecdve League, Jan. 8.1918, box 5,
American Ptot^sJve League (Zorrespon^mx with Field G^BRces, 1917-1919, RBCOKÍS rathe Department erf" Jus-
tice, RG 65 (Hatiottal Ardiives. Wa;rfiingK>n, D.C); Schwantes, "Toil má Trouble," 127; ^bee Daily Revkw. |uiy
12, 1917, quoted in Undîst and Frasei; "SwásAopca Inteipmation of the ï&bce D^xírtacUm," ^ 8 n 4 3 ;
Naúonat Sodety of hfcw finâsd Women, Jtdit^Jrtm Far md Nena; 26; Ann Barton, Ma^ Bhor (New York,
1935). 16-17. Ft» a dieoraic^conudennion of v^lantismutd gender, MX Mir^^ns, Volant Citizens, 137-52.
^ £xcc^^ñom a s m ^ groi^ of Fn^nssúve wtnnon i ^ n n o s , the draconian anti-vice meanites of riie harnt
Snont &ced no public o|)positkiii, a l d i o t ^ mtmm did v^ce úick own ptoc«^ ¿rom wñhm (»isons and intem-
North, -where African Americans had migrated in large numbers during the war. But
white vigilance organizations In die South had dedicated much effort to enforcing
African American participation in the drafr and suppressing black militancy. Ten-
sions boiled over in the summer of 1919, with at least twenty-five episodes of racial
violence in cities nationwide, from Washington, D . C , and Knoxville, Tennessee, to
Birmiiâm, Alabama, and Longview, Texas. In Chiaô, at least 38 people died in
two days of rioting that began on July 27, 1919. In Omaha in late September 1919,
a crowd of six thousand attempted to lynch the city's mayor when he defended Will
Brown, an African American packinghouse worker who was the taiêt of the mob;
federal and state troops had to intervene to end the episode. In the year following the
armistice, at least 76 African Americans were lynched, 10 of them still in their mili-
tary uniforms. African Americans found that they could affirm their loyalty and law-
fulness and plead for the rule of law, or they could form their own vigilance societies
for self-defense. They attempted both approaches."*^
Some tried to stop the lynchings and race riots of 1919 by convincing white
Americans that black people needed state and legal protection from the rule of mob
violence. This was an old technique in the antilynching movement, but the message
was made dearer and more lu^gent by pointing to African Americans' loyalty during
and afrer the war. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP), in its annual report for 1919, called for law and order and affirmed the
rights of black Americans by insisting that the fW that "lawabiding colored people
are denied the commonest citizenship rights, must be brought home to all Americans
who love feir play." Writing in the Jndependent, W S. Scarborough, president of Wil-
berforce University, a historically black college in Xenia, Ohio, ^pealed to the rule
of law and conduded by asking, "Will not the American white p«>ple come half-
way—put aside their prejudices and play fair widi this people that has done so much
to hdp win this war?" Such positions were the culmination of over two decades of
organized antilynching activity, much of it drawing on the extensive networks of vol-
untary association among African American clubwomen. Hopes for a vigorous
response from the government foundered in the White House, where President Wil-
son dismissed a petition bearing thirty thousand signatures and protesting the treat-
ment of African Americans in the Washington riots. Wilson insisted that the fight for
the League of Nations treaty required all his attention.^'
In the Mississippi River Delta, however, where patient appeals to law and feirness
were ignored by white listeners, another version of fair play arcê. Citizens of Phillips
ment faciiities. Hobson, Uneasy Virtue. 168-71.

" The stanstics are horn John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss Jr.. Irom Slavery te freedom: A History ofAJncan
American! ÇNcwYoài, 1994), 346-52. See also William M. Tuttle, Race Riot: Chia^ in the I^ Summer of 1919 (fêw
York, 1970); James C. Oison and Roaaid C. Nau^, History of Nebmka (Lincoln, 1997), 289-92; and Tcra W. Hunta,
*'"TendiAnnLud Report írf^dtK NAACPforthe Yar 1919," 1920, in CivU R^hts and.^Ham Americans: A Docu-
mentary History, ed. Afiiert P. Blaustein and Robert L Zai^rando {Evanston, 1991). 339; W S. Scaiboroi^. "Race
Rioö Mid Thdr lt«nedy.''iiwSiîMbit, Aug. 16,1919. p. 223;JeéHgra-Joncs, Violence and Ri^trm in American His-
(»O^ \ 51. < ^ d u oppositíoii m J^rnchü^ SK BeJcrman, Madness ami Civilization, 45-76; Fein^^, "'Ladies and
Lyndüßg,*" \€A-^25v,}KepáynT)<má}:i^,^v(ê^nstC3malry:JessUDanUlAjrmandAe^ Campai^
against lynchif^ (New York. 1993); Jenkins, "History of the Black NXfoman's Oub Movemoit in America," 89-95;
County, Arkaiâs, fonnwi an organization to keq> watch oyer their fèUow citizens and
maintain peace and orcier in tbeir community. They met in seer«, swore oadis oí alle-
giance to "defend this Goremment and her Constitution at all times," and perhaps
stodcpiled arms for self-d^n;«:. Thê were not the n ^ t riders of the Klan. These v o -
lant Americans were the black shartt:rof^>ers of the IVi^ycssive Fanners and Household-
ers' Union of America. Their stoiy demonstrate the multiple uses of citizen vi^knce in
the early-twentieth-century United States and the contest about its sîficance.^
On October 1,1919, black sharecroppers filled the pews of a small church in Hoop
Spur, Arkansas, near the town of & i i ^ , to hear about the work of the Prc^jeîve
Farmers. Although accounts of the earliest incidents are conflicting, the sharecroppers
ended up in a gun batde with a group of white men outside the church, trlêring
three days of violence across Phillips County. Crowds of local whites roamed the
countryside, and Afncan Americans returned fire; 200 people may have diecL U.S.
Army forces restored order, but they turned over control of the county to the Com-
mittee of Seven, a privately organized white vigilance organization composed of local
busineifö and political elites. The Committee of Seven quickly established its own rule
of law in Elaine, launched an investigation of the riots, and arrested 79 African Amer-
ican men. In the wake of the committee's investigations, the trial that followed can
hardly be dignified with the name: deprived of counsel and forbidden to call witnesses
on their own behalf, every one of the black defendants was convicted by the alt-white
jury, some after just seven minutes of deliberation. Twelve men were sentenced to
death and 67 others to lengthy prison terms in what Mary White Ovington, chairman
of the board of the NAACP, called a "lynching by law." The Progressive Farmers and
Househcdders' Union was seen no more in Phillips County.'*^
Coming at the end of a months-lor^ wave official violence in the "red summer" of
1919, the riots in Elaine contributed to a movement by Airicran American activists to
put a stop to lynching and mob violence. The NAACP called a Conference on Lynching
and Mob Violence in 1919, while Ida B. Wells-Barnett publicized the violence in Phil-
lips County riirou^ a fund-raising campaign, articles in the Chicago Defender, and a
RosatjTï Tetto^-Penn, "African-American Women's Networks in the Anti-lyndiiög Crusade," in Gender, Class,
Aicr aiiiÂ^rminiAi/VïgTïï«iw£'rA ed.Noralec Frankel and Nancy S. Dye (Lexington, Ky., 1991), I48~6l;and
Robert Zangrando, The NAACP Crmade {gainst Lynching, /ÍWí^/í»50 (Philadelphia, Î980).
^ For the OMh, see Walto" E White, "'Massacrmg Whites' in Arkansas," Nation, iDec 6,1919, p. 715. On events
in Baine in 1919, see Riciiard C. QOTUKX-, A Mob Intent on Death: The t¿iACP and the Arkansas Riot Casa (Middle
town, 1988); O. A. Rogers, "The Same Race Riots of 1919," Arkansas Historical Quarteriy, 19 (Summer 1960),
1 4 2 - ^ ; Kieran laôr, "'We Have Just Begun: Wade Otganiung and Wkvvx Response in the Aiicansas Delta,
1919," ibid., 58 (Autumn 1999), 265-84; Arthur I. Waskow, Fmm Race Riot to Sit-in, 1919 and the 1960s: A Study
in the Connections betuxen ConfUct and Violence (Gaiden City, 1966); and ^ ^ Qizabedi WooduiS*, "African-Ameri-
can S t r u ^ ^ ftir Qtôenship in the Arkansas and Mississi|:î Ddtas in the Age of Jim Oow," Radical History Reeiew
(na 55, Wmter 1993), 33-51. For an axicoMBX um. erroneously report that tbe twcKe taca convicted in d^ wake of
die riots were executed, see Lee E. ^ÄHHiams «id Lee E, WiUîm II, Anomny tfFow Raee Iôts: Racial CenJUa in
KnaxaUle, Ehine (Arkansas), TulsB <W Chkúgo. 1919-1921 (Jackson, 1972), 58-55. Also uniciiabte is J. W. Butts
»id Domdty james, "The XktáBaymgCaxxsesf^^îiÚBs^yx 1^1919,'' Arkansas His^rit^C^tart^ 20(S|mng
1%1), 95-l(H. For 2 comptîenstve iúsoiñoâífim overview, see Jeuuñe M. Whayne, "Lew ViUaios ami ^tdied-
ness in H ^ Piac«: Race and Cbss in die Sané Riots," ikid., 58 (Autumn 1999), 2^-313.
^^TlwoffîciidikaditE^f^^CoimiiétKeaf Seven was 30f)eople,butfiewi^Marsbdieveih^tnuiiber. See
White, "'h^macÓBE Whim' m Aiicansas,' 715; WHIiam B. Hixson )x.> Mootßeld Storey and the MoUtionist Tradi-
19Ö.
. Coercion, and the Law in World War I America 1377
pamphlet diat she drculated in Arkansas. Public criticism of the violence in Arkansas
was suppleanöited by courtroom challenges. Speaking in Columbia, South Carolina,
in the summer of 1919, Moorfield Storey, a distinguished former president of the
American Bar Association, told his audience that "there never was a time in the history
ofthe world when it was more important to teach the knowledge of and respect for the
law." Lflce other critics of mob violence. Storey insisted, "that aä men must obey the
law is the doctrine on whidi iree governments rest"; he a i ^ e d that "there is no more
dangerous tyranny" tlum "nrobocracy." Storey would later collaborate váúi the NAACP
on court cases resulting from the 1919 Arkansas riots that eventually b r o i ^ t ques-
tions of l^âl authority and mob violence before the nations highest court.^
In his brief to the Supreme Coun, Storey aigued that the formal mechanisms of
iaw were insufficient protections vên the entire atmosphere of social life was per-
vaded by coercion: "If any juror had had the courage to investigate said chaise, with
any spirit of fairness, and vote for acquittal he himself would have been the victim of
the mob." The legal system, claimed Storey, might be an insufficient safeguard
against the mob, even when it operated according to its rules. In a dramatic dârture
from earlier decisions, the Court ^ e e d , ruling in 1923 to overturn the verdicts. As
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in the majority opinion in Moore v. Dempsey:
If the case is that the whole proceeding [of a trial] is a mask—that counsel, jury,
and judge were swept to the fatal end by an irresistible wave of public passion . . .
neither perfection in the machinery for correction nor the possibility diat the trial
court and counsel saw no other way of avoiding an immediate outbreak ofthe mob
can prevent this Court from securing to the petitioners their constitutional rights-'*^
The law, in other words, could itself be a form of mob violence. In such a situation,
said Holmes, the Court could intervene to guarantee a fair trial. The ruling in Moore
V, Dempsey demonstrates how widespread postwar concerns idrout mob \iolence and
legitimate authority found one resolution in the judicial process. It held out the pos-
sibility, eagerly hoped for by civil libertarians and African American activists, that the
law might act as the arbiter ofthe boundaries of political coercion.
Tltó Postwar Debate over Law and Order
Even as thqr marched in Armistice Day parades in November 1918, few of the
nations vigilance societies felt that their work was done. The Connecticut Home
Guard, for eûnple, petitioned Governor Hola)mb to foresail his attempt to dis-
band the oiânization. Members noted that "the State should have at its command
** Jenkins, "History of the Sack Woman's Oub Movement in America." 93; Zar^rando. NAAŒ Crusade
agaimt Lynching, 23-50; Ida B. Wdk-Bamctt. Cntsadeßr/ustiee: The Aui^^^hy of Ma B. WeUs. ed. Atíireda M.
Dusttr {Qbicî^, 1970), 397-404. WeBs-Bametts work «ras not a l w ^ welcomed by the NAACP. See ibid., 400-
^h h/ioQiBxad Stxxw> Ohee^ncv to the Law: An AMress at the Openir^tf Petigru Coiúge in Co^
lina (hcmxm, 1919), 3-5. 7. O« tke NAACT'S îegJ campaign, see Conner, Mob Intent on Death, 106-84; and
Waácow, Frtm Raee Riot to Sit-in. 143-74.
*^Hixxin,A^tßeld Storey md the AboiitimiM Tradition, 184; Moorr v. Dempsey^ 261 U.S. 86, 91 (1923). But
seeJiáaJQe^mMáiO McReôlds's dissmt^ "Hie ééxys ii»^d<^ to oifoicranoit of <mr criminal Ivws have become
a ntóonai scandai and give s«ôus alann lo dwae vAo observe." Ibid., 93.
1378 Tlie Joun^ of American Histoiy March 2002
Afiican Americans defended themselves i ^ n s t organized violence in personal confrontations,

indudir^ tbe one pictured here in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, and t h r o i ^ legal channels: Tbe
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People succeeded in persuîng die
Supreme Coun to overturn tbe convictions of twelve black men condemned to death after riots
in Elaitie, Arkansas, in 1919 (Moore v. Dempsey, 1923). Courtesy Tulsa Race Riot Collection.
McFarUn Library, University of Tulsa.
during the time of reconstruction and readjustment of public and private afers, a
weíl-dÍKUpiined and reliable military force of sufficient strength to protect life and
property within its borders in any emergency." The governor granted their rwûest,
and guard members probably hdped quell the town-gown batde of New Haven of
May 28, 1919, when three hundred soldiers and five thousand townspeople, out-
raged by student catcalls at a military band concert, stormed the Yale Univereity cam-
pus and beat students until they were forcibly disbanded."*^
The lajgest postwar v ^ a n c e organization was the American Legion. Founded
soon after the war as a veterans' organization, the legion jumped wholeheartedly into
the tumultuous conflicts of the postwar period, and legionnaires ftequendy
attempt«! to impose their vision of Americanism and sodal order through extrairai
means. The kgion worked dosely with pid>lic and private espionage and surveillance
oiganizations, as in Cleveland, Ohio, on May 1, 1919, when legionnaires and former
members of the American Protective League broke up the city's May Day parade and
K>re red i a ^ from the hat:^ of sodalist vasrans who darai march in dïeir own uni-
forms. Later in the yeat. Armistice Day brought violence to Centralia, Washington,
** Cotmectkut Military EnKxgency Bcsid, Report to ÍAÍ Governor. 7; "Two \ f e i ^ » t 2S 5.ÍXK) Mc^ ^&ile Stu
doais," AÍB» York Tribune. W ^ M, 1919, di^^pÍE^ in Amîcan Gvil liberties Uniem Jhthives. red 8, vol. 70.
RolUnG. Osti^wm daims éa& ^Ceauiectû^t l<sbdaBaî Ouard httAuc \3ç the tvst, t»tt it was piobably the Home
Gua«L Oai»weis, Thra Centuria t^Nem Havm, 408.
Vigilance, Coerdon, and die Law in World War I America 1379
where legionnaires stormed the local iww hall and exchanged gunfire with the men
inside. They then captured local iww leader Wesley Everest, castrated and killed him,
and draped his body through the city streets wrapped in an American flag.**^
Despite calls from across the polidcal spectrum to rein in the postwar violence, the
continuity power of die American Legion and similar groups, including the Ku Kïux
Klan, wtóch made over two hundred appearances in twenty-seven states and added
one hundred thousand names to its membership rolls in the year afrer the armistice,
demonstrates that extral^d politicd coercion persisted afrer the war. Throughout the
1920s, the i ^ o n and the Klan continued to esœrcise forms of political coercion, rang-
ing between the legitimate and the illîtimate, that reflected wartime ptecedents.^^
In response to the violence of the war and postwar years, many called for the rule
of law. In Oklahoma City, viêre an aggressive state council of defense and groups
such as the Knights of Liberty acted with the support of the state govemment, Har-
bw's Weekly editorialized on the dangers of suspending the rule of law:
Armed with the great authority of public opinion, the Councils rapidly assumed
judiciary and almost legislative tights. In some instances, the same men acted as
accuser, prosecutor, judge and jury. . . . No autocratic government in die past cen-
tury ever suspended the great fundamental principle, that a person dialed with an
offense gainst the law must have the right of triai, to face his accusers or to have
the counsel of one versed in the
Or, as the Omaha World-Herald tàxtonsMiM in October 1919 in the wake of the
riot there:
We have learn«! how frail is the barrier wîich divides civilization from the primal
jungle, and we have been given to see deariy what that barrier is. It is the law. It is
the might of the law wisely and fearlessly administered. It is the respect for and obe-
dience to the law on the part of the members of sodety. When these fàu us, all
things iail. When these are lost, all will be lost.^
Such a vision—that legal process, not violence, divides lîtimate from illegitimate
political coercion—rested on a different characterization of mob violence and vigi-
lantism and different views of the place of law in polidcal life from those held by
members of vigilance sodeties.^'
^' William Pencak, For God and Country: The American Legion, 1919-1941 (Boston, 1989); Marcus Duffield, King
¿i?wn (NewYork, 1931); Thomas A. Rumer, The American Legion: An Official History. 1919-1989 (fiewYoik, 1990). On
erents in Cleveland, s«e "Tlie May D ^ Kiotit^," itóítíflB, May 10, 1919, p. 726. On a similar event in Gary, Indiana, see
"Red Chief Beats It As Moh Threatens," New York World, May 4, 1919, dipping in American Civil Liberties Union
Archives, reel 8, vol 70. On CentralU, see Dubofeky, We Shaä Be All, 455~%; Tom Copland, The Cemralia Tragedy of
1919: Ebner Smith and tbe WobbUes (Seatde, 1993); and the lightly fictionalized account in John Dos Passos, 1919 (New
York, 1932). For an exam|^ of batd« between die American Legion and the NAACP, see Wedin, Inheritors of the Spirit, 193.
^VnsMm ma Moss, fr&mâvery to Freedom. 349.
*" Harkuts Weeklji, Dec. 11, 1918, p. 4, quoted in Edda Bilger, "The'Oklahoma Vorwärts': The Voice of German-
Ammcans in Oklahoma duriiç Wtwld \ 5 ^ I." Ommkles of Oklahoma, 54 (Summer 1976), 252. Bilger suggests Aat
there was wide^fcad aipport for mob vifAtncs m newsps^pers in Okkhoma Gty and Tuisa in 1917 and earfy 1918, but
that oppwBtiwi Oí it bccrâîe more common by kte Ï918. Ibid., 256.
* OnuéaWorid-Heniid, quoted In Timaha." Literary Disea. Oct. 11,1919, p. 16.
" On dtU dijtiiicñim, xt Siown, "History of Vigüantísm in Amoica,'' 108-9. Bor an overview of fay words in dis-
cussioiu (rf^dting Mid mob AdoleDce,M!eFdmsKr, "'Ladies and lyndüf^,'" 18-44; and C 3 u m e ç ^ WaMiep, " \ f e
of Words: T V CMjOoversy over d » Definition of lA^chine, 1899-194^," ßmmal ttfSotabem History, 66 ÍFdi. 2000),
75-100.
1380 The Journal of Ajnfñcan History Mardi 2002
For most Americans, the call was for "law and order," for a strengthening of con-
stituted legal authwities' control of political coercion. Tlie 1918 "sladser r^ds"—in
which American Protective Les^jue members drculated on streets, in baUparks, and
in other public places demancting tiiat men show their draft cards and detaining
those who did not comply—prompted a flareup of dissent diat brought the league's
a m b ^ o u s legal status into focus. The APL W ^ qulddy shut down, but the Justice
Dârtment was simtdtaneously hiring a dozen new federé agents a week. Postwar
legislation simÜarly took power to regulate prostitution away from women's volun-
teer vigilance societies wdiile it dramatically expanded the tcaxh of state power by
authorizing die intervention of boards of health and local police. Harlow's Weekly,
which had spoken out passionately for the rule of law, hoped diat it would be used to
rein in lawless German Americans "because they failed to use the caution so necessary
in this time of stress." In the wake of the Washington, D . C , riots, wme s o u ^ t to
UK law to control, not white rioters, but African American citizens. "Already a bill
bdbre the Senate seeks to separate the races on street cars," noted the Independent. In
the wake of the events of 1919, Congress considered a bill making lynching a federal
crime but did not adopt it. The nationwide May Day violence of 1919 led one sena-
tor to state that he would "at once introduce a bill in Congress making it unlawful to
advocate, among other things, by a 'general cessation of industry,' the 'overthrowing
of the Government of the United States, or any other Government,' in California the
wholesale arresting of 'undesirable aliens' is already under way."^^
In the immediate afrermath of the war, the political situation was presented as a
choice between law and order and social chaos. Among the growing community of
civil libertarians, a stark picture of American politics also prevailed, but viewed from
a different angle. The activists of the National Civil Liberties Bureau—like their
opponents, the law-and-order conservatives who clamored for stricter loyalty laws—
wanted more laws, and they wanted them more consistendy enforced.^^
Another area in which civii libertarians and conservatives concurred was in thdr
denunciation of "mob violenœ." Where one side saw jingoistic superpatriots, another
feared subversive anardüst strikers, but both understood the mob to be made up of the
same sodal types, and both thougjit mob rule posed similar dangers to American
democracy. As one commentator wrote of the July 1919 race riot in Washington, D.C:
The mobs that broke the long record erf"good order in the National capital were
made up almost wholly of twys l^twMn eighteen and twenty-five years of a^. In
" HarUw's Weekfy quoted in Richard C Rohrs, The Germans in Oklahoma (Norman, 1980), 45: E. H. Rush-
more ro Capt. Outiles D. Frey, Oct. 4, 1918, btHt 7, Asamcan Pnwecdve L e : ^ ^ Corre^xHKimce with Field
Offices, 1917-1919, Recordsof the Department of Justice; "The ^«^Khingcon Riots," Independent, Aug. 2,1919,
p. 147; "May Day Rioting," 726. See dso H d r i ^ F. Dowell, A Histoty of Crimnal SjfndkaUsm Legislation in the
United States (1939; New Ybik, 1969)' "Law and oider** was a |m>nihient issme in dhe 1920 fêsiduitial cam-
pados. Camüda^s coiuàckïed fot úie Rqnüîcan and Democcaiic ivsnaiaaóom iaduded maay who had made
thèr namtí as «k&nders of ixw and oftkr—Gov. Qdvin Cooli<%e of Massadiuseta. Gov. James O»[ <^ Ohio.
Mayor Ole Hanson of Seank, Attorney Gênerai A. MiiicidJ Paini^, and Gen. ÎMmarà Wood—while cbe Social-
ist party made nu^ ñoience a cmteipiecx of its ca0^MÛ{^ on behalf (^ Eigene V.XJM>&, áien in fedeial îson in
Adanta. See Donaád S_ McCoy, 'Ticcdoa of 1 9 ^ . " m Himry Âmericm PrmdetOaî Ekôm, 1789-1968, ed.
A A U S à k i ^ l d k i k % ^
few an « i m a ^ (^^Micatioa^ issu^from rifteHsu^»^ Ovtl Ubemesûeut (laecx Fexvuned ^ À n ^ -
CivU Ubemra Ui«»i), IK Ëveiètt Dean Maitín, Tbe Moh Mind vs. Gml Uheny {ficwYotk,
part thcw were composed of young roughs of the dty. The rest were soldiers and
saikirs, àiher dischaiêd or from near-by camps, and irom their appearance doubt-
less of the hoodlum element of their home towns.^
Such statements attributing social disorder to spontaneous, disorganize
of lower-dass men were common throughout 1919.
Some leading postwar intellectuals contributed to this vision of the mob as they
reformulated their thoughts on crowd psychology and mass politics. European SCKÍ-
ologists at the turn of the century considered the significance of mob psycholc^ in
an extended debate that gave voic^ to their concerns about mass democracy. Prewar
American thinkers often challenged the antidemocratic assumptions of this literature.
Writing before the war, the historian Allan Nevins chastised a European theorist of
crowd psychology for ignoring "the immense hopefulness in the gradual rationaliza-
tion of the crowd which is going on all around us" and suêsted a progressive inter-
pretation of the crowd. "Not even in the backward parts of the world is the crowd, in
any sense of the term, so excitable and blind as it once was." That view would not
prevail in the postwar years. By then, intellectuals had come to fear the mob instinct
and its power over the American mind; Walter Lippmann worried that "at the
present time a nation too easily acts like a crowd."^^
In their sociological and intellectual assumptions, the critics of mob violence—who
had witnessed the violence of the American home front firsthand—^were not entirely
wrong. But such a viewpoint acted to make the working of American political ccK^cion
invisible, in two ways. Fißt, it obscured the central role played by oiânÍ2£d groups and
local elites in the narrow catôry of events called "mob violence." Second, by focusing
on violent passion and ignoring the ways that vigilance groups had exercised their pow-
ers with the consent of the government, this literature helped sweep the more system-
atic, oiânized, and passiotiless coercions under the rug of political legitimacy.^
In M 1917 Bisbee witnessed wât the city's Daily Review called "a splendid gathering
of high-dass, patriotic business men and workers and professional men of the district."
Sheriff Harry Wheeler, who had led the deportatiotis that July and who was viciously
rehuked in die Presidents Mediation Commission report, was the guest of honor.
Accepting the accolades of his fellow community leaders. Wheeler said, "My friends,
you pay me too much honor in this matter. There were scores of men in that drive the
^ "Racial Tension and Race Riots," Outlook, Aug. 6,1919, p. 533.

" Allan Nevins, "Crowds and Crowd-ft^diok^," Dial, May 11, 1916, pp. 465-66. Nevins's essay is a review
of Martin Conway, TTie Crowd in Iûtce and VCkr (t^zw York, l9lS).W9ÍtcrUppaann, Liberty and the News (^sw
Yorit, 1920), 56. &Ä dso Waiter Uppmann, The Phantom Public (New York, 1925); and, for a rontrasting view,
John Dewey, Tlie ñf^ anä Ití Problems (New York, 1927). For an extended considwadon of Lîpmann and
Dewey on 'die piddk," see Robert B. W«tbrook,>í'» Dewey and American Democracy (Idiaca, 1991), 275-318.
^ On the t ^ t i o n ^ p between da», gender, ra«, and crowd violena:, see Feimster, "'LiKÜes and Lynching'";
Paul A. GUje, RiotitînAmertmfôomaxgsm, 1996); and Leonard L. Richards, Gentlemen of Propa^ and Stand-
ing: Anti-Abditàinust Mobs in Jacksonian America (New Yoric, 1970). The long-standii^ tradition of ercuang the
crowd iusioiis i^^gendemen of propnty and standing" help«! elites disdngui^ Aeir own potitical cooi^ns from
ones dwt éireaîed Atar social
1382 The Journal of American Hiôry March 2002
morning of July 12 who are entitled to more honor than 1, who did more than I that
day for the district and our home fires. I merely did my duty. I couldn't shirk."^^
On the World War I American home front, there were many men and women
who, like SherifiF Wheeler, felt they could not shirk the duty of vigilance in service of
the war effort. And so they responded, drawing on social practices they knew and
creating others as they went along. During the war Americans policed their fellow
citizens as part of a mobilization effort that pervaded nearly every facet of national
life. At the factory and at school, in churches and in dance halls, on the streets and on
the telephone, ordinary Americans were watched and governed by their fellow citi-
zens. The apparatus of surveillance would not have been constructed had not many
Americans viewed vigilance as basic to good citizenship and had not officials at all
levels of government tolerated and even encouraged that vision of political obliga-
tion.
In May 1919 the Public, a reform-minded magazine, editorialized on the role of
law in American life:
This is a country of law. If it is not that it is nothing at all. And being a country of
law those who assume to set up private judgment are undermining its foundation.
Every word spoken and every act committed is subject to law, and men have been
appointed to see to its enforcement. . . . If this system is not self-sustaining then
democracy itself is at fault. ^^
Events on the World War I home front demonstrate that the system was not self-sus-
taining as the editorialist had suêsted. Those who called for the rule of law while they
oversaw a system of coercion that continued to operate outside the law were neither
devious, duplidtous, nor hypocritical. They were obedient citizens trapped in a paradox
of their own making, dedicated to a nation of lav« that asked them to ignore law^. In the
postwar push for law and order, the woret manifestation of citizen vigilance—mob vio-
lence—had been denounced, and even as it persisted into the postwar years, the intellec-
tual, legal, and institutional weapons wielded against it would grow more powerful. But
the vast structures of citizen vigilance remainai in place; vigilance societies that had
done the work ofthe state outside its boundaries now saw those actions folded within it.
The mob, narrcnviy ckfíned, had been publicly renounced. But the coercion had not.
^ iûece, "Cc^pcr Can^ Pianotism>" 203.

« "Mob Vioknce." Aiéfic. Mä^ 10,1919, p. 481.
Copyright of Journal of American History is the property of Organization of American Historians and its
content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's
express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

The Only Badge Needed Is Your Patriotic Ferver

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Only Badge Needed Is Your Patriotic Ferver

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Only Badge Needed Is Your Patriotic Ferver

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Only Badge Needed Is Your

Patriodc Fervor: Vigilance, Coercion,

The Obligation of Vigilance in Peace and War

The concqjt of vigilance as a form of collective self-defense has long accompanied

Delèiidisig die Connecticut Home Firont

Keeping Vigil over Labor in the Arizona Copper Mines

"Yankees at War," 107; Buip«, "Connccticat in Ae mis," 127.

Phelps-Dodge Corporation (who "happened to be in Bisbee on the day of the depor-

deported are said to be law-abiding aien ei^a^d in an earnest effort at improve-

Wilson assigned the Presidents Mecliation Commission (PMC), a board of lawyers

Moral V^ilance around MiUtary Camps

resources of occupation, education, health, recreation and religion in the community

Women formed patriotic lesees, surveillance sodetles, and women's auxiliaries to

Keeping Vig^ over the Racial Order

ment faciiities. Hobson, Uneasy Virtue. 168-71.

Tltó Postwar Debate over Law and Order

Afiican Americans defended themselves i ^ n s t organized violence in personal confrontations,

^ "Racial Tension and Race Riots," Outlook, Aug. 6,1919, p. 533.

^ i^uece, "Cc^pcr Can^ Pianotism>" 203.

You might also like