Senator Cummings of Iowa said:
This measure is the most stringent and drastic law ever proposed to curb a free people in time of peace or war. The Government would have absolute power in war time to suppress newspapers and prevent debate in Congress. It might even be held a criminal offense for two citizens to discuss with each other questions of military policy.
The New York “Call” of July 2, 1919, described the effect of the law in no exaggerated language when it said:
Free discussion became a memory, and rubber stamp opinions became a badge of “patriotism.” Men and women were hunted out of their homes for having an idea higher than a rat. In some states a White Terror raged which deported whole families to adjoining states. Blood flowed. Men were mobbed and some lynched because they insisted on using their brains, instead of the brains of others. Public officials applauded, refused to interfere, and newspapers glorified the carousal of hate and terror.
Spying upon your friends became an honorable calling. The coward who hated his fellow man in packs became the popular “hero.” Papers and magazines had their mailing privilegeswithdrawn and some were suppressed. Libraries were repeatedly ransacked for “seditious” literature. The schools became a refuge of servile teachers, who taught what was told them, no matter how absurd it might be. Censorship barred the masses from the real news of the world. The “news” was manufactured in government bureaus and in the editorial offices of the daily newspapers. The theater and the “movie” became agencies for enforcing standardized opinions. The churches tied their creeds to the chariot of the imperialists and made their Christ speak for reaction. The lecture platform became defiled. The reversion back to the primitive permeated politics. The blackest enemies of human progress had the public ear; its friends were damned and assaulted. Historical works were “revised” or suppressed to make them square with the brutal mania of the hour.
All this was glorified in the name of “democracy,” in the name of “liberty,” in the name of “freedom.” A shadow fell upon the intellectual life of the nation. For the time being it was blotted out. All thinking had ceased, except for a courageous few, and they were mobbed or sent to the penitentiaries. Yet the editors, politicians, preachers, capitalists, bankers, exploiters, profiteers, patrioteers, “labor leaders,” all, looked upon their work and called it good. Missions went abroad to tell the European yokels of our “ideals.” The masses were intellectual prisoners, marching in the lockstep of capital’s chain gang.
There was a phase of this spy activity that went even beyond this: The invasion of the homes of German Americans whose sons were fighting in the ranks and dying in France—there were 17,000 of the latter. They were harried by ill-bred patriots of the sort we read of in the history of the French revolution, who, disregarding the fact that these parents were citizens, treated them as suspects and kept them under surveillance because they were not rushing out into the open and shouting “Huns.”
Many a case occurred in which a lad in the American army was fighting against his own brother in the ranks of the German army and his mother over here was harrassed by members of the National Security League, the American Defense Society or the American Protective League, while the father was cast out of employment for being of German blood.
Many a crippled boy returned from France to find that his family had been impoverished and persecuted by secret agents or self-constituted spies. In the breast of many a young German American were then and there planted the seeds of hate for his tormentors, and, sad to relate, doubts of the virtue of American liberty. He had given his blood to make the world safe for democracy and found his home in the grip of despotism.
There are those who account for the persecution of the German element by the reminder that the war offered the first opportunity for Southern-thinking Americans to repay the German element forits share in the Civil War in aiding the Union to win the final victory in 1865. Be that as it may, in the end this element was gloriously vindicated by ample proof of its loyalty, no matter what the test. Despite the most unrelenting enforcement of every phase of the objectionable act, mass meetings were held in twelve cities during Lincoln’s birthday in 1919, to protest against the law and demand its repeal. The meetings were called in the name of Lincoln, the liberator, but not by German Americans.