World War 1
People's Century: 1900 - Age of Hope - Documentary (1 page essay)
Photos Taken 100 Years Ago Capture Rare Look at Paris in Color
Watch the City of Berlin, Germany Evolve Over Time in the 20th Century
Amazing footage and the music gives us a sense of the impending calamity that will affect everybody in this film. Imagine what Europe would have been like today if it were not for that disastrous First World War beginning in 1914. Not only was the flower of that generation's youth thrown away but European world power went with it. To have been followed by round two twenty years later.
Interesting fact to note: Men's fashion has hardly changed for a whole century, while women's fashion has totally changed. The thing that strike me the most is that back then teens and kids were dressed like little adults, there were no difference between teen and adults in appearance.
Historical color footage of the German capital of Berlin in the 1930s during Adolf Hitler's National Socialist Third Reich.
Highlights in the video: Brandenburg Gate, Quadriga, Berlin Victory Column, Reichstag, Radio Tower, 1936 Summer Olympics, Unter den Linden, Changing of the guard at the Neue Wache, Berlin City Palace, Berlin Cathedral, Old National Gallery, Museum Island, Old Museum, Pleasure Garden, Spree, Alexanderplatz, Berliner Weisse, Berlin Zoological Garden, Wannsee, Ministry of Aviation, etc.
This is how Berlin looked like just after Adolf Hitler had committed suicide and Germany surrendered in World War Two. Fascinating moving pictures in color show the situation of the city in summer 1945 and daily life in the ruins. The city was divided by the victors into four zones: British, French, Soviet, and American. Notice the large portrait of Communist dictator Josef Stalin in the Soviet Zone.
Berlin 1957 - 1960 color - Berlin Ost & West vor dem Mauerbau - before the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961 dividing East & West
US President John F. Kennedy made a major historic visit to Berlin in 1963.
"Berlin Wall" Speech - US President Ronald Reagan's Address on East-West relations at the Brandenburg Gate - June 12, 1987.
November 10, 1989: Celebration at the Berlin Wall. This world-shaking event signaled the coming end of the Cold War and the collapse of Communism throughout Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union itself was dissolved on Christmas Day, December 25, 1991, thus ending its hegemonic imperial stranglehold on its captive nations.
The Progressive Era -- Book by Murray N. Rothbard
"Progressivism brought the triumph of institutionalized racism, the disfranchising of blacks in the South, the cutting off of immigration, the building up of trade unions by the federal government into a tripartite of big government, big business, big union alliance, the glorifying of military virtues and conscription, and a drive for American expansion abroad. In short, the Progressive era ushered the modern American politico-economic system into being."
From the Preface by Murray N. Rothbard
Each week, Future of Freedom Foundation president Jacob Hornberger and Misean economist Richard M. Ebeling discuss the hot topics of the day. Here Jacob and Richard discussed the disaster of progressivism. I cannot stress enough the importance of this dialog. This 30 minute conversation encapsulates the most brilliant and enlightening synthesis of ideas and history concerning the origins and roots of this pernicious intellectual movement, both at home and abroad. Ebeling concisely traces these concepts from their 19th century Marxian notions of the dynamic class struggle of history, that history, according to Karl Marx, inevitably moved in a “progressive” direction from primitive pre-industrial societies, to a feudal order, to industrial capitalism, will move onward towards socialism (and the dictatorship of the proletariat), finally to the ultimate stage of history, communism.
Any movement away from this cyclical direction was “reactionary” or regressive. In perhaps the highlight of his remarks, he builds upon the pioneering insights of Murray Rothbard and others in focusing upon the crucial development of the welfare-warfare state in Germany under chancellor Otto von Bismarck, and Bismarck’s co-opting of the collectivist program of the Marxian Social Democrats into a Bismarxian hybrid to enhance state power and control.
Again as Rothbard elucidated, generations of key American graduate students attended German universities during this period, returning to the US transformed by these statist ideas they had absorbed. These persons, such as Richard T. Ely, became the first generation of progressive intellectuals and cogs within the state apparatus that moved America away from a classical liberal (libertarian) direction towards this collectivist hybrid known as progressivism. Hornberger cogently points out the key role of the judiciary in the erosion of the constitutional safeguards against interventionism, and the pivotal model of Woodrow Wilson in establishing the matrix for all that followed.
The Eugenics Crusade tells the story of the unlikely –– and largely unknown –– campaign to breed a “better” American race, tracing the rise of the movement that turned the fledgling science of heredity into a powerful instrument of social control.
Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race
The Eugenics movement drew their greatest enthusiastic support and funding — extensive funding from America’s upper-most philanthropic sources such as from the Carnegie Institute and the Harriman railroad fortune. The Rockefeller Foundation helped develop and fund various German eugenics programs, including the one that Dr. Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz. Cereal magnate J.H. Kellogg provided funding to help found the Race Betterment Foundation in Battle Creek, Michigan. They were all in league with some of America’s most respected scientists from such prestigious universities as Stanford, Yale, Harvard and Princeton.
Top tier social scientists, especially economists, gave their full sanction to the Eugenics project. Several feminist reformers advocated an agenda of eugenic legal reform. The National Federation of Women’s Clubs, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and the National League of Women Voters were among the variety of state and local feminist organizations that at some point lobbied for eugenic reforms. One of the most prominent feminists to champion the eugenics agenda was Margaret Sanger, the leader of the American birth control movement. Margaret Sanger saw birth control as a means to prevent unwanted children from being born into a disadvantaged life, and incorporated the language of eugenics to advance the movement. Sanger also sought to discourage the reproduction of persons who, it was believed, would pass on mental disease or serious physical defects.
Triumphant Plutocracy: The Story of American Public Life from 1870 to 1920 -- Book by Richard Franklin Pettigrew
Former U. S. Senator Provides Searing Indictment of the Criminal Elites Which Ran America
By its candid, "speaking truth to power" presentation, Triumphant Plutocracy: The Story Of American Public Life From 1870 To 1920, is unlike any other political memoir by a former United States Senator.
But then author Richard F. Pettigrew was in a class by himself when it came to forthright honesty, integrity and dedication to principle in his fifty years of public service to the nation.
Here is what Pettigrew states in his opening paragraph:
"The American people should know the truth about American public Life. They have been lied to so much and hoodwinked so often that it would seem only fair for them to have at least one straight-from-the-shoulder statement concerning this government 'of the people, by the people and for the people,' about whose inner workings the people know almost nothing."
He goes on to say:
"It is fifty years since I began to take an interest in public affairs. During those years I have been participating, more or less actively, in public life -- first as a government surveyor, then as a member of the Legislature of Dakota; as a member of the House of Representatives and, finally as a member of the United States Senate. Since 1880 I have known the important men in both the Republican and Democratic parties; I have known the members of the diplomatic corps; I have known personally the last ten presidents of the United States, and I have known personally the leading business men who backed the political parties and who made and unmade the presidents. For half a century I have known public men and have been on the inside of business and politics. Through all of that time I have lived and worked with the rulers of America."
Plutocracy means rule by the rich, those wealthy criminals who have used and manipulated the political mechanism of the government to plunder and exploit the rest of us.
The book's title, Triumphant Plutocracy, is a grim, ironic play upon Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie's earlier banal book, Triumphant Democracy.
Triumphant Plutocracy is a searing indictment of the criminal elites which composed the governing class of America during this period.
Like Carroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope, this is an insider revealing the shocking truth of how the world really works in the corridors of power.
And because it is a first-person account, there is much found in this book that is found nowhere else.
Pettigrew holds nothing back.
He names names.
He relates his candid conversations and behind-the-scenes interactions with the rich and powerful.
The frank accounts of his meetings with Theodore Roosevelt are alone worth the price of the book.
(By the way, TR did NOT "charge up San Juan Hill" in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. Pettigrew has some fascinating information on that myth.)
Pettigrew details the land grabbing seizure of public lands, the fraud and thievery by the bankers, railroads, trusts, and tariff manipulators at the expense of the public.
He spares no one.
Pettigrew is particularly eloquent on the criminal aggression of American imperialism and the rise of the American empire, that empire that continues to bankrupt our republic and earn us nothing but hate and enmity throughout the world.
First published in 1921, it is terrific to have this classic back in print.
The great investigative journalist George Seldes was one of my personal heroes.
In his autobiography, Witness To A Century: Encounters With The Noted, the Notorious,and the Three SOBs, Seldes relates an interesting tale about this volume in chapter 22 of his book, "Lenin Speaks of His American Mentors."
Seldes was in Moscow for the fifth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. He was one of the few American journalists who met V. I. Lenin and spent personal face-time with him.
Lenin discussed the tremendous impact two Americans had had upon him.
First, the Socialist politican and writer Daniel De Leon, who had shaped Lenin's intrepretation of Marxism, and second, Pettigrew, whose book Lenin was presently reading.
Seldes made a note of the title of this work, which he wanted to promptly obtain when returning to America. Seldes put down the title as Plutocratic Democracy.
For years he searched for a copy, but found that no book by that title existed.
When I read this account, I wrote Seldes to inform him that the book truly did exist, and that I have a first-edition copy.
I included a photocopy of the title page and table of contents in my correspondence.
Seldes graciously wrote me back, thanking me for correcting his error.
He soon died after that at the age of 104.
Like Carroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope, or Jules Archer's The Plot To Seize The White House, Triumphant Plutocracy is one of the most important and revealing books you will ever read.
Its brilliant account of what was really going on in American life during the fifty years after the Civil War to that of World War I provides compelling reading.
The Untold Story of Panama -- Book by Earl Harding
Definitive investigative account naming names of the culprits involved in this infamous Wall Street scam of obtaining the land on which to build the Panama Canal.
Well worth reading this online edition of the 1959 hardback book.
Mr. Burris has an autographed copy of this rare volume.
For a fine modern day re-telling of the tale, "of the financial speculation, fraud, and international conspiracy that led to the building of the Panama Canal," check out Ovidio Diaz Espino, How Wall Street Created A Nation: J. P. Morgan, Teddy Roosevelt, and the Panama Canal.
To place this nefarious scheme in historical context, see Murray N. Rothbard's seminal Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy, available online.
People's Century: 1914 Killing Fields -- Documentary (1 page essay)
Heritage of the Great War -- Comprehensive WWI Website
Royal Cousins At War: Part 1 -- Documentary
Episode 1: A House Divided
Examines what impact the relationships between cousins Nicholas II of Russia, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and George V of the United Kingdom had on the outbreak of the First World War. This episode focuses on the story of the emerging divisions and rivalries between the inter-related royal houses of Europe during the 19th century.
Royal Cousins At War: Part 2 -- Documentary
Episode 2: Into the Abyss
The realignment of the European powers and the emergence of the alliance system in the years following the death of Queen Victoria, played a significant role for the three monarchs in the frantic, desperate days of July and August 1914.
Cousins At War -- Article
Cousins at War
By Theo Aronson
Last updated 2011-03-10
In May 1910, the monarchies of Europe came together in London, in an opulent show of strength, for the funeral of Edward VII. War and revolution in the ensuing decade heaped assassination, defeat and exile upon them. Theo Aronson portrays the European Royal Families at War.
'The old world in its sunset'
What Winston Churchill once described as 'the old world in its sunset' had never been captured more brilliantly than at the funeral of King Edward VII in May 1910. This was the occasion of the celebrated Parade of Kings, when over 50 royal horsemen - a swaggering cavalcade of emperors, kings, crown princes, archdukes, grand dukes and princes - followed the slowly trundling coffin through the streets of London.
Republican envoys... were firmly relegated to the end of the procession.
Here was a moment of supreme monarchical glory. Republican envoys, no matter how powerful the countries they represented - even France or the United States - were firmly relegated to the end of the procession. Who, seeing this collection of royalty clattering by, could doubt that the institution of kingship was flourishing? Nothing could better have symbolised the extraordinary early 20th-century flowering of European monarchy than this spectacular parade.
Never since the days of the ancien régime of pre-revolutionary France had monarchy seemed so firmly entrenched. Instead of diminishing in number, royal thrones had multiplied, and the second half of the 19th and the early years of the 20th centuries had seen the setting up of half a dozen new monarchies, so by the year of Edward VII's death there were more monarchs in Europe than there had ever been. Without counting the rulers of the kingdoms and duchies that went to make up the German empire, there were 20 reigning monarchs - with a crowned sovereign in every country except France and Switzerland (and even France had restored the monarchy four times in the 19th century).
Whatever the powers of these rulers - whether they were autocrats as in Russia, or virtually powerless constitutional monarchs as in Great Britain - their prestige and position remained almost intact. Few of those watching, or taking part in, Edward VII's funeral could have imagined that this blaze of splendour marked, not a royal high noon, but a royal sunset.
Victoria's dynasty
Kaiser Wilhelm II and George V at Potsdam, 1913 ©With self-preservation being one of the chief motivations of monarchy, by 1910 Europe's sovereigns, or at least their advisers, had had the foresight to adapt themselves to the more liberal tenor of the times. The French Revolution, a century before, had taught them a lesson. Because the burgeoning middle classes had demanded legal constitutions, the monarchs had granted them. Where there had been a clamour for extended suffrage, they had agreed to it. By assimilating new ideas, monarchies had to some extent converted themselves into symbols of democracy; the leaders of these same monarchies, however, remained stubbornly blind to the gradually spreading republican and revolutionary movements taking root in their countries.
Queen Victoria was sometimes called the Grandmamma of Europe...
Rendering them unassailable (or so they fondly imagined) was the fact that the monarchs of Europe were all closely related. Queen Victoria was sometimes called the Grandmamma of Europe, and there was hardly a Continental court that did not boast at least one of her relations. During World War One there were no less than seven of the old Queen's direct descendants, and two more of her Coburg relations, on European thrones. Before it happened, can anyone blame this family of kings, or their subjects, for assuming that a war between these crowned cousins was all but impossible?
One can appreciate why Kaiser Wilhelm II, at the outbreak of war in 1914, exclaimed that 'Nicky' had 'played him false'. For the rulers of the world's three greatest nations - King George V of Great Britain and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia on the one hand, and the German Kaiser on the other - were not simply cousins, they were first cousins. If their grandmother Queen Victoria had still been alive, said the Kaiser, she would never have allowed them to go to war with each other.
Instead, World War One proved once and for all that the family ties between the reigning houses of Europe were more or less irrelevant. Their kinship simply snapped, like cotton threads, as the storm of war broke over their heads.
World War One
French infantry take cover in a trench, 1916 ©lt was an act of regicide that catapulted Europe into war - an act that not unexpectedly took place in the Balkans. The region had been in a state of ferment for years, and the assassination of the heir to the Hapsburg Empire, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by a Serbian nationalist, was the culmination of a train of events leading inexorably to war.
By now, however, Europe's leading nations were locked in alliances...
Yet at first the monarchs of Europe did not take the incident too seriously. lt was expected that the Hapsburg Emperor, Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary, would demand and be given an apology from Serbia. By now, however, Europe's leading nations were locked in alliances - there was Serbia with Russia, Russia with France, France with Great Britain, Great Britain with Belgium on the one side, and Germany and Austria-Hungary on the other. With Serbia's apology not proving abject enough, relations between Serbia and Austria-Hungary were broken off. This finally alerted Europe's family of kings to the danger that threatened them.
As the alliances clicked inexorably into place, a positive snowstorm of telegrams between the crowned heads tried to avert the inevitable. Kaiser Wilhelm II (Willie) was particularly assiduous in keeping touch with his cousins Georgie and Nicky. But by now there was nothing they could do. Their constitutional powers counted for almost as little as their cousinhood. Although, technically, Franz Joseph, Nicholas II and Wilhelm II could perhaps have curtailed the coming hostilities, they were at the mercy of more powerful forces: the generals, the politicians, the arms manufacturers, and the relentless timetables of mobilisation. Ultimatum followed ultimatum. In the face of national pride, imperial expansion and military glory, the protestations of the crowned heads were swept aside. On such giant waves, they could only bob about like so many corks.
The Kaiser and the Tsar
Rasputin held great sway over the Russian Tsarina, Alexandra ©By the year 1914 kings no longer led their armies into battle. lt was just as well. Kings were no more guaranteed to be good soldiers or military strategists than they were to be good rulers. In theory, sovereigns remained in supreme command, but the actual waging of this war was entrusted to generals. All the European monarchs either remained firmly in their palaces, paying an occasional visit to their troops, or else established themselves in some country house behind the front lines. Either way, most of them had very little say in the conduct of the war.
Kaiser Wilhelm II soon revealed himself as nothing more than a bombastic sabre-rattler...
Of all the sovereigns involved in World War One - the emperors of Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, the kings of Great Britain, Italy, Belgium, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece and, briefly, Montenegro - the most apparently warlike turned out to be the least belligerent when the reality of war hit them. Kaiser Wilhelm II soon revealed himself as nothing more than a bombastic sabre-rattler, lacking in every quality of leadership. Eventually, ignored by the High Command, be spent his days 'drinking tea, going for walks and sawing wood'. By the end of the war, with his armies facing military defeat, he was overwhelmed by the forces of republicanism and revolution that he had always more-or-less ignored, and he was forced to abdicate.
In April 1915 the equally irresolute Tsar Nicholas II took the fatal step of assuming personal command of the army. No less misguided was his decision to leave the capital in the hands of his stronger-willed consort, the Empress Alexandra, who was entirely under the influence of the mysterious starets (spiritual advisor) Rasputin. In March 1917, riots broke out in St Petersburg, and a week later Nicholas II heard that a hastily assembled provisional government had decided that he must abdicate. Without the support of either the politicians or the generals, the Tsar had to submit. In the course of a week, the previously apparently unassailable Romanov dynasty had collapsed.
Royal survival
George V visits the Western Front, c.1918 ©The British sovereign, in the person of King George V, handled things much better. Confining his military activities to the occasional inspecting of troops, he met the threat of social unrest by identifying the crown with the day-to-day wartime lives of his subjects: visiting hospitals, touring factories, conferring decorations. He changed the German name of his House - Saxe-Coburg-Gotha - to the undeniably British one of Windsor.
...the Russian Imperial family was left to its fate.
But possibly the best illustration of the British monarch's ability to preserve his own best interests was in the matter of a place of refuge for the Russian Imperial family. In spite of his government's offer of asylum, George V argued against it - why? He realised that, to most of his subjects, the Tsar was a bloodstained tyrant, that the Empress Alexandra was accused of being pro-German and that this was no time for a constitutional monarch, apprehensive of his own position, to be extending the hand of friendship to an autocrat - however closely related. So the Russian Imperial family was left to its fate.
By the end of World War One, the three great monarchies of Central Europe - Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary - had fallen. In the main, it was those sovereigns without personal power who kept their thrones, and those wielding too much power who lost them. And although monarchy might not have been a perfect system of government, it was perhaps preferable to what followed. World War One saw the end of the Europe of the Kings, and the beginning of the Europe of the Dictators.
Rasputin -- Documentary (1 page essay)
Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin (Russian: Григорий Ефимович Распутин; [ɡrʲɪˈɡorʲɪj (j)ɪˈfʲiməvʲɪtɕ rɐˈsputʲɪn]; January 21 [O.S. 9 January] 1869 – 30 December [O.S. 17 December] 1916) was a Russian peasant, mystical faith healer, and trusted friend of the family of Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia. He became an influential figure in Saint Petersburg, especially after August 1915, when Nicholas took command of the army fighting in World War I. Advising his wife Alexandra Feodorovna in countless political issues Rasputin became an easy scapegoat for Russian nationalists, liberals and aristocrats.
There is uncertainty over much of Rasputin's life and the degree of influence that he exerted over the weak-willed Tsar and the strong-willed Tsarina. Accounts are often based on dubious memoirs, hearsay, and legend. While his influence and position may have been exaggerated — Rasputin became synonymous with power, debauchery and lust — his presence played a significant role in the increasing unpopularity of the Imperial couple. Rasputin was murdered by monarchists who hoped to save Tsarism by ending his sway over the royal family.
The Great War: Christmas Truce of 1914 -- Documentary (1 page essay)
WWI began in August 1914, and by December all thoughts of quick victory had faded. Fighting was most fierce in a thin strip of land called the Western Front. A system of trenches separated Allies from Germans, with the area in between known as No Man's Land. Amidst the trench warfare that defined World War I, a few days of spontaneous peace broke out. On Christmas Eve, an astonishing event began--up and down the Western Front, Allied and German soldiers met peacefully in No Man's Land. Without a signed treaty, surrender, or armistice, German and Allied soldiers alike were able to share Christmas cheer together.
World War I -- Amazon.com Book and DVD List
WORLD WAR I.
When World War I broke out in Europe in August 1914, most Americans responded in a deeply ambivalent way. Their initial response was that the United States must, at all costs, remain uninvolved in the conflict. As the presidential election of 1916 attests (when "he kept us out of war" became the centerpiece of Pres. Woodrow Wilson's successful reelection bid), most national leaders responded to this prevailing sentiment. Once the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, however, public opinion on the conflict underwent a complete reversal, and Americans embraced the war effort with a ferocity that bordered on hysteria. Oklahomans' responses to the war between 1914 and 1918 were certainly consistent with this pattern. Indeed, it can be argued that the transformation from neutrality to "100 percent Americanism" was even more precipitous in the Sooner State than in the rest of the nation.
Oklahomans initially expressed a deep aversion to the war, an opinion compounded by the conflict's negative economic effect on the state. Germany's blockade of Allied ports effectively closed off valuable western European markets to American agricultural products, leading to a steep decline in crop prices. In Oklahoma, where agriculture was king, the results were disastrous. The month after the war began, the prices that Oklahoma's cotton farmers received for that commodity dropped more than 20 percent, from ten cents to eight cents per pound. Prices remained below the ten-cent mark for a full year, falling to six cents per pound in November 1914. Although the effect was not as direct for Oklahoma wheat farmers, prices for that crop remained below one dollar per bushel during 1914.
Elected officials in Oklahoma experienced firsthand their constituents' negative feelings about the war. U.S. Rep. William H. Murray, whose record as a political leader predated statehood, discovered in 1916 that his open support for war preparedness cost him his Fourth District congressional seat. Additional evidence of Oklahomans' lack of enthusiasm for the war came in 1917 when the U.S. Congress passed the Selective Service Act, which called for all men of draft age to formally register for conscription on a single day in June of that year. In June 1917 Oklahoma officials estimated the number of draft-age males in the state to be 215,000. Of that number, only 111,986 young men actually registered, and more than 80,000 of these claimed to be exempt from the draft. Thus, only 15 percent of the state's draft-age men indicated their willingness to fight in the European war. By war's end 59,247 white men and 19,999 African Americans had been inducted. Approximately 5,000 American Indians either enlisted or were inducted.
However, the economic crisis caused by the European war lessened Oklahomans' initial aversion to the conflict. As the United States moved closer to entering the war in late 1916 and early 1917, British and French markets were reopened, and American farmers became important suppliers to the Allies. The resulting increase in demand meant that for Oklahoma farmers the hard times of 1914 and 1915 were replaced by extraordinary prosperity. By December 1916 cotton farmers in the Sooner State were getting eighteen cents per pound for their crop (compared to just over six cents two years earlier), and prices would break the thirty-cent mark before the armistice in November 1918. The trend was identical for wheat farmers, who saw prices double between 1914 and 1918. When the United States formally declared war on Germany in April 1917, most Oklahomans were much more inclined to react favorably.
Some, however, still opposed American involvement. The most dramatic manifestation of antiwar sentiment came in Seminole and surrounding counties in August 1917 when rumblings of discontent with the war led to an uprising known as the Green Corn Rebellion. After seizing control of local institutions, the organizers of the uprising planned to travel to Washington, D.C., hoping to attract enough supporters on the journey to force the federal government to change its war policy. These plans never materialized, however, and the Green Corn Rebellion was easily put down by local authorities before the rebels left the state.
The Green Corn Rebellion and its aftermath helped spark a backlash against opponents of the war in Oklahoma. During 1917 and 1918 those who disagreed with American war policy were perceived as "radical" and "un-American," and the period was marked by unprecedented hysteria and the suppression of dissent. In this sense, developments in Oklahoma mirrored those in other states where federal officials used the recently enacted Espionage and Sedition Acts to prosecute approximately eighteen hundred antiwar dissenters. In addition, the federal government created a network of semiofficial watchdog organizations called the Councils of Defense to ensure the support of the citizenry for the war. In Oklahoma the council was directed by James Monroe Aydelotte of Oklahoma City, who presided over a network of county and local organizations dedicated to promoting loyalty and support for the war effort. Among other things, the Councils of Defense promoted the sale of war bonds, distributed loyalty pledge cards, and even reported to authorities the names of citizens who were less-than-enthusiastic in their support for the war. Given the kind of superpatriotism engendered by the Councils of Defense, especially the tendency to equate dissent with disloyalty, it is hardly surprising that at times the actions taken by these "patriots" took a decidedly extralegal form. Those identified as disloyal were often subjected to rituals of public humiliation (as the man in Comanche County, who was forced to publicly explain his refusal to sign a loyalty card and then to kiss the American flag) or violent intimidation (as happened to Robert Carlton Scott, Carl Albert's grandfather, who was given two hundred lashes by a mob for his refusal to sign a loyalty card).
In the end, the effect of World War I on Oklahoma was mixed at best. The increase in crop prices proved short lived. Soon after the war ended, Oklahoma farmers began suffering the effects of an agricultural depression. It would last for more than a decade, a crisis that was tied to the conflict's imperfect peace. Even more significantly, the use of intimidation to artificially limit the scope of political discourse proved to be one of the more enduring legacies of American involvement in the European war. Under such conditions the political dialogue shrank considerably as those holding positions considered to be outside of the mainstream were prevented from articulating them.
The results of the superpatriotism of 1917 and 1918 and the hysteria it engendered can be seen most clearly in the elections of 1918 and 1920. Faced with such a stringent narrowing of the public discourse, many Oklahomans simply retreated from the democratic process. Voter turnout in 1918 shrank by more than ninety-seven thousand, almost a third over 1916, and despite the fact that at least one hundred thousand voting-age males had come to Oklahoma since statehood, fewer males voted in 1920 than in 1907. In this sense, the events of 1917–19, known as the "First Red Scare," foreshadowed trends more commonly associated with the Cold War a generation later.
Jim Bissett
See also: FARMING
Bibliography
Jim Bissett, Agrarian Socialism in America: Marx, Jefferson, and Jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1904–1920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999).
James H. Fowler, II, "Creating an Atmosphere of Suppression, 1914–1917," The Chronicles of Oklahoma 59 (Summer 1981).
James H. Fowler, II, "Tar and Feather Patriotism: The Suppression of Dissent in Oklahoma During World War I," The Chronicles of Oklahoma 56 (Winter 1978–79).
O. A. Hilton, "The Oklahoma Council of Defense and the First World War," The Chronicles of Oklahoma 20 (March 1942).
Bill Moore, "Oklahoma's Air Ace: William T. Ponder and World War I," The Chronicles of Oklahoma 86 (Summer 2008).
Michael Morton, "No Time to Quibble: The Jones Family Conspiracy Trial of 1917," The Chronicles of Oklahoma 59 (Summer 1981).
James R. Scales and Danney Goble, Oklahoma Politics: A History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982).
Sooners in the War: Official Report of the Oklahoma State Council of Defense, From May 1917 to January 1, 1919 (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma State Council of Defense, 1919).
Citation
The following (as per The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition) is the preferred citation for articles:
Jim Bissett, "World War I ," The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, www.okhistory.org (accessed March 16, 2018).
© Copyright Oklahoma Historical Society 2009.
Links of Interest
Oklahoma Council of Defense during WWI
OKLAHOMA COUNCIL OF DEFENSE.
In May 1917, one month after the U.S. entered World War I, the Council of National Defense, created by the National Defense Act of August 1916, asked each state to organize its own council. With vague direction from Washington, D.C., the state councils had a wide range of tasks, including publicity, conservation of food and fuel, and military preparedness, as well as promoting Liberty Bond, war savings stamp, and Red Cross campaigns. Because the Oklahoma legislature did not convene during the war, Gov. Robert L. Williams established an extralegal state council. He appointed James Monroe Aydelotte, the chair of the State Board of Affairs, to head the twelve-member council. Williams selected Roberta Campbell Lawson, president of the Oklahoma State Federation of Women's Clubs, as chair of the Oklahoma Woman's Committee of National Defense.
On May 16, 1917, the Oklahoma Council of Defense met and established eleven committees, including munitions, manufacturing, supplies, labor, publicity, and finance. In July 1917 Governor Williams appointed prominent entrepreneurs to be on the county executive committees. Throughout the state a million volunteers formed thousands of community councils at the school district level. To communicate instructions to the statewide workers, the state council published a monthly newspaper, Sooners in the War.
Newspapers and public speakers informed the public on the causes of the war and the need for a concerted effort to win the war. The state council provided weekly material to newspapers to be published under the heading "We Must Win the War." The council created the Oklahoma Patriotic Speakers' Bureau, whose members gave speeches using a pamphlet, "The War: Its Justification and Purpose," written by Dr. Angelo C. Scott, a faculty member of the University of Oklahoma. The pamphlet provided uniform information explaining why America had entered the war, the atrocities of German crimes, and the need to support the government. In Oklahoma more than three thousand volunteer speakers served as "Four Minute Men," who gave brief patriotic speeches. National and international speakers, such as Secretary of the Interior Franklin D. Lane and French Lt. Paul Perigord, spoke to enthusiastic Oklahoma crowds.
The state council organized an Oklahoma Loyalty Bureau and cooperated with the American Protective League to locate dissenters and to jail those who remained disloyal. Oklahomans had to sign a pledge card, declaring loyalty to the government and agreeing to report any disloyal statement or act. Approximately half of Oklahoma's two million population signed cards. Before the federal government passed the Sedition Act of 1918, amending the Espionage Act, the Loyalty Bureau asked cities and towns to pass antisedition ordinances. The bureau employed a number of secret service agents, who worked in communities in which a large portion of the population was suspected of sedition.
Because the Oklahoma Council of Defense was an extralegal organization, numerous incidents of extreme measures occurred to eliminate dissent. Men were beaten with leather straps and tarred and feathered. Liberal use of yellow paint designated individuals and businesses suspected of disloyalty. The Tulsa County Council of Defense, one of the more zealous, hired a detective and formed a secret organization to watch for dissenters.
Like other states, Oklahoma banned the speaking and teaching of the German language. Local communities used vigilantism to force German-language newspapers to cease publication. In 1918 the names of three Oklahoma towns with German connotations were changed from Kiel, Bismark, and Korn to, respectively, Loyal, Wright, and Corn.
Several county Councils of Defense prevented traveling tent shows from performing. Officials believed that the shows brought a bad influence into communities and diverted money away from war finance campaigns. The state council agreed with their action and used a publicity campaign to prevent traveling tent shows from coming to Oklahoma.
In July 1918 the State Councils Section in Washington, D.C., sent a directive to the southern states strongly recommending that they establish a separate organization so that African Americans could receive recognition of their efforts, which would otherwise be intermingled with the white councils. By October 1918 all southern states had a working African American organization except Oklahoma.
Oklahoma had received bad national publicity in August 1917 following the draft-resistance movement known as the Green Corn Rebellion. Thereafter, state officials worked diligently to guarantee that Oklahomans buy their quota of war bonds. Anyone who had money, but refused to buy war bonds, was called a "slacker" and would have to ride in the "slacker wagon." Consequently, Oklahomans met or exceeded the state's quota in the four Liberty Bond drives. Slacker also became a popular term to describe men who avoided the draft and individuals who did not grow their own vegetables.
Armistice occurred on November 11, 1918. Before the state and county councils disbanded in January 1919, county demobilization committees were formed to assist the returning veterans with legal advice and to help them obtain a job. In 1919, as a result of the anti-German language movement during the war, the Oklahoma Legislature passed an English Language Law requiring that only English be taught through the eighth grade in schools. Hysteria and fear continued after the war with the Red Scare in 1919.
Linda D. Wilson
See also: ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LAW, GREEN CORN REBELLION, TWENTIETH-CENTURY OKLAHOMA, WORLD WAR I
Bibliography
Edda Bilger, "The 'Oklahoma Vorwärts': The Voice of German-Americans in Oklahoma During World War I," The Chronicles of Oklahoma 54 (Summer 1976).
William J. Breen, Uncle Sam at Home: Civilian Mobilization, Wartime Federalism, and the Council of National Defense, 1917–1919 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984).
Daily Oklahoman (Oklahoma City), 17 May 1917, 8 June 1917, and 31 March 1918.
James H. Fowler, II, "Creating an Atmosphere of Suppression, 1914–1917," The Chronicles of Oklahoma 59 (Summer 1981).
James H. Fowler, II, "Tar and Feather Patriotism: The Suppression of Dissent in Oklahoma During World War I," The Chronicles of Oklahoma 56 (Winter 1978–79).
Harlow's Weekly (Oklahoma City), October 1917 to November 1918.
O. A. Hilton, "The Oklahoma Council of Defense and the First World War," The Chronicles of Oklahoma 20 (March 1942).
David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
William T. Lampe, comp., Tulsa County in the World War (Tulsa, Okla.: Tulsa County Historical Society, 1919).
H. C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War: 1917–1918 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957).
Charles W. Smith, "The Selling of America in Oklahoma: The First and Second Liberty Bond Drives," The Chronicles of Oklahoma 73 (Winter 1995–96).
Sooners in the War: Official Report of the Oklahoma State Council of Defense, From May 1917 to January 1, 1919 (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma State Council of Defense, 1919).
W. E. Welch, J. S. Aldridge, and L. V. Aldridge, comps., The Oklahoma Spirit of '17 (Oklahoma City, Okla.: Historical Publishing Co., 1920).
Robert L. Williams Collection, Research Division, Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City.
Citation
The following (as per The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition) is the preferred citation for articles:
Linda D. Wilson, "Oklahoma Council of Defense," The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, www.okhistory.org (accessed March 16, 2018).
© Copyright Oklahoma Historical Society 2009.
The Green Corn Rebellion in Oklahoma During WWI
GREEN CORN REBELLION.
Triggered by opposition to World War I and the draft, this tenant farmers' revolt broke out in three counties along Oklahoma's South Canadian River in August 1917. While antiwar sentiments fueled the Green Corn Rebellion, it actually grew from long-standing grievances many tenants held against local landowners, businessmen, and state and local authorities. The farmers were particularly angered over the growing control of land by small numbers of wealthy landholders who often resorted to rampant land speculation and outright fraud to obtain property. Speculation and falling crop prices had by 1917 forced over half of Oklahoma's farmers into tenancy.
As a result, many tenants and small landowners joined the state's Socialist Party and affiliated organizations such as the Oklahoma Renters' Union. The Socialists proposed expanding the public domain, enacting a graduated land tax, and creating a cooperative marketing system, but some tenants grew frustrated with the political process and turned to night-riding and to direct action techniques copied from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The IWW, however, refused to allow tenant farmers to join, because they were not wageworkers.
Instead, many tenants joined the Working Class Union (WCU), formed in New Orleans but based in Van Buren, Arkansas. The WCU soon claimed thirty-five thousand members in Oklahoma, although the number is questionable. With the collapse of cotton prices when World War I began, WCU membership rose. It grew more in 1915 when farmers violently opposed a campaign promoting cattle dipping to control the tick-borne "Texas fever." WCU members alleged the chemical dips actually sickened and killed cattle, and they began a campaign of dynamiting dipping vats and destroying the property of county officials.
The WCU grew dormant when cotton prices rose in 1916, but American entry into World War I revitalized the organization. Farmers saw the conflict as "a rich man's war, poor man's fight," and throughout the summer of 1917 the WCU planned its opposition to the new federal Conscription Act. In early August hundreds of men—white, African American and American Indian—gathered at the Sasakwa, Oklahoma, farm of John Spears, an aging Socialist. The men planned to march to Washington and end the war, surviving on the way by eating barbecued beef and roasted green corn, the latter giving the rebellion its name. The rebels began burning bridges and cutting telegraph lines on August 3, but they soon faced hastily organized posses, which halted the revolt. Three men died in the conflict, and more than four hundred others were arrested. Of those, 150 were convicted and received federal prison terms of up to ten years.
After the rebellion failed, the Oklahoma Socialist Party disbanded. State and federal authorities utilized the revolt in their efforts to suppress the IWW, although neither it, nor the Socialists, had any official part in the uprising. Several years later the events of August 1917 were memorialized in a novel, The Green Corn Rebellion, by Oklahoma-born author William Cunningham.
Nigel Anthony Sellars
See also: GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS, INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD, OKLAHOMA RENTERS' UNION, SOCIALIST PARTY, SOUTHERN TENANT FARMERS' UNION, TENANT FARMING AND SHARECROPPING, TEXAS FEVER
Bibliography
Charles Bush, "The Green Corn Rebellion" (M.A. thesis, University of Oklahoma, 1932).
J. Stanley Clark, "Texas Fever in Oklahoma," The Chronicles of Oklahoma 24 (Winter 1951–52).
Covington Hall, Labor Struggles in the Deep South and Other Writings (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1999).
Nigel Sellars, "'With Folded Arms? Or With Squirrel Guns?' The Green Corn Rebellion," The Chronicles of Oklahoma 77 (Summer 1999).
Sherry H. Warrick, "Antiwar Reaction in the Southwest During World War I" (M.A. thesis, University of Oklahoma, 1973).
John J. Womack, Jr., "Oklahoma's Green Corn Rebellion: The Importance of Fools" (Senior thesis, Harvard University, 1961).
Citation
The following (as per The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition) is the preferred citation for articles:
Nigel Anthony Sellars, "Green Corn Rebellion," The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, www.okhistory.org (accessed March 16, 2018).
© Copyright Oklahoma Historical Society 2009.
Nigel Anthony Sellars, Treasonous Tenant Farmers and Seditious Sharecroppers: The 1917 Green Corn Rebellion Trials.
James H. Fowler, II, “Tar and Feather Patriotism: The Suppression of Dissent in Oklahoma During World War I,” The Chronicles of Oklahoma 56 (Winter 1978–79) pages 409 – 430.
Linda D. Wilson, “Oklahoma Council of Defense,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, www.okhistory.org (accessed March 16, 2018).
Jim Bissett, “World War I ,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, www.okhistory.org (accessed March 16, 2018).
Jim Bissett, Agrarian Socialism in America: Marx, Jefferson, and Jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1904–1920.
Garin Burbank, When Farmers Voted Red: The Gospel of Socialism in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1910-1924.
William Cunningham (Author), Nigel Anthony Sellars (Introduction), The Green Corn Rebellion.
Davis D. Joyce, An Oklahoma I Had Never Seen Before: Alternative Views of Oklahoma History. (See especially, Marvin E. Kroeker, “”In Death You Shall Not Wear It Either”: The Persecution of Mennonite Pacifists in Oklahoma)
Jeanette Keith, Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South during the First World War
Established in June 1905 in Chicago, the Industrial Workers of the World ( IWW ) was a labor organization that sought to organize workers along the lines of industrial unions rather than the specialized trade, or craft, unions of the American Federation of Labor. The new organization, whose members came to be called Wobblies, embraced revolutionary socialism and extended membership to all wage workers regardless of race, creed, color, or sex. It also rejected signing contracts with employers, believing that such agreements limited workers' ability to strike. In addition, the union's advocacy of direct action resistance, or sabotage, gave it a widespread, though undeserved, reputation.
By 1906 the IWW had organized three locals in Oklahoma Territory and two in Indian Territory, but the Panic of 1907 and a decline of a building boom in Oklahoma City killed these efforts. The organization revived in Oklahoma after 1914 as a result of the oil boom and serious problems in recruiting laborers for the state wheat harvest. The IWW's Agricultural Workers Organization (AWO) began its first recruiting efforts in 1915 at Enid in Garfield County. Though initially barely successful, the AWO's experience in Oklahoma led it to develop more sophisticated recruiting methods, such as the traveling job delegate who followed the harvesters from town to town. The new tactics spurred the growth of the AWO, which soon became the largest and financially strongest part of the IWW.
The AWO soon expanded its organizing efforts to include oil-field workers, especially pipeline crews. The Oil Workers' International Union (OWIU) had locals in Tulsa and Drumright by early 1917. But American entry into World War I led to attacks on both the OWIU and the AWO, now renamed the Agricultural Workers' Industrial Union. Businessmen and both state and federal authorities began active anti–IWW campaigns, especially after the labor union was falsely blamed for the Green Corn Rebellion, an antiwar uprising by tenant farmers along the South Canadian River. Attacks on IWW members included the brutal whipping, tarring, and feather of sixteen men in Tulsa in November 1917 and the repeated prosecution of one member wrongly accused of dynamiting a Tulsa oilman's home.
Federal officials also pursued conspiracy charges against members of the OWIU, convicting several in a series of trials in Wichita and Kansas City, Kansas, while the Oklahoma legislature passed a criminal syndicalism law effectively making mere membership in the IWW a crime. After the war the IWW briefly grew in Oklahoma, but several prosecutions of members under the criminal syndicalism law, the appearance of the combine-harvester and improved pipe-laying methods, combined with an ideological split with the organization, doomed any hope of a full revival.
Nigel Anthony Sellars
See also: LABOR–ORGANIZED, OKLAHOMA CONSTITUTION, OKLAHOMA STATE FEDERATION OF LABOR, TWIN-TERRITORIAL FEDERATION OF LABOR
Bibliography
Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (2d ed.; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Vol. 4, Industrial Workers of the World (New York: International Publishers, 1965).
Nigel Anthony Sellars, Oil, Wheat, and Wobblies: The Industrial Workers of the World in Oklahoma, 1905–1930 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998).
Citation
The following (as per The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition) is the preferred citation for articles:
Nigel Anthony Sellars, "Industrial Workers of the World ," The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, www.okhistory.org (accessed March 16, 2018).
© Copyright Oklahoma Historical Society 2009.
The Socialist Party in Early Oklahoma
SOCIALIST PARTY.
In the first two decades of the twentieth century the Socialist Party of Oklahoma consistently ranked as one of the top three state socialist organizations in America. At the party's height in the elections of 1914, the Socialist Party candidate for governor, Fred W. Holt, received more than 20 percent of the vote statewide. In Marshall and Roger Mills counties, where the Socialist Party was strongest, Holt captured 41 and 35 percent of the vote, respectively. More than 175 socialists were elected to local and county offices that year, including six to the state legislature. As these statistics make clear, to a greater extent than anywhere else in the nation, the Socialist Party in Oklahoma played an active, potent role in state and local politics.
The earliest formations of the Oklahoma Socialist Party occurred during the territorial period in Grant and Kay counties near the Kansas border. By 1902 there were some twenty-three locals affiliated with the socialist organization in Oklahoma Territory. Soon the center of socialist activism shifted southward to the Indian Territory, and by 1907 the geographic shape of the Socialist Party of Oklahoma had become clear: socialists were concentrated in the old Indian Territory (especially in Marshall, Johnston, Pontotoc, Seminole, Jefferson, Stephens, Garvin, Love, and McCurtain counties), and in Roger Mills, Beckham, Dewey, and Kiowa counties in the west.
From the outset, Oklahoma socialism had a decidedly agrarian focus. Building on the expertise its members inherited from past agrarian movements (principally the Farmers' Alliance and the Farmers' Union), Oklahoma socialists directly challenged the inequities of early-twentieth-century commercial agriculture. Unlike their counterparts in the national Socialist Party, who thought of farmers as members of the petite bourgeoisie and therefore ineligible for party membership, Oklahoma socialists argued forcefully that farmers who worked the land were legitimate members of the working class. Indeed, Sooner socialists developed a pathbreaking "Farmers' Programme" that called for restoring land to working farmers. In addition, Socialist Party speakers relentlessly attacked tenancy, the crop lien system, and usury, the principal components of the agricultural crisis for small farmers.
As they made these arguments, Oklahoma socialists were careful to do so in terms that would make sense to their potential constituents. The party's goal of moving land from large owners into the hands of working farmers, they argued, was entirely consistent with the republican ideals espoused by the nation's Founding Fathers. In addition, party members worked hard to present their message in a cultural form that was familiar to most Oklahomans by using the language and imagery of fundamentalist Christianity.
Socialists in the Sooner State held that their ideals were completely in keeping with the teachings of Jesus Christ, especially as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount. Building on this idea, some Oklahoma socialists argued that capitalism was an inherently unchristian system, but socialism allowed citizens to live according to the Biblical concept of cooperation. To them, socialism was a more moral, Christian alternative than the current economic system. As a result, the message of socialist organizers and candidates was often couched in religious terms. Many party members saw Jesus as the first socialist, and they considered it natural to make their case in fundamentalist, Christian churches. In these ways, the Socialist Party of Oklahoma managed to present the message of socialism, not as an alien doctrine, but as an alternative well within the boundaries of accepted American political discourse. Such a feat was unmatched elsewhere in the United States, and it helps explain the remarkable success of Oklahoma socialism.
Thus, the party's concise indictment of some of the flaws of early-twentieth-century America, coupled with its ability to present its Marxist message in terms that many Oklahomans found reasonable, made the Socialist Party of Oklahoma especially attractive to those at the bottom of society. As these recruits joined the party, they became part of a sophisticated organization consisting of more than eight hundred Socialist Party locals, with socialist precinct chairmen appointed to virtually every voting precinct in the state. Every summer, thousands of the faithful gathered at socialist encampments to be revitalized by several days of music, entertainment, and speakers. Dozens of county and local socialist newspapers served the movement's communication needs, as did a special Oklahoma edition of the national socialist weekly, The Appeal to Reason. Charismatic and effective leaders like H. M. Sinclair, Patrick S. Nagle, Oscar Ameringer, Stanley Clark, J. T. Cumbie, H. H. Stallard, and Fred W. Holt skillfully articulated and executed the party's agenda.
In addition to its stand on agricultural issues the Oklahoma Socialist Party opposed the disfranchisement of blacks, supported women's suffrage, worked closely with organized labor, and condemned American involvement in the European war. The latter position proved to be problematic for the party, making it vulnerable to the repression and hysteria that accompanied the American declaration of war in 1917. State and national leaders responsible for war mobilization created a network of semiofficial organizations called Councils of Defense designed to promote patriotism and ensure support for the war effort. One of the primary tasks of these organizations was to identify citizens whose loyalty seemed suspect. Those identified as "disloyal" faced consequences ranging from ostracism to mob violence. As socialists spoke out against the war, they inevitably faced such consequences. Dozens of party members, many of them local leaders, were arrested during the war years, and the Socialist Party's electoral performance declined precipitously after 1916. In 1920 Eugene V. Debs, the socialist candidate for president, received only 5 percent of the vote in Oklahoma, down from the 15 percent the socialist presidential candidate had received four years earlier. Even more telling was the dismantling of the party organization as numerous locals were disbanded. By 1922 the once thriving Socialist Party of Oklahoma had virtually ceased to exist.
Even so, the legacy of the Socialist Party of Oklahoma continued. Socialists played an important role in the success of the Farmer-Labor Reconstruction League in 1922. On a deeper level, Oklahoma socialists became important political actors during a crucial time in the state's history. Their diagnosis of society's shortcomings and many of their proposed remedies foreshadowed developments that during the Great Depression, scarcely a generation removed from the party's demise, would become all too clear.
Jim Bissett
See also: GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS, FARMER-LABOR RECONSTRUCTION LEAGUE, FARMERS' ALLIANCE, OKLAHOMA FARMERS' UNION, OKLAHOMA TERRITORY
Bibliography
Jim Bissett, Agrarian Socialists in America: Marx, Jefferson, and Jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1904–1920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999).
Garin Burbank, When Farmers Voted Red: The Gospel of Socialism in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1910–1924 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976).
James R. Green, Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895–1943 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978).
Howard L. Meredith, "History of the Socialist Party in Oklahoma" (Ph.D. diss., University of Oklahoma, 1969).
Ellen I. Rosen, "Peasant Socialism in America? The Socialist Party in Oklahoma Before the First World War" (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1975).
John Thompson, Closing the Frontier: Radical Responses in Oklahoma, 1889–1923 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986).
Citation
The following (as per The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition) is the preferred citation for articles:
Jim Bissett, "Socialist Party," The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, www.okhistory.org (accessed March 16, 2018).
© Copyright Oklahoma Historical Society 2009.
World War I: The American Legacy -- Documentary
I Didn't Raise My Boy To Be A Soldier -- Popular Song Before American Intervention In World War I
World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals -- Murray N. Rothbard article
A New History of Leviathan: Essays on the Rise of the Corporate State -- Book by Ronald Radosh and Murray N. Rothbard (editors)
War Collectivism in World War I -- Book by Murray N. Rothbard
More than any other single period, World War I was the critical watershed for the American business system. It was a “war collectivism,” a totally planned economy run largely by big-business interests through the instrumentality of the central government, which served as the model, the precedent, and the inspiration for state corporate capitalism for the remainder of the twentieth century.
Merchants of Death: A Study of the International Armament Industry -- Book by H. C. Engelbrecht and F. C. Hanighen
Here is the archetype of all post–World War I revisionism of a particular variety: the hunt for the people who made the big bucks off the killing machine. The Merchants of Death was, in many ways, the manifesto of a generation of people who swore there would not be and could not be another such war.
But here is the kicker: it was co-authored by the founder of Human Events, the conservative weekly. So this is no left-wing screed against profiteering. It is a careful and subtle, but still passionate, attack on those who would use government to profit themselves at the expense of other people's lives and property.
Here is a sample of the ideological orientation: "The arms industry did not create the war system. On the contrary, the war system created the arms industry.… All constitutions in the world vest the war-making power in the government or in the representatives of the people. The root of the trouble, therefore, goes far deeper than the arms industry. It lies in the prevailing temper of peoples toward nationalism, militarism, and war, in the civilization which forms this temper and prevents any drastic and radical change. Only when this underlying basis of the war system is altered, will war and its concomitant, the arms industry, pass out of existence."
This book is a wonderful example of what Rothbard called the "Old Right" in its best form. The book not only makes the case against the war machine; it provides a scintillating history of war profiteering, one authoritative enough for citation and academic study. One can see how this book had such a powerful effect.
Why re-release this book now? The war profiteers are making money as never before. They are benefiting from conflict as never before. Everything in this book has not only come to pass but as been made worse by a million times. So this treatise is more necessary than ever.
This is the real heritage of the American Right.
Merchants of Death Revisited: Armaments, Bankers, and the First World War -- T. Hunt Tooley article
The year 2004 marked the seventieth anniversary of the publication of Engelbrecht and Hanighen's Merchants of Death: A Study of the International Armament Industry, a book that made it into the general consciousness of most thinking Americans by the mid-twentieth century. The stark language of the title no doubt contributed to its fame. Moreover, the theme of arms merchants pushing for war is both easily understood and easily discussed, even by those who have not read it.
The Intimate Papers of Colonel House: Volume I -- Book by Charles Seymour (editor)
Phillip Dru, Administrator -- Anonymous (Edward Mandel House)
By Robert Higgs
Edward M. House, a man now almost completely forgotten, was one of the most important Americans of the twentieth century. Given that most high school seniors do not know that the War Between the States was fought sometime between 1850 and 1900, we cannot reasonably expect many people to recognize his name today, much less to know anything about him. I suspect that scarcely anyone except a smattering of history teachers and a few history mavens can accurately state why House was an important figure in U.S. history. Yet he arguably had a greater impact on the past century than all but a handful of other actors.
Political history tends to be written primarily with reference to formal state leaders — pharaohs, caesars, kings, prime ministers, presidents, and their most notable civilian and military officers. Yet probably at all times and places, much less prominent individuals have exerted potent influence out of the limelight or completely behind the scenes. I have long been interested in what we might call the general theory of gray eminence and in leading examples of the genus. The typical American now knows little or nothing, for example, about Bernard M. Baruch, John J. McCloy, Clark Clifford, and David Rockefeller, although each of these men played a powerful role in shaping the world in which we now live. I do not mean to suggest that all such unofficial movers and shakers are rich and use their wealth as the key that admits them to the inner sanctums of official power. Some, such as House, were not outrageously rich, and some who were, such as Baruch, had great influence not simply because of their wealth, although having great gobs of money at one’s disposal certainly never hurts when one sets out to cultivate so-called statesmen.
Edward Mandell House (1858—1938) grew up in Houston, Texas. His father, Thomas William House, an English immigrant who had made a fortune as a blockade runner during the War Between the States, died the third-richest man in the state in 1880, leaving to his children an estate valued at $500,000. Edward managed his share of the inheritance astutely, even though he spent much of his time engaged in politics―never running for elective office or seeking an appointive one, but helping other men to gain office and make policy. Though a sickly man and certainly not a flamboyant one, he had a flair for making friends who appreciated his discretion, respected his views, and valued his counsel. This talent for winning friends and influencing people would remain the basis of his remarkable achievements in politics throughout his life. He was, in today’s lingo, a very smooth operator, appreciated all the more because he clearly had no desire to displace the king he had just helped to place on the throne. The power he sought was the power behind the throne.
By 1910, House was seeking a new, wider stage for his political activities. He had played an important part in getting four governors elected in Texas and in guiding their policies in office―the first of them, Jim Hogg, had given him the entirely honorific title of Colonel, by which he was known thereafter―but he was losing interest in the local scene.
After maintaining a residence in Austin since 1886, he took an apartment in New York City in 1902. He also spent a good deal of time in the summers at a rented house on the shore near Boston, and in Europe. Wherever he went, doors were opened to him, and he and his wife Loulie entertained actively in return. The range of his friendships, acquaintances, and social connections was extraordinary. His biographer Godfrey Hodgson reports:
His diary records meals with Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Rudyard Kipling, as well as with the virtuoso pianist Ignazy Jan Paderewski, who became president of Poland. He mingled with politicians, generals, bankers, academics, journalists, and society hostesses in New York, Paris, and London. He knew J. P. Morgan Jr. well enough to call him “Jack,” and he dined with Henry Clay Frick in the house that became his great art museum. (Woodrow Wilson’s Right Hand, p. 9)1
Not a bad showing for a man who had left Cornell before graduating and whose annual income ranged only from $20,000 to $25,000 (approximately $450,000 to $560,000 in today’s dollars).
In 1911, he spied what he took to be a potentially rising star to which he might hitch his idle political wagon, a man with no prior experience as a politician until his election as governor of New Jersey in November 1910. Woodrow Wilson (1856—1924) had been, except for a brief stint as a fledgling lawyer, a lifelong academic; he spent his life prior to 1910 as a student, professor, and university administrator, serving from 1902 to 1910 as president of Princeton University, an office in which he gained a well-deserved reputation for his self-righteous refusal to compromise. After Wilson’s election as governor, a number of Democrats began to tout him as the party’s next candidate for the presidency, and in the winter of 1910—11, House decided to join this movement, “to do what I could to further Governor Wilson’s fortunes” (56).
House played an important role as campaign strategist and intra-party peacemaker in 1911 and 1912, and he deserves part of the credit for getting Wilson first the nomination and then the presidency. Of course, the principal person responsible for Wilson’s election was Theodore Roosevelt, whose insatiable craving for power had led him to bolt the Republican Party and run as a Progressive Party (Bull Moose) candidate, thereby splitting the opposition to Wilson and ensuring a Democratic victory. House played a more important role after Wilson’s election, because the president-elect had little interest in the nuts and bolts of party politics, including the distribution of patronage and the selection of men for cabinet and other high-level positions, and he left these decisions largely in House’s hands. Wilson offered House himself any cabinet position he wanted, except secretary of state, which had been reserved for William Jennings Bryan, but House declined, preferring to work in the shadows as the president’s most trusted advisor.
In this capacity, House quickly developed an extraordinarily intimate relationship with the president as political advisor, personal confidant, and frequent social companion. He engaged actively in the extended politicking that ultimately led to passage of the Federal Reserve Act, and in the ticklish matter of U.S. relations with Mexico, then in the throes of violent revolution. As war clouds began to gather over Europe, House, with Wilson’s approval, undertook to head off hostilities by bringing about an understanding among the three greatest powers, the United States, Great Britain, and Germany, making them jointly the guarantors of world peace. He met with Kaiser Wilhelm II and with British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey, among others, to work up interest in the plan, but this attempt at preemptive reconciliation obviously never came to fruition.
During the war, House actively engaged in efforts to bring the fighting to an end. He shared Wilson’s view that the most desirable outcome would be one that left the postwar world drastically reshaped in a way that eliminated or greatly diminished militarism, promoted national self-determination, spread democracy, left the United States standing astride the international political system, and brought about Wilson’s recognition as the world’s savior. In short, House shared Wilson’s peculiar megalomania and undertook to make its main objective a reality. At the same time, House, ever the practical deal-maker and compromiser, understood that the United States could not simply impose its will on the world and that the Americans would have to yield other powerful nations, especially Great Britain and France, some of the prizes they sought to gain from the war. As Hodgson writes, both “Wilson and House were willing to bargain territories and populations for the particular peace they wanted” (106), even if they had to sacrifice “national self-determination” along the way.
After the war began in 1914, Wilson proclaimed that the United States would remain neutral in word and deed, but Wilson and House’s natural inclination was to favor the British, and as various provocations by both sides ensued, the president and his right-hand man dealt with them in a fashion that tilted the United States increasingly toward frank support of the Allies and opposition to the Central Powers. As early as the Lusitania’s sinking in May 1915, House advised Wilson that Americans could “no longer remain neutral spectators” (109), but Wilson moved toward war more hesitantly. When secretary of state Bryan refused to abandon honest neutrality, sensibly holding the British starvation blockade of Germany to be as reprehensible as the German torpedoing of (arms carrying) passenger liners, he was pushed out of the government and replaced by Robert Lansing, From the outset, however, Lansing was allowed little real discretion, and House acted as the de facto foreign minister. A joke went around in Washington:
Question: How do you spell Lansing?
Answer: H-O-U-S-E.
House began to preach “preparedness,” which meant building up a great U.S. army and navy. Hodgson writes: “While the president dreamed of saving the world, House was beginning to contemplate the implications for the American state of being a world power. In this activity between 1915 and 1917 it is not fanciful to see a first, sketchy draft of what would become the national security state” (113). Although House continued his efforts to bring the warring parties to a truce, he admitted early in 1916 that “in spite of all he was doing, a break with Germany could not be averted but only deferred” (115). According to French foreign minister Jules Cambon, House told him in February 1916 that U.S. entry into the war on the Allied side was inevitable and awaited only a serviceable incident that would cause the American people to rally behind the president’s call for war (116). Needless to say, a peacemaker who is already resigned to war can scarcely hope to bring about peace, and indeed House’s efforts failed to halt the massive, pointless bloodletting in Europe.
In 1916, when Wilson ran for reelection, House played a much greater role than he had played in the campaign in 1912. He had “no official role in the campaign, yet he planned its structure; set its tone; guided its finance; chose speakers, tactics, and strategy; and, not least, handled the campaign’s greatest asset and greatest potential liability: its brilliant but temperamental candidate” (126). After campaigning on the slogan “He kept us out of war,” Wilson narrowly won a closely contested election.
Shortly after beginning his second term, however, Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war. We may properly attribute a substantial share of the credit (or blame) for this action to House’s subtle and persistent efforts to move the president toward it during the preceding two years. As House confided to his diary, he had worked from the start of his relationship with Wilson to influence him in a certain direction: “I began with him before he became President and I have never relaxed my efforts. At every turn, I have stirred his ambition to become the great liberal leader of the world” (139). In Wilson, a man whose grotesquely swollen conception of his own importance had few equals, House’s teachings had encountered a highly receptive pupil.
Once the United States became a declared belligerent, the prospect of an Allied victory increased greatly, and House occupied himself actively not only in engineering a way to end the fighting, but also in planning the contours of the postwar world. Like Wilson, House “believe that the war had been imposed on the peoples of Europe by the monarchies and their aristocracies” (150), and therefore both men maintained that a postwar settlement should include, among other things, the destruction of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires and the creation of a number of new, democratic states in central Europe. To fill in the details of this vision, Wilson asked House to assemble a group of experts. The resulting project was known as the Inquiry, and the plan it created became the basis for Wilson’s Fourteen Points and for his principal proposals at the Versailles conference. The Inquiry ultimately placed 126 scholars on its payroll. Although each of them had substantial credentials, hardly any of them was expert on European politics — a shortcoming that helped to doom the president’s dealings with the likes of David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau at Versailles. Indeed, as one ponders this big committee’s hubristic attempt to redraw the map of large parts of Europe and other regions, such as the Middle East, F. A. Hayek’s idea of the “pretense of knowledge” springs to mind:
Few [members of the Inquiry] had any detailed knowledge of, for example, the disputed frontiers of Romania, Hungary, or Bulgaria, still less of the history and ethnography of Poland or the Ottoman Empire. One who was assigned to work on Italy confessed later that he was “handicapped by a lack of knowledge of Italian.” . . . [W]hen it came to what we would now call the Middle East, the Inquiry more or less gave up. (160)
Is it any wonder, then, that the arrangements made at Versailles for the Middle East proved to be the source of what has aptly been called “a peace to end all peace” and that almost a century later the world continues to pay a horrible price for the statesmen’s bungling in 1919?
House contributed probably more than anyone else to the formulation of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which served as the understanding that led the Germans to silence their guns in November 1918. On the night of January 5, 1918, Wilson and House sat down together at 10:30 to sketch out a major speech by Wilson on his vision for a postwar settlement. Two hours later, they had, as House wrote in his diary, “finished remaking the map of the world” (165). When Wilson delivered his speech, however, he “conspicuously ignored complexities the Inquiry had recognized” (167). (Of course, politicians always ignore complexities; if they didn’t, they wouldn’t last long as politicians.) Later, after the Treaty of Versailles had been hammered out―and Wilson’s amateurish attempt at direct diplomacy hammered pretty severely in the process―the Germans justly complained that they had been hoodwinked into the Armistice by Wilson’s promise to make the Fourteen Points the basis of a postwar settlement. As Englishman Harold Nicolson wrote,
It is difficult to resist the impression that the Enemy Powers accepted the Fourteen Points as they stood; whereas the Allied Powers accepted them only as interpreted by Colonel House. . . . Somewhere, amid the hurried and anxious imprecisions of those October [1918] days, lurks the explanation of the fundamental misunderstanding which has since arisen. (190)
And what a momentous misunderstanding it was! Even James Brown Scott, a legal expert in the U.S. delegation, said of the ultimate treaty that “the statesmen have . . . made a peace that renders another war inevitable” (243). In light of this history, we might credit House with having made an important contribution to ending the fighting in 1918―and to establishing the preconditions for its resumption in 1939.
House and three others joined Wilson himself to compose the five-man American delegation to the high-level negotiations at Versailles that began in December 1918. House shared Wilson’s vision of a League of Nations, and at the conference he did as much as anyone to make this vision a reality, albeit one born with a congenital defect, owing to the ultimate U.S. refusal to join it. Twenty-six years later, the creation of the United Nations, a second try at the establishment of an international peace-keeping league, may therefore be traced in part to back to House.
When Wilson departed France in mid-February 1919, he left House at the conference “to act in his place and with his full confidence” (215). In the president’s absence, House proceeded to do what he had been doing successfully for decades: he made deals, compromising where necessary to gain the other parties’ agreement and creating the best possible arrangements he could make in an extremely complex and challenging situation. Although House kept Wilson informed as he went along, the president seems not to have fully comprehended what House was agreeing to in France. When he returned to Versailles in mid-March and absorbed the details, he reacted with dismay to what he viewed as the betrayal of his high ideals for the settlement. Although House continued to negotiate specific matters at Versailles, he never again acted as the chief U.S. delegate, and the intimate relationship between House and Wilson quickly dissolved: “their friendship never recovered from the events of February and March 1919. It ended in bitterness and mutual incomprehension, with grave consequences for both of them and ultimately―it really is no exaggeration to say―for the peace of the world” (217). After the Germans signed the treaty in June, House saw the president off for his return voyage to the United States. Their conversation on that occasion was the last they would ever have.
“Wilson’s entourage [consisting of his wife Edith, his personal physician Admiral Cary T. Grayson, his press secretary Ray Stannard Baker, and the kingmaker Bernard Baruch], then and for the rest of their lives, interpreted House’s entirely intelligible and honorable diplomatic maneuvers as the blackest treason” (225). Edith Wilson, whom the widowed president had married in 1915, had disliked House from the beginning. She evidently resented him because of the intimacy he shared with her new husband. After the president became incapacitated by a major stroke in September 1919, Edith, besides acting as de facto president of the United States for much of the remainder of his term, made sure that no communication from House reached the bedridden Wilson. For years the two men had been so close that Wilson trusted House to speak for him, confident that his own thoughts would be expressed precisely. “Mr. House,” the president had once said, “is my second personality. He is my independent self. His thoughts and mine are one” (6). But now House found himself completely cut off. It is a dangerous thing to disappoint a vainglorious and vindictive man, but no less dangerous to vex his ruthless, scheming wife.
House lived another twenty years after the war. He continued to circulate in the highest circles in the United States, especially among the movers and shakers of the Democratic Party, and in Europe, but he never again exercised the kind of influence he had exercised from 1912 to 1919 by virtue of his close association with Woodrow Wilson. He went to considerable lengths to tell his side of the story and to vindicate his actions, while Edith Wilson and the other members of Wilson’s entourage continued to demonize the erstwhile gray eminence and to blame him for the president’s postwar failures. House still traveled in style and socialized with European aristocrats and American plutocrats. He was, in Hodgson’s expression, “a grandee on a world scale” (263). He never publicly criticized Woodrow Wilson, and even in private, where he did criticize, he always professed loyalty. When Wilson died in 1924, House wished to attend the funeral, but Bernard Baruch told him that he would not be admitted. After advising Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1920s and early 1930s, House became a peripheral figure in the Brains Trust in 1932 and 1933 and contributed to Roosevelt’s election as president. Only in his final few years did he finally withdraw into his private affairs.
He never became bitter. In old age, he developed greater infirmities and grew tired of living, but he was satisfied that he had played a significant role in great events. As he said, “My hand has been on things” (272). Indeed, it had been―to a degree that, in our day, very few Americans appreciate.
- Henceforth, all parenthetical page numbers not otherwise identified may be assumed to come from this source.
Trench Warfare -- Documentary
They Shall Not Grow Old -- Documentary
An award-winning documentary about World War I with never-before-seen footage to commemorate the centennial of the end of the war.
World War I: Tactics And Strategy -- Documentary
The WWI Conspiracy - Part One: To Start A War -- Documentary
The WWI Conspiracy - Part Two: The American Front -- Documentary
The WWI Conspiracy - Part Three: A New World Order -- Documentary
War Is A Racket, by Smedley Darlington Butler
Woodrow Wilson and World War I, Murray N. Rothbard (audio lecture)
War Collectivism: Power, Business, and the Intellectual Class in World War I, by Murray N. Rothbard
World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals, by Murray N. Rothbard
Merchants of Death Revisited: Armaments, Bankers, and the First World War, by T. Hunt Tooley
The United States and World War I, by John J. Dwyer
The Life & Legend of Cecil Rhodes
Rare 1974 interview with Professor Carroll Quigley, author of The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, and Tragedy & Hope – A History Of The World in Our Time.
Who Was Edward M. House? by Robert Higgs
Phillip Dru, Administrator — Anonymous (Edward Mandel House)
The Intimate Papers of Colonel House — Book by Charles Seymour (editor)
The World War I Conspiracy – The Corbett Report
The Great War - 1918 (WWI Documentary) (1 page essay)
The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century - episode 1: Exposion -- Documentary
The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century - episode 2: Stalemate -- Documentary
The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century - Episode 3: Total War -- Documentary
The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century - episode 4: Slaughter -- Documentary
The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century - episode 5: Mutiny -- Documentary
The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century - episode 6: Collapse -- Documentary
The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century - Episode 7: Hunger and Hatred -- Documentary (1 page essay)
The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century - Episode 8: War Without End - Documentary (1 page essay)
All Quiet on the Western Front -- Feature Film
All Quiet on the Western Front is a 1930 American war film based on the book of the same name by Erich Maria Remarque. About a young soldier who faces disillusionment in the soul-crushing horror of World War I, it is praised for being a realistic account of World War I. The film was the first to win Academy Awards for both Outstanding Production and Best Director. AFI ranked the film as the #7 best American film in the epic genre. Starring Louis Wolheim and Lew Ayres. Directed by Lewis Milestone.
The World at War (Ralph Raico) -- Video Lecture
The late Ralph Raico was a specialist in European classical liberalism and Austrian Economics. He learned economics under Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and Friedrich Hayek, and was professor emeritus of history at Buffalo State College.
In this lecture, Raico teaches a Cato Summer Seminar group the history of World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. He offers an in-depth look at the conditions which led to both wars and the ways in which governments throughout the 20th century have used war powers to justify and fuel their expansion.
Paris 1919, Part 1 -- Documentary
Paris 1919, Part 2 -- Documentary
FACT: World War I Didn't End in 1918 -- Article
The supposed world peace brought about by Armistice Day was anything but universal. In 1919, across Eastern Europe to Central Asia, the violence begun in World War I raged on for as long as five more years
Vladimir Lenin: Voice of Revolution -- Documentary (1 page essay)
The Russian Revolution, February - October 1917 (1)
The Russian Revolution: Red October and the Bolshevik Coup (2)
The Aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution (3)
A Grim Centennial -- Srdja Trifkovic article
Revolutionaries dug a pit and fell in: How a prestigious Moscow address became the antechamber to Death row -- Marvin Olasky article
George Seldes -- Documentary (1 page essay)
The great pioneer investigative journalist George Seldes is one of my personal heroes.
In his autobiography, Witness to a Century: Encounters with The Noted, the Notorious, and the Three SOBs, Seldes relates an interesting tale in chapter 22 of this book, "Lenin Speaks of His American Mentors." Seldes was in Moscow for the fifth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. He was one of the few American journalists who met V. I. Lenin and spent personal face-time with him. Lenin discussed the tremendous impact two Americans had had upon him. First, the Socialist politician and writer Daniel De Leon, who had shaped Lenin's interpretation of Marxism, and second, former U. S. Senator Richard Pettigrew, author of Triumphant Plutocracy, which Lenin was presently reading. Seldes made a note of the title of this work, which he wanted to promptly obtain when returning to America. Seldes put down the title as Plutocratic Democracy. For years he searched for a copy, but found that no book by that title existed. When I read this account, I wrote Seldes to inform him that the book truly did exist, and that I have a first-edition copy. I included a photocopy of the title page and table of contents in my correspondence. Seldes graciously wrote me back, thanking me for correcting his error.
He soon died after that at the age of 104.
Henry George Seldes (/ˈsɛldəs/ sel-dəs;[aa] November 16, 1890 — July 2, 1995) was an American investigative journalist and media critic. The writer and critic Gilbert Seldes was his younger brother. Actress Marian Seldes is his niece.
Influenced by muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, his career began when he was nineteen years old and was hired at the Pittsburgh Leader. In 1914, he was appointed night editor of the Pittsburgh Post.
In 1916, he went to the United Press in London and, starting in 1917, during World War I, he moved to France to work at the Marshall Syndicate. While there, he interviewed Paul von Hindenburg, the supreme commander of the German Army. Hindenburg commented on the defeat of Germany in the war, including U.S. involvement; however this interview was censored by the U. S. military. Seldes would later comment that the publishing of this interview could have avoided the rising of the Nazis to power and, thus, World War II.
After World War I, he spent ten years as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. In 1922, he interviewed Vladimir Lenin and, in 1923, got expelled from the Soviet Union, along with three colleagues, for disguising news reports as personal letters; a letter his publisher wrote for the Soviets only facilitated his expulsion. The newspaper then sent him to Italy, where he reported on opposition leader Giacomo Matteotti's murder, implicated Benito Mussolini in Matteotti's death, and was again expelled.
In 1927, he reported for the Chicago Tribune in Mexico, where he criticized the use of the country's mineral rights by American companies. He battled with the Tribune's owner and publisher, Col. Robert McCormick, over the paper's altering of his Mexico articles, and soon afterwards quit the Tribune over what he felt was censorship. In 1929, Seldes became a freelance reporter and author, subsequently writing a series of books and criticisms about his years as a foreign correspondent, and the issues of censorship, suppression and distortion in the press. During the late 1930s he had one more stint as a foreign correspondent, along with his wife Helen, for the New York Post, in Spain during the Spanish Civil War.
In 1940, Seldes co-founded a weekly newsletter, In Fact, subtitled "an Antidote to Falsehoods in the Daily Press." In it, he attacked corporate malfeasance, often using governmental documents from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). He exposed, issue after issue, the health hazards of cigarettes and attacked the mainstream press for suppressing such news, blaming the newspapers' heavy dependence on cigarette advertising. He cited J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI for anti-union campaigns. He brought attention to how the National Association of Manufacturers was able to use its advertising dollars to produce news stories favorable to its members and to suppress news stories unfavorable to them.
Having both staunch admirers and strong critics, Seldes influenced many younger journalists. He received an award for professional excellence from the Association for Education in Journalism in 1980, and a George Polk Award for his life's work in 1981. Seldes also served on the board of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).
Here are some of the noted people George Seldes knew, worked with, or interviewed:
Soviet Communist dictator V. I. Lenin, U. S. President Woodrow Wilson, physicist Albert Einstein, Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, U. S. President Theodore Roosevelt, German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, Soviet Communist dictator Josef Stalin, Soviet Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, German General Paul von Hindenburg, French Marshal Ferdinand Foch, U. S. General John J. Pershing, British author George Bernard Shaw, U. S. presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, U. S. author Ernest Hemmingway, U. S. author Sinclair Lewis, U. S. journalist Dorothy Thompson, British author H. G. Welles, U. S. newspaper publisher Colonel Robert McCormick, dancer Isadora Duncan, anarchist Emma Goldman, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Soviet Cheka head Feliks Dzerdzinsky, U. S. President Calvin Coolidge, U. S. author Josephine Herbst, U. S. author Thomas Wolfe, French author Andre Malraux, Senator Joe McCarthy, U. S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Yugoslavian dictator Marshal Tito, Russian author Maxim Gorki, U. S. newspaper columnist “Dear Abby,” Zelda Fitzgerald, U. S. songwriter Cole Porter, psychiatrist Alfred Adler, U. S. financier Bernard Baruch, Spanish Communist revolutionary Dolores Ibarruri, U. S. author Lincoln Steffens, actor Charlie Chaplin, actor Douglas Fairbanks, actor Errol Flynn, actor Warren Beaty, U. S. writer and revolutionary Jack Reed, U. S. author and newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann, U. S. newspaper columnist Heywood Hale Broun, U. S. newspaper editor and columnist William Allen White, U. S. newspaper editor Irwin S. Cobb, U. S. newspaper columnist Alexander Woollcott, U. S. newspaper reporter Floyd Gibbons, U. S. author Damon Runyon, U. S. newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler, U. S. journalist Bill Moyers and U. S. consumer activist and presidential candidate Ralph Nader.
IN FACT Newsletter -- George Seldes
Can These Things Be! -- Book by George Seldes
You Can't Do That -- Book by George Seldes
The Facts Are: A Guide to Falsehood and Propaganda in the Press and Radio -- Book by George Seldes
The Fascist Road To Ruin -- George Seldes pamphlet
You Can't Print That -- Book by George Seldes
The Libertarian Angle: The Interventionism of Two World Wars series, Part 1
The Libertarian Angle: The Interventionism of Two World Wars series, Part 2
The Libertarian Angle: The Interventionism of Two World Wars series, Part 3
The Libertarian Angle: The Interventionism of Two World Wars series, Part 4
The Libertarian Angle: The Interventionism of Two World Wars series, Part 5