Anti-War Groups Can’t Find City for National Meeting
The New York Times reported on this day that the People’s Council of America for Democracy, a coalition of pacifist and anti-war groups, was having difficulty finding a city to hold a national meeting because of the mounting attacks on anti-war activists.
After the U.S. entered World War I, on April 6, 1917, patriot fever swept the country, and the result was a massive suppression of freedom of speech and press, along with vigilante attacks on pacifists, Socialists, opponents of the war, radical labor unions and young men suspected of evading the draft.
The governor of Minnesota officially barred the People’s Council from meeting in that state; officials in Fargo, North Dakota, did likewise. The group also sought to hold its meeting in Washington, D.C., Chicago or Milwaukee. The police chief in Washington, however, announced that no street meetings by the group would be allowed in the city. The meeting was finally held in Chicago, but some delegates traveling to it were expelled from the town of Hudson, Wisconsin.
The travails of the People’s Council in simply finding a place to hold a meeting was indicative of the public hysteria against any opposition to the war.
Read about wartime hysteria and repression: Christopher M. Finan, From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America (2007)
Learn more: Paul L. Murphy, World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States (1979)
Read about the World War I hysteria and the founding of the ACLU: Samuel Walker, In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU (1990)